Name: The Beggar Student
Price: 14.48 EUR
Availability: InStock
Author: Osamu Dazai
ISBN: 9780811238588

Type

Physical Book

Author

Osamu Dazai

Publisher

New Directions Publishing Corporation

Language

English

Pages

Format

Paperback

ISBN13

9780811238588

Synopsis "The Beggar Student"

A fictional thirty-something writer named Osamu Dazai has just mailed his publisher a terrible manuscript, filling him with dread and shame. Shortly afterward, while moping around a park in suburban Tokyo, he spots a figure drowning in a nearby aqueduct.He doesn't want to become a witness to a suicide and eventually decides to flee the park. But as he is leaving, he trips over the boy who had been drowning, and the two begin an unlikely conversation that turns into an intellectual spat. Hoping to ingratiate himself with the boy--a high-school dropout--Dazai finds himself agreeing to perform that very night as the live narrator of a film screening in the boy's stead...So begins the madcap adventure of The Beggar Student, where there is glamor in destitution and glimmerings of truth in intellectual one-upmanship. Replete with settings straight out of the popular anime Bungo Stray Dogs and echoes of the themes in No Longer Human, this biting novella captures the infamous Japanese writer at his mordant best.

Osamu Dazai

(Author)

View Author's Page

(Pseudonym of Tsushima Shuji; Kanagi, 1909 - Tokyo, 1948) Japanese writer. Born from the disillusionment prevalent in his country after the end of World War II, Osamu Dazai's last novels expressed the feelings of a generation that had witnessed the collapse of their traditional values: The Setting Sun (1947), perhaps his most famous work, focuses on the decline of the Japanese nobility after the defeat in the war, while his last book, No Longer Human (1948), narrates in an autobiographical tone the frustration over the national debacle. Known for his ironic and somber wit and the brilliant fantasy of his novels and stories, his obsession with suicide and his constant search for a deeper truth would make him a cult figure among the young readers of his country.

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