
Self-Portraits
Stories
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Narrated by:
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Brian Nishii
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By:
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Osamu Dazai
About this listen
Bringing together novelist Osamu Dazai’s best autobiographical shorts in a single, slim volume, SELF-PORTRAITS shows the legendary writer at his best and worst.
“Art dies the moment it acquires authority.” So said Japan’s quintessential rebel writer Osamu Dazai, who, disgusted with the hypocrisy of every kind of establishment, from the nation’s obsolete aristocracy to its posturing, warmongering generals, went his own way, even when that meant his death and the death of others. Faced with pressure to conform, he declared his individuality to the world in all its self-involved, self-conscious, and self-hating glory. “Art,” he wrote, “is ‘I.’”
In these short stories, collected and translated by Ralph McCarthy, we can see just how closely Dazai’s life mirrored his art, and vice versa, as the writer/narrator falls from grace, rises to fame, and falls again. Addiction, debt, shame, and despair dogged Dazai until his self-inflicted death, and yet despite all the lies and deception he resorted to in life, there is an almost fanatical honesty to his writing. And that has made him a hero to generations of listeners who see laid bare, in his works, the painful, impossible contradictions inherent in the universal commandment of social life—fit in and do as you are told—as well as the possibility, however desperate, of defiance.
Long out of print, these stories will be a revelation to the legions of new fans of NO LONGER HUMAN, THE SETTING SUN, and THE FLOWERS OF BUFFOONERY.
©1991, 2024 Kodansha International Limited, Ralph McCarthy (P)2024 New Directions Publishing Corp.Listeners also enjoyed...
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How to listen
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🚕
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Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982
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In a small, tidy apartment on the outskirts of the frenzied metropolis of Seoul lives Kim Jiyoung. A 30-something-year-old “millennial everywoman”, she has recently left her white-collar desk job - in order to care for her newborn daughter full-time - as so many Korean women are expected to do. But she quickly begins to exhibit strange symptoms that alarm her husband, parents, and in-laws: Jiyoung impersonates the voices of other women - alive and even dead, both known and unknown to her.
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Overall
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Performance
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good
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First Time is the Charm
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Set in the early postwar years, it probes the destructive effects of war and the transition from a feudal Japan to an industrial society. Ozamu Dazai died, a suicide, in 1948. But the influence of his book has made "people of the setting sun" a permanent part of the Japanese language, and his heroine, Kazuko, a young aristocrat who deliberately abandons her class, a symbol of the anomie which pervades so much of the modern world.
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By: Osamu Dazai, and others
-
The Beggar Student
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