Tag - osamu-dazai

 
 

OSAMU DAZAI

Japan Times
JAPAN / History / JAPAN TIMES GONE BY
Jun 3, 2023
Japan Times 1923: This may be a true story, but again, it mayn’t
Some mysterious behavior from a jar of ashes 100 years ago makes the front page of The Japan Times. Then, 25 years ago, a conference believes newsprint will win out over the internet.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Mar 19, 2023
'The Flowers of Buffoonery': Osamu Dazai's unexpected portrait of camaraderie
The novel adds new texture to the author's classic 'No Longer Human,' while bringing levity to a somewhat dire thesis: The world is full of inauthenticity.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Mar 13, 2023
Osamu Dazai gets silly while facing fears in 'The Flowers of Buffoonery'
Translator Sam Bett brings out the fragile personalities in the author's early novella, a predecessor to his modern classic novel “No Longer Human.'
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Jul 21, 2022
Independent publisher gives short stories their due with 'Storybook ND' series
New Directions spotlights short fiction with a new translated series featuring Yoko Tawada and Osamu Dazai.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Aug 1, 2020
‘A Late Chrysanthemum’: A short story collection full of pathos and maturity
This anthology of short stories may tend toward the morally dubious, but it's a solid introduction to literary masters of the 20th century.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Jan 25, 2020
Is Japan enjoying a new literary golden age?
The case for Yes
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Nov 28, 2019
'Human Lost': Osamu Dazai's classic novel gets lost in sci-fi technobabble
A futuristic update of 'No Longer Human,' the latest computer-animated film from Polygon Pictures takes liberties with the source material.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 18, 2019
'No Longer Human': A biopic with no decent biography
Mika Ninagawa's 'No Longer Human' tells the story of celebrated Japanese author Osamu Dazai, with a particular focus on his turbulent love life
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books / ESSENTIAL READING FOR JAPANOPHILES
Dec 22, 2018
Delve into a teenager's consciousness with Osamu Dazai's 'Schoolgirl'
Concise enough to be read in one sitting, 'Schoolgirl' combines Osamu Dazai's familiar themes of melancholy, alienation and despair with levity and humor.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Nov 10, 2018
A journey to hell with Osamu Dazai, Japan's ultimate bad boy novelist
Dazai is the ultimate bad boy of Japanese literature and 'Ningen Shikkaku,' recently re-translated by Mark Gibeau as 'A Shameful Life,' is his supreme masterpiece, a novel that still shocks today with its brutal honesty and unflinching, strangely thrilling pessimism.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books / WORKS BY JAPANESE WOMEN
Oct 20, 2018
Fierce and inventive, Yuko Tsushima's oeuvre goes beyond the 'I-novel' genre
Early on, Yuko Tsushima broke the boundaries of the traditional Japanese I-novel, giving voice to a voiceless minority by authentically depicting the struggles of single mothers in society as a single mother herself.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
May 19, 2018
Mount Fuji is the gift to writers that keeps on giving
'Mountain/Home: New Translations from Japan' shows Mount Fuji from a variety of literary angles in this comprehensive anthology of translations.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Mar 30, 2018
Thawing out on the stove train through Tsugaru
In his 1944 semi-autobiographical "Return to Tsugaru," Japanese author Osamu Dazai (1909-48) revisits his native Tsugaru, a peninsula in northernmost Aomori Prefecture and, apart from praising its people, has mostly unflattering things to say about the place. Forty years later, British writer Alan Booth followed in his footsteps, walking the entire peninsula to the mouth of the then recently finished Seikan Tunnel that connects Honshu and Hokkaido. Booth's observations largely echo those of Dazai.
Japan Times
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Nov 13, 2017
Blue Sky Books is a literary treasure trove
Aozora Bunko is an electric internet library that contains works of literature in the public domain.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books / ESSENTIAL READING FOR JAPANOPHILES
Nov 4, 2017
'Blue Bamboo: Japanese Tales of Fantasy': Between the fantasy and reality of Osamu Dazai
Osamu Dazai packs wry humor and warm humanity into seven short stories, as his collection, "Blue Bamboo," inventively blurs the line between fantasy and reality.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Sep 15, 2017
Views both old and new of Aomori's Tsugaru
Cut off by the Ou Mountains to the south and far removed from any center of power, Aomori Prefecture's remote Tsugaru Peninsula was largely left to its own devices until the Azuchi-Momoyama Period (1573-1603).
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Jan 14, 2017
Mishima and the maze of sexuality in modern Japan
In June 1948, novelist Osamu Dazai committed suicide. The 38-year-old, who had just completed his masterpiece, "No Longer Human," and whose fame was peaking, jumped into Tokyo's Tamagawa Canal with his mistress, Tomie Yamazaki, and drowned.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Dec 13, 2016
Tokyo: photogenic to its very core
Care to take a guess what the new exhibition "Tokyo, Tokyo and Tokyo" at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum is about? In fact there are two exhibitions with the same name running concurrently, so it's "Tokyo, Tokyo and Tokyo" and "Tokyo, Tokyo and Tokyo."
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Mar 26, 2016
Black Illumination: the disqualified life of Osamu Dazai
The author Osamu Dazai committed suicide — several times. The first was on a cold December night in 1929, just before his school exams. But the overdose of sleeping pills he took was not enough; he survived, and graduated. The second was in October, 1930, on the barren sands of a beach in Kamakura — this time a double suicide with a young woman he barely knew. Tragically, she drowned, while Dazai was rescued by a passing fishing boat. He went on to marry and began a career as a writer. The third attempt was in the spring of 1933: He tried hanging himself from a beam in the mesmerizing stillness of his Tokyo apartment. Once again Dazai survived, though he was hospitalized and developed a morphine addiction. And the fourth was in the fall of 1936, when Dazai and his wife — with their marriage disintegrating — attempted a double suicide, but to their horror, they lived.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books / ESSENTIAL READING FOR JAPANOPHILES
Jun 6, 2015
Osamu Dazai's travel guide 'Return to Tsugaru' is more concerned with people than place
In the northernmost reaches of Honshu, Japan's largest island, lies Tsugaru, an area isolated even from its neighbors in Aomori Prefecture, let alone the rest of Japan. As a celebrated author and son of Tsugaru himself, Dazai Osamu must have seemed the perfect choice for this 1944 volume in Oyama Shoten's series of books on regional diversity. But a few pages into "Return to Tsugaru," the result of this commission, Dazai warns the reader that they shouldn't expect to learn too much about Tsugaru itself. Instead, he will be concentrating on his own chief interest: "love, for want of a better word ... the human heart in its relations with other hearts."

Longform

Historically, kabuki was considered the entertainment of the merchant and peasant classes, a far cry from how it is regarded today.
For Japan's oldest kabuki theater, the show must go on