3.75
[Content warnings: this volume includes on-page sex, and there’s a deliberately disturbing sequence in which a children’s manga character is given an enormous penis, has sex, and is then killed and left to be eaten by birds.] This volume picks up where the previous one left off. Yozo has survived h...
I’ll start this off with some content warnings. This book includes several suicide attempts (one successful), a main (POV) character who becomes an alcoholic and a drug addict and who is probably depressed, and several mentions of rape and child molestation. Most of these things aren’t described in ...
Schoolgirl chronicles a day in a life of a Japanese girl. It's a first person narration full of angst, snark and minute observations. From a casual mention of a war, it's fair to assume that the story took place in the early 1940s, but it really doesn't matter, because she could well be just another...
Absolutely wonderful. Somehow I'm really interested in Dazai Osamu's way of writing: very mysterious and intrigued at the same time.
On Love and Beauty: Adorably pretentious family and their silly story-telling game. All wrapped up in gentle irony. Cherry Leaves and the Whistler: I like that this cute, sad little tale hinges on someone whistling this mad wartime classic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A75AQg.... The Chrysanthemum...
Despite its title, No Longer Human is really about the pain of being human (duh). It's about depression. Alienation. Life spiralling out of control. Okay, so Yozo, the protagonist, is afraid of humans. He doesn't understand why exactly people act like they do, but in order to fit in, he tries acti...
touchstone of J-lit, 人間失格 is the "i'm going out of my mind" scream! of the flip-side of the Japanese-identity-exploration question of modernist Japanese writers. compared to the purveyor and surveyor of erotic obsession, Tanizaki; the 'tea ceremony and mountain geisha' specialist Kawabata; the milit...
I'm not sure what to say about this - I can see that it was an important book -- there are moments of lyrical beauty in it - But it is very hard to adjudge a book written in Japanese when read by an English only speaker.... On the other hand, the angst of the writer and the character -- Dazai hims...
Log in with Facebook 
