The works featured here ( translated by Ralph McCarthy and Donald Keene) are varied the title story is an autobiographical one, which relates the misadventures of the narrator during the fire bombings of Tokyo at the end of WW2. That latter element was commented on by Marina Sofia, who mentioned she thought it was typical of much Japanese writing, and some years further down the line I tend to agree with her. Dazai was a complex man, often controversial, who took his own life and his writing style for “The Setting Sun” was fascinating, if detached. “Early Light” contains three short works by Dazai, an author I’ve written about before on the Ramblings back in 2016, I read his classic work “ The Setting Sun” for our 1947 Club, and I’ve actually owned several of his works for decades. Fortunately, it’s a short work so I managed… Well, I hadn’t planned to necessarily read another Japanese book for this month’s Japanese Literature Challenge… However, a flurry of mentions on Twitter centring around the recent New Directions ‘Storybook ND’ releases reminded me that I had “Early Light” by Osamu Dazai in that edition lurking digitally – and so it seemed like a good time to try a little e-reading! I’m not a fan of the medium (my eyes suffer a lot…) but as the hardbacks of this series are so expensive, I had no choice but to try the e-book.
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