A fictional writer in his thirties named Osamu Dazai has just sent his publisher a terrible manuscript, filling him with dread and shame. Shortly afterward, while moping around a park in suburban Tokyo, he spots someone drowning in a nearby aqueduct. He doesn’t want to become a witness to a suicide and eventually decides to flee the park. But as he is leaving, he trips over the boy who had been drowning, and the two begin an unlikely conversation that turns into an intellectual spat. Hoping to ingratiate himself with the boy—a high-school dropout—Dazai finds himself agreeing to perform in the boy’s stead that very night as the live narrator of a film screening...

So begins the madcap adventure of The Beggar Student, where there is glamor in destitution, and intellectual one-upmanship reveals glimmers of truth. Replete with settings incorporated into the popular anime Bungo Stray Dogs and with echoes of No Longer Human, this biting novella captures the infamous Japanese writer at his mordant best.

Les mer
<strong>For fans of <em>No Longer Human,</em> Osamu Dazai's darkly bewitching novel about the small redemptions of being a pathetic, miserable writer </strong>

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9780811238588
Publisert
2024-12-10
Utgiver
Vendor
New Directions Publishing Corporation
Vekt
98 gr
Høyde
206 mm
Bredde
132 mm
Dybde
8 mm
Aldersnivå
G, 01
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet
Antall sider
96

Forfatter
Oversetter

Biographical note

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.