The Beggar Student

Osamu Dazai, Sam Bett

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English

New Directions Press
02 December 2024

Literature: history & criticism; Fiction & Literature

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.

By: Osamu Dazai
Translated by: Sam Bett
Imprint: New Directions Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 206mm, Width: 132mm, Spine: 8mm
Weight: 98g
ISBN: 9780811238588
ISBN 10: 081123858X
Pages: 96
Publication Date: 02 December 2024
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Osamu Dazai was born in 1909 into a powerful landowning family of northern Japan. A brilliant student, he entered the French department of Tokyo University in 1930, but later boasted that in the five years before he left without a degree, he had never attended a lecture. Dazai was famous for confronting head-on the social and moral crises of postwar Japan before he committed suicide by throwing himself into Tokyo’s Tamagawa Aqueduct. His body was found on what would have been his 39th birthday. Sam Bett is a fiction writer and Japanese translator whose credits include Star by Yukio Mishima. Working with David Boyd, he co-translated the Mieko Kawakami novels Heaven, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize; All the Lovers in the Night, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction; and Breasts and Eggs.

Reviews for The Beggar Student

"""What I despise about Dazai is that he exposes precisely those things in myself that I most want to hide."" -- Yukio Mishima ""Dazai was an aristocratic tramp, a self-described delinquent, yet he wrote with the forbearance of a fasting scribe."" -- Patti Smith"