'Schoolgirl' is the novella that first established Dazai as a member of Japan's literary elite. Essentially the start of Dazai's career, the 1933 work gained notoriety for its ironic and inventive use of language, and how it illuminated the prevalent social structures of a lost time.
Born in 1907, Nakahara Chuya was one of the most gifted and colourful of Japan's early modern poets. A bohemian romantic, his death at the early age of thirty, coupled with the delicacy of his imagery, have led to him being compared to the greatest of French symbolist poets. Since the Second World War Nakahara's statu...
The post-war period in Japan was one of immense social change as Japanese society adjusted to the shock of defeat and to the occupation of Japan by American forces and their allies. Osamu Dazai's The Setting Sun takes this milieu as its background to tell the story of the decline of a minor aristocratic family. The st...