11/24/2023 0 Comments No longer human japanese bookŌba cannot forget his abuse by a female servant when he was young. It is interesting that someone who felt himself different from an early age and for whom “it would be no exaggeration to say that my only playmates while I was growing up were girls” (48) became a diffident lady-killer rather than a homosexual. Of course, this resonates with my experience of people not believing I could possibly be serious when I am, and feeling I’m not like other people, incapable of “getting by.” And “unusual or extravagant things tempt me” (p. 139), which in turn is a result of his desperate clowning. I like Keene’s characterization of Yozo as a man “who is orphaned from his fellows by their refusal to take him seriously” (p. Would Keene have been moved to translate Dazai, if there was nothing of the Japanese tradition that Keene venerates in Dazai? Let alone, recall translating Dazai “as if I were writing a book of my own,” an experience he only otherwise had with Kenkô’s Essays in Idleness ( On Familiar Terms, p. 7), though this is more credible now than it was six decades ago.ĭazai seems very traditionally Japanese to me in many ways, a descendant of Sei Shônagon both in wit and to some degree in aesthetics (Dazai is still plenty delicate and fairly indirect, even about what she would have considered vulgar and even sordid matters, very regretful and very perishable). As far as literature is concerned, the break with the Japanese past is almost complete” (p. I am not so sure that Keene was right that the Japanese “are certainly much more like Americans than they are like their ancestors of one hundred years ago. 9 really? a capacity for love? and gentleness? or solipsism mixed with diffidence?)Īn earlier reader of the copy of the book that I read challenges his translation (67ff) of “irrationality” instead of “illegality.” (“In the way that most men fail to see their own cruelty, Yozo had not noticed his gentleness and capacity for love”-p. I read the epilogue differently from translator and longtime Columbia professor Donald Keene: as showing the notebook’s writer was successful at mimicking good nature, not that his widow is right and the writer wrong. I can’t muster sociological interest in it as social history of the 30s either, since dissipation is basically timeless (though the preferred means vary). No Longer Human ( Ningen Shikkaku, 1948) is more epigrammatic that The Setting Sun (Shayo, 1947 ), but perhaps I am too old for it (as I was once too young to read Proust)-too old to be much moved for the plaint of a creature too delicate for the world. Unfortunately, I seem to like each Dazai Osamu (1909-1948) book that I read less than the previous one I’ve read (and the second of his novels less than the first).
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