Between emotive TikToks and unexpected fandom as a character in the manga and anime “Bungo Stray Dogs,” unpacking Osamu Dazai’s ongoing wave of renewed popularity nearly a century after the author’s works were first published is a challenge. The reasons are nearly as complex as the man himself.
Although recognized in literary circles outside Japan ever since translator Donald Keene introduced him to the West in the late 1950s, Dazai’s works have been enjoying a new boom in the past decade. In the past two years, new translations of novels “No Longer Human,” “The Setting Sun,” two novellas “Flowers of Buffoonery” and “The Beggar Student” and two short story collections have all come out, by translators including Juliet Winters Carpenter, Sam Bett and Ralph McCarthy.
Retrograde, by Osamu Dazai. Translated by Leo Elizabeth Takada. 128 pages, ONE PEACE BOOKS, fiction.
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