The Flowers of Buffoonery

by Osamu Dazai, Sam Bett (Translator)

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Exploring themes of alienation and being misunderstood, Flowers of Buffoonery is a refreshing narrative that gives perspective on the notion of finding your place in a changing world. With a sharp wit and a keen understanding of what it is to be human, this is one of those stories that is equally timeless and timely.

For the first time in English, Osamu Dazai’s hilariously comic and deeply moving prequel to No Longer Human

The Flowers of Buffoonery opens in a seaside sanitarium where Yozo Oba—the narrator of No Longer Human at a younger age—is being kept after a failed suicide attempt. While he is convalescing, his friends and family visit him, and other patients and nurses drift in and out of his room. Against this dispiriting backdrop, everyone tries to maintain a lighthearted, even clownish atmosphere: playing cards, smoking cigarettes, vying for attention, cracking jokes, and trying to make each other laugh.

While No Longer Human delves into the darkest corners of human consciousness, The Flowers of Buffoonery pokes fun at these same emotions: the follies and hardships of youth, of love, and of self-hatred and depression. A glimpse into the lives of a group of outsiders in prewar Japan, The Flowers of Buffoonery is a darkly humorous and fresh addition to Osamu Dazai’s masterful and intoxicating oeuvre.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811234542
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	03/07/2023
Pages:	96
Sales rank:	17,508
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Osamu Dazai was born in 1909 into a powerful landowning family of northern Japan. A brilliant student, he entered the French department of Tokyo University in 1930, but later boasted that in the five years before he left without a degree, he had never attended a lecture. Dazai was famous for confronting head-on the social and moral crises of postwar Japan before he committed suicide by throwing himself into Tokyo’s Tamagawa Aqueduct. His body was found on what would have been his 39th birthday.

Sam Bett is a fiction writer and Japanese translator whose credits include Star by Yukio Mishima. Working with David Boyd, he co-translated the Mieko Kawakami novels Heaven, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize; All the Lovers in the Night, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction; and Breasts and Eggs.

Editorial Reviews

12/05/2022

This beguiling novella from Dazai (1909–1948) revisits the protagonist from the author’s No Longer Human at a younger age. Yozo Oba, 25, an artist–cum–Marxist agitator from a once-wealthy family, has just survived an attempted suicide after jumping off a seaside cliff with his lover, Sono, who drowned. A series of asides from Dazai break the fourth wall, either bemoaning the author’s choices for characterization and plot—“My fear of being ridiculed is so intense I’d rather beat my critics to the punch”—or haranguing the reader for passing judgment on Yozo and the friends and relatives who visit and exchange laughter during Yozo’s convalescence at a sanatorium (“How cruel of you. What part of what you see here is carefree?”). More complicated, and more intriguing, is the truth behind Yozo and Sono’s jump. Initially, Dazai casts Yozo as a murderer (“In my satanic insolence, I prayed for my salvation in the same breath that I prayed Sono would die,” Yozo thinks shortly after his rescue), but that becomes complicated as Dazai brings wit and pathos to the chronicle of Yozo’s four days at the sanatorium, as Yozo’s jocular banter with an art school classmate, a younger cousin, and a nurse belie a deep despair. In a few artful strokes, Dazai has sketched a memorable character. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

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

The Japan Times

"What I despise about Dazai is that he exposes precisely those things in myself that I most want to hide."

Yukio Mishima

"Outrageous, exasperating, and, like so much of Dazai’s writing, indefinably (perhaps also indefensibly) charming."

The Nation - Paul Franz

"Dazai was an aristocratic tramp, a self-described delinquent, yet he wrote with the forbearance of a fasting scribe."

Patti Smith

"For all his novels’ reputation as sketches of alienation, they’re equally potent as modern portraits of human connection."

The Atlantic - Jane Yong Kim

"Dazai’s usual concerns in a lighter, more comic key,... captures the sweetness under the pretended bravado of these baffled youth."

The New York Times - Andrew Martin