Osamu Dazai gets silly while facing fears in 'The Flowers of Buffoonery'

For the first time in English, readers will be able to experience the early days of Japanese fiction’s beloved bad boy.

Osamu Dazai’s 1935 novella “The Flowers of Buffoonery” shares a protagonist, the young, wannabe writer Yozo Oba, with the author’s modern classic novel “No Longer Human,” released more than 10 years later. Yet this is hardly an origin story of Dazai’s troubled narrator. While both books closely mirror the tragedies in the author’s life, the early novella strikes a lighter tone.

“The overlaps with Dazai’s life are irrefutable,” says translator Sam Bett. “He revisited many of the plot points of the novella later in ‘No Longer Human.’ And yet the books are so different, they feel almost like different media. Unlike ‘No Longer Human,’ which traces the arc of a life, ‘Buffoonery’ takes place over the course of about four days. It is narrated by a disembodied third-person narrator who is woefully insecure about the quality of his book, the book we are reading. This is a surreal novel. By the time Dazai penned ‘No Longer Human,’ he got over his discomfort with seriousness.”

If “The Flowers of Buffoonery” shows an artist unsure of himself, it is due to the frequent commentary of a narrator fearing his critics — or even worse, his own mediocrity. The device of breaking the fourth wall, where a writer talks straight at the reader, perhaps commenting on the story in a self-deprecating manner, may be familiar to English-language readers through Western postmodernists like Kurt Vonnegut or Chuck Palahniuk, who starts out his novel “Choke” (2001) sounding exactly as sheepish as Yozo: “If you’re going to read this, don’t bother. There has to be something better on television.” But where did Dazai pick up the device back in the 1930s?

“Some have suggested that Dazai borrowed the self-critical narrator from the French author Andre Gide,” says Bett. “‘The Flowers of Buffoonery’ is speckled with all kinds of references to Western art and literature. For starters, there is the title, which pokes fun at Baudelaire and his ‘Flowers of Evil.’ Then there’s the first line (“Welcome to Sadness. Population one.”) throwing shade on Dante.”

Much like the men in his story, Dazai gets silly to check his own complex: the fact that he has much to prove and needs to break free from literary models. It may be this self-deprecation, the genuine disarming lostness underneath his joking exterior, that makes Dazai appealing to modern readers.

“Striking the right tone was important because of the dark side of the plot,” says Bett. “The incongruity between bright surfaces and grim interiors is a major feature of Dazai. His fiction is enamored with the pull of suicide, how it can motivate and animate behavior. I think one function of all the buffoonery in this story is that it makes us shake our heads with something lighter than disgust, but darker than humor. We are reminded why this book is set here, at a seaside sanatorium for tuberculosis patients in recovery.”

In recent years, Bett has handled some of the most high-profile translations of Japanese fiction, including Yukio Mishima’s novella “Star” and Mieko Kawakami’s “Breasts and Eggs” (with translator David Boyd). After such complex projects, what were the major obstacles in now tackling Dazai?

“A fun challenge was coming up with realistic dialogue that also feels appropriately dated,” Bett explains. “The book is set in 1929, almost 100 years ago. Most of the dialogue is spoken by artistic types in their 20s, some of them from well-off families. My goal was to find a workable English equivalent for these rambunctious, foppish, fragile personalities.

“I regularly consulted an etymology dictionary to make sure phrases like ‘in a pickle’ or ‘living daylights’ didn’t postdate the Japanese text. I gave myself a two-year grace period, for a couple of words like ‘pizazz’ (first attested 1937) because they felt so perfect for the book. I also thought about the movies of the period, specifically college films such as ‘The Freshman’ with Harold Lloyd, which explore the shallow end of adulthood.”

Some say that an ideal translation should not draw attention to itself, that, in fact, it shouldn’t be visible that a text came from another language. But prose as showy as “The Flowers of Buffoonery,” filled with Japanese slang from the 1920s, may require translation choices that can’t help but draw some attention — and perhaps even critique.

As bold as he is creative, Bett doesn’t struggle with the question of visibility. He aims to recreate an experience in which an English translation reads as much as possible like the Japanese original. Some of his hardest lexical choices came from the dissonant and unexpected ways the writer links elements.

“This is where much of the fun happens,” says Bett. “For example, in a scene at the beach, Yozo’s cousin shrugs off a rejection in what Dazai describes literally as ‘a Western manner.’ My version has him shrug ‘like a Hollywood dandy.’ Dazai would have assumed readers would know what it means for somebody to shrug in a Western way. American readers are unlikely to take much away from this. My job was to find a way to say exactly what Dazai said, but in a different way and with a different set of options. That’s my view of translation.”

For readers who enjoy Bett’s literary voice, it should be great news that he also writes fiction. Given his award-winning rendition of Mishima, it may not be very surprising that his own stories are florid and grand, if at times somewhat more domestic.

“My ideas for fiction begin with a subject I find fascinating, then grow into a story when my curiosity leads me to a catalyst,” says Bett. “For my first novel, those two elements are the gory sport of shark fishing and the gaze of nature magazine photography.”