Here to slake the unquenchable thirst of Dazai’s legions of loyal fans are eleven works of short fiction and vignettes, most of which have never before appeared in English. Beginning with ‘Memories’ (which tells a tale of teenage love, based on the autobiographical events that inspired Dazai’s famed No Longer Human), and ending with ‘Good-Bye’ (the chapters of a comic romance that the author left unfinished when he took his own life), the short works here show the range and breadth of an author best known for his meditations on squalor and despair. But there is laughter here too, as in ‘Tengu,’ a tongue-in-cheek critique of august hucksters of haiku. And there is also suspense on display: ‘A Bluff Illusion’ presents a literary murder story in which a harmless prank escalates into a deadly pose. ‘A Warning on Worldly Pleasures’ retells Saikaku’s famous story about the temptation of a holy ascetic, and ‘A: Autumn’ unfolds a quiver of epigrams (seemingly) drawn at random from the author’s notes. All are masterfully translated by Ralph McCarthy. Spanning the breadth of Dazai’s delightfully multifaceted, if tragically foreshortened, career, Good-Bye is a must-have for any Dazai fan.
