Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai is the most painful book I've ever read. I found it a masterpiece, but it's not a book I could ever say that I "enjoyed" as it felt like a diary of pain and despair. A work, more like a suicide note and confession than actual novel.

Did you know it had a prequel?

The Flowers of Buffoonery was written around a decade earlier and focuses on Oba Yozo as he stays in a sanitarium after one of his failed suicide attempts. About half of the book is taken up in conversations with his friends who come to visit him, or with his brother who is trying to, if not cover up the situation, at least make it tidy. Much like No Longer Human, it is a character study... but not on the character himself. It is on the author.

This book is short at only 96 pages, but what little bit of genuine story there is would make for only a very short and unmemorable tale. What makes this story both longer and actually work as a book is Dazai's interruptions.

"I guess I'll never be a great writer. I'm a softy. I'll admit it. At least we've figured that much out. A softy through and through. But in my softness I find peace, however fleeting. Ah, it doesn't matter anymore. Forget I said anything. It would seem the flowers of buffoonery have shriveled up at last. And shriveled up into a mean, disgusting, dirty mess while we're at it."

There is no criticism of this book that can truly be offered without Dazai at least trying to beat us to the punch. He will tell us the story only to interject that a line sounds childish or overly poetic and not fitting the scene. He will make note that it sounds like an amateur trying to sound like a professional.

""I blame that newfangled philosophy. Marxisim."
A fabulously silly line of dialogue. Superb."

I didn't add that second line. He genuinely writes that into the book, as if making his own editor notations.

Where No Longer Human was a diary of suffering, this one is almost a comedic look at insecurity. He will praise himself one moment only to find himself loosing control of the book the next. He introduces a character that seems to be moving what little plot there is along only to interject on the next paragraph that he regrets doing so as he does not feel tonally appropriate.

The entire book is a tightrope walk, balancing the melancholy feeling of No Longer Human with a jovial air of buffoonery. His characters laugh whenever they say something serious to try to hide that they actually said something so real, and the author does that as well. He's mocking himself as this is almost a trial run for the later book... it's expressing so many of the same things, but he keeps laughing and self mockery to not fully show it. It's not the masterpiece that No Longer Human is, but it's a much more enjoyable read for that very reason. I think that those who like this will likely be people who've read the later book and want to see something of a first attempt at it, but from someone trying to laugh and still maybe hopes that things will work out alright rather than the author who will commit suicide promptly after finishing his work. 4/5 stars.

"Once a writer loses his affection for his subject, his sentences display a marked decline in quality. Actually, I take it back. That last one there was snazzy."