The Beggar Student

by Osamu Dazai, Sam Bett (Translator)

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

If 'meta' was defined by one story, it'd be this book. Acclaimed author Osamu Dazai turns the pen on himself in this meditation of life and art.

For fans of No Longer Human, Osamu Dazai’s darkly bewitching novel about the small redemptions of being a pathetic, miserable writer.

A fictional writer in his thirties named Osamu Dazai has just mailed his publisher an awful manuscript, filling him with dread and shame. Wandering along a river in a nearby park in suburban Tokyo, he meets a high-school dropout and the two get into an intellectual spat. Eventually, Dazai finds himself agreeing to perform in the boy’s place 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 glimmerings of truth in intellectual one-upmanship. Replete with settings straight out of the popular anime Bungo Stray Dogs and echoes of the themes in No Longer Human, this biting novella captures the infamous Japanese writer at his mordant best.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811238588
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	12/10/2024
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	7.80(w) x 5.10(h) x 0.50(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

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

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

From the Publisher