For the first time in English, Osamu Dazai’s hilariously comic and deeply moving prequel to No Longer Human
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.
While No Longer Human delves into the darkest corners of human consciousness, The Flowers of Buffoonery pokes fun at these same emotions: the follies and hardships of youth, of love, and of self-hatred and depression. A glimpse into the lives of a group of outsiders in prewar Japan, The Flowers of Buffoonery is a darkly humorous and fresh addition to Osamu Dazai’s masterful and intoxicating oeuvre.
"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
"This beguiling novella from Dazai (1909–1948) revisits the protagonist from the author’s No Longer Human at a younger age...Dazai brings wit and pathos to the chronicle of Yozo’s four days at the sanatorium, as Yozo’s jocular banter with an art school classmate, a younger cousin, and a nurse belie a deep despair. In a few artful strokes, Dazai has sketched a memorable character."
― Publishers Weekly
"Dazai’s usual concerns in a lighter, more comic key,... captures the sweetness under the pretended bravado of these baffled youth."
― Andrew Martin, The New York Times
"For the first time in English, readers will be able to experience the early days of Japanese fiction’s beloved bad boy."
― The Japan Times
"For all his novels’ reputation as sketches of alienation, they’re equally potent as modern portraits of human connection."
― Jane Yong Kim, The Atlantic
"Outrageous, exasperating, and, like so much of Dazai’s writing, indefinably (perhaps also indefensibly) charming."
― Paul Franz, The Nation
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.
