No One Knows

No one really understands how we suffer. One day, when were adults, we may come to recall this suffering, this misery, as silly and laughable, but how are we to get through the long, hateful period until then? No one bothers to teach us that.

 Osamu Dazai was a master raconteur who plumbedin an addictive, easy stylethe absurd complexities of life in a society whose expectations cannot be met without sacrificing one's individual ideals on the altar of conformity. The gravitational pull of his prose is on full display in these stories. In Lantern, a young woman, in love with a well-born but impoverished student, shoplifts a bathing suit for himand ends up in the local newspaper indicted as a crazed, degenerate communist. In Chiyojo, a high-school girl shows early promise as a writer, but as her uncle and mother relentlessly push her to pursue a literary career, she must ask herself: is this what I really want? Or am I supposed to fulfill  their own frustrated ambitions? In Shame, a young reader writes a fan letter to a writer she admires, only to find out, upon visiting him, that hes a bourgeoise sophisticate nothing like the desperate rebels he portrays, and decides (in true Dazai style): Novelists are human trash. No, theyre worse than that; theyre demons. . . They write nothing but lies.

This collection of 14 talesa half-dozen of which have never before appeared in Englishis based on a Japanese collection of, as Dazai described them, soliloquies by female narrators. No One Knows includes the quietly brilliant long story Schoolgirl and shows the fiction of this 20th-century genius in a fresh light.