A01=Osamu Dazai
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alcohol
alcoholism
anomie
aoi bungaku
Author_Osamu Dazai
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B06=Donald Keene
B06=Ralph McCarthy
Category1=Fiction
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=FA
Category=FBA
Category=FV
Category=FYB
Category=HBWQ
Category=NHWR7
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
eq_anthologies-novellas-short-stories
eq_bestseller
eq_fiction
eq_historical-fiction
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_modern-contemporary
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
fatalism
hiroshima
Language_English
PA=Available
post-war
Price_€10 to €20
PS=Active
softlaunch
ww2
Product details
- ISBN 9780811231985
- Weight: 252g
- Dimensions: 160 x 239mm
- Publication Date: 27 Sep 2022
- Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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Early Light offers three very different aspects of Osamu Dazai's genius: the title story relates his misadventures as a drinker and a family man in the terrible fire bombings of Tokyo at the end of WWII. Having lost their own home, he and his wife flee with a new baby boy and their little girl to relatives in Kofu, only to be bombed out anew. "Everything's gone," the father explains to his daughter: "Mr. Rabbit, our shoes, the Ogigari house, the Chino house, they all burned up," "Yeah, they all burned up," she said, still smiling.
"One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji," another autobiographical tale, is much more comic: Dazai finds himself unable to escape the famous views, the beauty once immortalized by Hokusai and now reduced to a cliche. In the end, young girls torment him by pressing him into taking their photo before the famous peak: "Goodbye," he hisses through his teeth, "Mount Fuji. Thanks for everything. Click."
And the final story is "Villon's Wife," a small masterpiece, which relates the awakening to power of a drunkard's wife. She transforms herself into a woman not to be defeated by anything, not by her husband being a thief, a megalomaniacal writer, and a wastrel. Single-handedly, she saves the day by concluding that "There's nothing wrong with being a monster, is there? As long as we can stay alive."
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.
Donald Keene, the author of dozens of books in both English and
Japanese as well as the famed translator of Dazai, Kawabata, and Mishima, was the
first non-Japanese to receive the Yomiuri Prize for Literature. Ralph McCarthy has lived in Japan for almost two decades. He is the translator of two collections of stories by Osamu Dazai, “Self Portraits” and “Blue Bamboo,” and of Ryu Murakami’s novel 69.
