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.

Details

ISBN13: 9780811238588
Format: Paperback / softback
Number of Pages: 96
Edition:
Publication Date:
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication City, Country: New York, United States
Dimensions (cm): 20.6(H)x13.2(L)x0.8(W)98
Weight (gm): 98

Author Biography

The author of the global bestseller No Longer Human and The Setting Sun, Osamu Dazai (1909-1948) was famous for confronting head-on the social and moral crises of postwar Japan. He committed suicide by drowning in Tokyo’s Tamagawa Aqueduct. Sam Bett is a fiction writer and Japanese translator. His translation of Yukio Mishima’s Star won the 2019–2020 Japan–U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature.

Reviews

Dazai was an aristocratic tramp, a self-described delinquent, yet he wrote with the forbearance of a fasting scribe.--Patti Smith
What I despise about Dazai is that he exposes precisely those things in myself that I most want to hide.--Yukio Mishima