No One Knows

Osamu Dazai, Ralph McCarthy

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English

New Directions Press
25 March 2025

Fiction & Literature; Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945); Short stories

No one really understands how we suffer. One day, when we're adults, we may come to recall this suffering, this misery, as silly and laughable, but how are we to get through the long, hateful period until then? No one bothers to teach us that.

Osamu Dazai was a master raconteur who plumbed-in an addictive, easy style-the absurd complexities of life in a society whose expectations cannot be met without sacrificing one's individual ideals on the altar of conformity. The gravitational pull of his prose is on full display in these stories. In ""Lantern,"" a young woman, in love with a well-born but impoverished student, shoplifts a bathing suit for him-and ends up in the local newspaper indicted as a crazed, degenerate communist. In ""Chiyojo,"" a high-school girl shows early promise as a writer, but as her uncle and mother relentlessly push her to pursue a literary career, she must ask herself: is this what I really want? Or am I supposed to fulfill their own frustrated ambitions? In ""Shame,"" a young reader writes a fan letter to a writer she admires, only to find out, upon visiting him, that he's a bourgeoise sophisticate nothing like the desperate rebels he portrays, and decides (in true Dazai style): ""Novelists are human trash. No, they're worse than that; they're demons. . . They write nothing but lies.""

This collection of 14 tales-a half-dozen of which have never before appeared in English-is based on a Japanese collection of, as Dazai described them, ""soliloquies by female narrators."" No One Knows includes the quietly brilliant long story ""Schoolgirl"" and shows the fiction of this 20th-century genius in a fresh light.

By: Osamu Dazai
Translated by: Ralph McCarthy
Imprint: New Directions Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 203mm, Width: 132mm, Spine: 20mm
Weight: 261g
ISBN: 9780811239332
ISBN 10: 0811239330
Pages: 256
Publication Date: 25 March 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

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. RALPH MCCARTHY has lived in Japan for almost two decades. He is the translator of two collections of stories by Osamu Dazai, “Self Portraits” and “Blue Bamboo,” and of Ryu Murakami’s novel 69.

Reviews for No One Knows

""Dazai was an aristocratic tramp, a self-described delinquent, yet he wrote with the forbearance of a fasting scribe. "" -- Patti Smith ""Praise for Self-Portraits: As acidic and addictive as a bag of sour candy."" -- Publishers Weekly ""Dazai’s work will either pull you out of a deep depression or crack your rose-colored glasses; there is no in-between."" -- The Millions ""Dazai is thoroughly contemporary in his depiction of the older generation’s casual exploitation of the young for its own ends."" -- Andrew Martin - Electric Lit """"Ultimately, it is not individuals Dazai seemed to dislike but the constraints on personal and societal freedom that force people into falsehood. His characters despise that people can’t be honest, and that they themselves can’t either learn to be false or have the courage to break away."" "" -- Zito Madu - The Washington Post ""This dazzling collection from Dazai comprises all the “soliloquies” he wrote from the perspectives of women. Taken together, they convey a startling breadth of emotion… On the exterior, most of the women characters are silent and submissive presences—dutiful wives, daughters, sisters, and mothers. The juxtaposition between how the world sees them and how they see the world lends an urgent sense of revolt to their freewheeling monologues."" -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)