On Osamu Dazai’s 'The Flowers of Buffoonery'

Osamu Dazai scoured Japanese society for an antidote to the collapse of the empire and its morality. He found only abject alienation, and depicted this in his best-known novels The Setting Sun (1947) and No Longer Human (1948). Given Dazai’s lietmotifs of suicide, masculinity, addiction, and the relationship between art and politics, it is unsuprising that his work is the subject of renewed interest in the Anglophone world (No Longer Human emerged last year as a trend on BookTok). This year, in concert with that resurgence, Dazai’s heretofore obscure novella The Flowers of Buffoonery (1935) is finally available in English translation. The collection of vignettes, which shares a narrator with No Longer Human, contains the first traces of Dazai’s distinct approach to fiction. The narrator is endearing, uneven, and darkly humorous. As an early artifact in Dazai’s oeuvre, Flowers raises compelling questions about his work, a descendant of the I-novel and precursor to autofiction, as well as his heterodox politics, which blurred the line between revolutionary and reactionary.