Good-Bye

Eleven short works by the Osamu Dazai, author of No Longer Human

Here to slake the unquenchable thirst of Dazai’s legions of loyal fans are eleven works of short fiction and vignettes, most of which have never before appeared in English.

Beginning with “Memories” (which tells a tale of teenage love, based on the autobiographical events that inspired Dazai’s famed No Longer Human), and ending with “Good-Bye” (the chapters of a comic romance that the author left unfinished when he took his own life), the short works here show the range and breadth of an author best known for his meditations on squalor and despair. But there is laughter here too, as in “Tengu,” a tongue-in-cheek critique of august hucksters of haiku. And there is also suspense on display: “A Bluff Illusion” presents a literary murder story in which a harmless prank escalates into a deadly pose. “A Warning on Worldly Pleasures” retells Saikaku’s famous story about the temptation of a holy ascetic, and “A: Autumn” unfolds a quiver of epigrams (seemingly) drawn at random from the author’s notes. All are masterfully translated by Ralph McCarthy.

Spanning the breadth of Dazai’s delightfully multifaceted, if tragically foreshortened, career, Good-Bye is a must-have for any Dazai fan.

213 pages. Paperback. 

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 alongside his lover by throwing himself into Tokyo's Tamagawa Aqueduct. His body was found on what would have been his 39th birthday.

About the Translator

Ralph McCarthy has lived in Japan for almost two decades. He is the translator of many short stories by Osamu Dazai and of Ryu Murakami's novel 69.