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Title: Self Portraits: Stories (Japan's Modern Writers) by Osamu Dazai, Ralph F. McCarthy ISBN: 4-7700-1689-1 Publisher: Kodansha Amer Inc Pub. Date: 01 February, 1993 Format: Paperback List Price(USD): $8.00

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)

Rating: 4
Summary: Witty, perceptive, sometimes disturbing
Comment: This is a collection of the autobiographical stories that made Dazai's reputation in Japan during the 1930s and 40s. Dazai, like many Tanizaki characters, shows that a good analysis is only a good analysis, not a means to change. He did not lack for insight into his pathologies, and he wrote with considerable wit about his self-defeating and self-destructive patterns (especially parasitism, lack of any ability to associate with others casually, alcoholism, and, for a time, addiction to pain-killer medication). Dazai sounds like a wittier version of the European Romantic artist suffering on the road to suicide, not made for the crass world, but feeling less superior to it than European romantics.

Like many bright provincials, he went to the metropolis, Tokyo. "To this charmless, featureless plain, people from all over Japan roll up in droves to push and shove and sweat, to fight for an inch of ground, to live lives of alternating joy and sorrow, to regard one another with jealous, hostile eyes, females crying out to males, males merely strutting about in a frenzy."

As boorish as was the figure of himself that he wrote, and as debunking of many verities, there is still something delicate in his perceptions as in both his resistance to the cult of Mount Fuji and how he is affected by it and by other natural phenomena. "One hundred views of Mount Fuji" and "Eight scenes of Tokyo" are self-lacerating, but not wholly self-absorbed. That is, there are other characters. There is even, in "Early light," reportage of being on the ground during the incendiary bombings at the end of World War II (lacking in rancor, preoccupied with surviving and taking care of the children). There's nothing about the American Occupation.