On Osamu Dazai’s 'The Flowers of Buffoonery'

The most famous Japanese writer for readers in the West is, without a doubt, Haruki Murakami. Of his 14 novels published in English, most, if not all, have become bestsellers, their familiar covers on prominent display in bookstores nationwide. More than a million copies of Norwegian Wood (1989) and the tome-like 1Q84 (2011) have been sold in the United States to date. And the success of these quasi-surrealist works has, over the past few decades, heightened Western appetites for a magical-realist strain of Japanese fiction—fiction that, despite certain strange or uncanny elements, is approachably Western in sensibility, featuring coherent themes, logical narratives, and direct dialogue.