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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-
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Story
No Longer Human (1948, Ningen Shikkaku / A Shameful Life / Confessions of a Faulty Man) was an attack on the traditions of Japan, capturing the postwar crisis of Japanese cultural identity. Framed by an epilogue and prologue, the story is told in the form three notebooks left by Ōba Yōzō, whose calm exterior hides his tormented soul. Osamu Dazai was a Japanese author who is considered one of the foremost fiction writers of 20th century Japan. A number of his most popular works, such as Shayō (The Setting Sun) and Ningen Shikkaku (No Longer Human), are considered modern-day classics in Japan.
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good
- By fatima on 05-06-24
By: Osamu Dazai
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Early Light
- Storybook ND Series
- By: Osamu Dazai
- Narrated by: Brian Nishii
- Length: 1 hr and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Early Light offers three very different aspects of Osamu Dazai's genius: the title story relates his misadventures as a drinker and a family man in the terrible fire bombings of Tokyo at the end of WWII. Having lost their own home, he and his wife flee with a new baby boy and their little girl to relatives in Kofu, only to be bombed out anew.
By: Osamu Dazai
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The Setting Sun
- New Directions Book
- By: Osamu Dazai
- Narrated by: June Angela
- Length: 4 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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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MORE OSAMU DAZAI TRANSLATIONS PLEASE!!!!!
- By Lucky on 10-19-22
By: Osamu Dazai
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The Flowers of Buffoonery
- By: Osamu Dazai
- Narrated by: Brian Nishii
- Length: 1 hr and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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.
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A meandering mess
- By I Ate Your Pug For Lunch and It was Tasty on 01-17-24
By: Osamu Dazai
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Schoolgirl
- By: Osamu Dazai, Allison Markin Powell - translator
- Narrated by: Traci Kato Kiriyama
- Length: 1 hr and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Essentially the start of Dazai's career, Schoolgirl gained notoriety for its ironic and inventive use of language. Now it illuminates the prevalent social structures of a lost time, as well as the struggle of the individual against them—a theme that occupied Dazai's life both personally and professionally. This new translation preserves the playful language of the original and offers the listener a new window into the mind of one of the greatest Japanese authors of the 20th century.
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Short and introspective
- By brandy on 12-12-23
By: Osamu Dazai, and others
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No Longer Human
- By: Osamu Dazai
- Narrated by: David Shih
- Length: 4 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Portraying himself as a failure, the protagonist of Osamu Dazai’s NO LONGER HUMAN narrates a seemingly normal life even while he feels himself incapable of understanding human beings. His attempts to reconcile himself to the world around him begin in early childhood, continue through high school, where he becomes a “clown” to mask his alienation, and eventually lead to a failed suicide attempt as an adult. Without sentimentality, he records the casual cruelties of life and its fleeting moments of human connection and tenderness.
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A voice of depression
- By Owen on 08-28-24
By: Osamu Dazai
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No Longer Human - Confessions of a Faulty Man
- By: Osamu Dazai
- Narrated by: Simon Jackson
- Length: 3 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
No Longer Human (1948, Ningen Shikkaku / A Shameful Life / Confessions of a Faulty Man) was an attack on the traditions of Japan, capturing the postwar crisis of Japanese cultural identity. Framed by an epilogue and prologue, the story is told in the form three notebooks left by Ōba Yōzō, whose calm exterior hides his tormented soul. Osamu Dazai was a Japanese author who is considered one of the foremost fiction writers of 20th century Japan. A number of his most popular works, such as Shayō (The Setting Sun) and Ningen Shikkaku (No Longer Human), are considered modern-day classics in Japan.
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-
good
- By fatima on 05-06-24
By: Osamu Dazai
-
Early Light
- Storybook ND Series
- By: Osamu Dazai
- Narrated by: Brian Nishii
- Length: 1 hr and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Early Light offers three very different aspects of Osamu Dazai's genius: the title story relates his misadventures as a drinker and a family man in the terrible fire bombings of Tokyo at the end of WWII. Having lost their own home, he and his wife flee with a new baby boy and their little girl to relatives in Kofu, only to be bombed out anew.
By: Osamu Dazai