A01=Osamu Dazai
alienation
anime
anime adaptation
Author_Osamu Dazai
bungo stray dogs
Category=FB
cult japanese writer
drowning
ennui
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
japanese classic
japanese fiction
japanese literature
japanese novella
manga
no longer human
novella
pop culture
tik tok
tokyo
Product details
- ISBN 9780811238588
- Weight: 98g
- Dimensions: 132 x 206mm
- Publication Date: 10 Dec 2024
- Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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A fictional writer in his thirties named Osamu Dazai has just sent his publisher a terrible manuscript, filling him with dread and shame. Shortly afterward, while moping around a park in suburban Tokyo, he spots someone drowning in a nearby aqueduct. He doesn’t want to become a witness to a suicide and eventually decides to flee the park. But as he is leaving, he trips over the boy who had been drowning, and the two begin an unlikely conversation that turns into an intellectual spat. Hoping to ingratiate himself with the boy—a high-school dropout—Dazai finds himself agreeing to perform in the boy’s stead that very night as the live narrator of a film screening...
So begins the madcap adventure of The Beggar Student, where there is glamor in destitution, and intellectual one-upmanship reveals glimmers of truth. Replete with settings incorporated into the popular anime Bungo Stray Dogs and with echoes of No Longer Human, this biting novella captures the infamous Japanese writer at his mordant best.
The author of the global bestseller No Longer Human and The Setting Sun, Osamu Dazai (1909-1948) was famous for confronting head-on the social and moral crises of postwar Japan. He committed suicide by drowning in Tokyo’s Tamagawa Aqueduct.
Sam Bett is a fiction writer and Japanese translator. His translation of Yukio Mishima’s Star won the 2019–2020 Japan–U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature.
