Self portraits

This revelatory collection of autobiographical stories by Dazai (1909--1948) lends context to his classic longer works, The Flowers of Buffoonery and No Longer Human. Often, the delightfully barbed musings feel like the remembrances of an aging rock star, as in "Eight Views of Tokyo," in which the narrator describes an attempt to write a story of his youth among the city's strivers, who are drawn to the "charmless, featureless plain" on which Tokyo was built to "regard one another with jealous, hostile eyes." "Canis familiaris" begins with a characteristically wry mix of bravado and resignation: "I have confidence when it comes to dogs. I'm confident that eventually I'll be bitten by one." In "Thinking of Zenzō ," Dazai writes of getting scammed by a woman posing as a farmer who overcharges him for roses. For all the hijinks, stories like "Early Light," which finds Dazai and his wife and two children on the run from bomb threats in the spring of 1945, lend necessary gravitas. As acidic and addictive as a bag of sour candy, this smart selection of Dazai's shorts is one to savor. (Feb.)

Snapshots from a worldly Japanese writer's troublesome life. Born in 1909 to a powerful, landed family in Aomori prefecture, Dazai lived a rambunctious socialite's life--one marred by quarrels, suicides, adulteries, and addictions. He survived the communal traumas of World War II and the atomic bombings before dying, by suicide, in 1948. All this is summarized neatly in translator McCarthy's introduction, where he praises Dazai as "the one Japanese author who consistently turned out entertaining and worthwhile literature…when the entire nation was toeing the ideological line of militarism and fanatic patriotism." While the introduction can only hint at Dazai's interior life, the "self-portraits" collected here present it in colorful, thinly fictionalized detail. Together, they depict a figure at once melancholy and sardonic; a self-serious artist and self-aware butt of every joke. The narrator begins one story analyzing the angles of Mount Fuji's slopes, only to decide, iconoclastically, that it's "pathetic, as mountains go." Still, he spends several months at a secluded teahouse with a Fuji view, hoping for inspiration to finish his novel but tormented by "interminable wavering and agonizing over my view of the world." The double meaning suggests that, for Dazai, contempt is both a pathology and a point of pride. Another narrator entertains himself by pranking a young businessman, pretending to mug him. But, with his rent due, the narrator decides to keep the money after all. Buoyed by the thrill of the windfall, he ends the piece by saying, "My suicide was postponed for another month." Many early stories double as confessions; later ones chronicle wartime traumas. As a tranquil scene turns violent, one narrator's literary collaborator says: "Stop right there. You're not just making this up." No, he's not. A vivid collection of stories--as sophisticated as they are mundane. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.