No one really understands how we suffer. One day when we're adults we may come to recall this
suffering this misery as silly and laughable but how are we to get through the long hateful
period until then? No one bothers to teach us that. Osamu Dazai was a master raconteur who
plumbed-in an addictive easy style-the absurd complexities of life in a society whose
expectations cannot be met without sacrificing one's individual ideals on the altar of
conformity. The gravitational pull of his prose is on full display in these stories. In
"Lantern " a young woman in love with a well-born but impoverished student shoplifts a
bathing suit for him-and ends up in the local newspaper indicted as a crazed degenerate
communist. In "Chiyojo " a high-school girl shows early promise as a writer but as her uncle
and mother relentlessly push her to pursue a literary career she must ask herself: is this
what I really want? Or am I supposed to fulfill their own frustrated ambitions? In "Shame " a
young reader writes a fan letter to a writer she admires only to find out upon visiting him
that he's a bourgeoise sophisticate nothing like the desperate rebels he portrays and decides
(in true Dazai style): "Novelists are human trash. No they're worse than that they're demons.
. . They write nothing but lies." This collection of 14 tales-a half-dozen of which have
never before appeared in English-is based on a Japanese collection of as Dazai described them
"soliloquies by female narrators." No One Knows includes the quietly brilliant long story
"Schoolgirl" and shows the fiction of this 20th-century genius in a fresh light.
