Home | Books By Year | Books from 1935
The Flowers of Buffoonery
Buy The Flowers of Buffoonery now from AmazonFirst, read the Wikipedia article. Then, scroll down to see what other TopShelfReviews readers thought about the book. And once you've experienced the book, tell everyone what you thought about it.
Wikipedia article
is a 1935 Japanese novella by Osamu Dazai. It was first published in the short-lived coterie journal ' and has been described as a "major contribution" to the magazine. In 1936, the novella was included in Dazai's first book-length fiction collection, 'The Final Years'.
Synopsis
In late December, the day after a failed suicide pact, twenty-something artist ba Yz awakens at a seaside sanatorium for tuberculosis patients and finds his lover Sono did not survive. A young nurse named Mano is assigned to care for him. His friends Hida and Kosuge travel down to visit, spending the night in a neighboring hospital room. Though they crack jokes and cause a stir at the hospital, they privately wonder if Yz is as well as he seems.
The next day, Yz's older brother arrives from their hometown far in the north and chides him for the mess he's made for their family. He insists that the friends stay with him on Enoshima, but later on Kosuge comes back to the hospital stinking of alcohol. Mano tells them all a ghost story about seeing a phantom crab while keeping vigil with a dead patient, but quickly takes it back and says it was made-up.
It snows the following day. Yz attempts to sketch the ocean but is disappointed with the result. Hida returns from the police and announces that Yz has been charged with aiding suicide, but adds that Sono's husband doesnt seem committed to the case. To steer the situation, Yz's brother has given him 200 and got him to sign a letter absolving their family from further responsibility.
On the fourth day, the director gives Yz a clean bill of health and has Mano remove his bandages. The three friends take a walk along the shore, so that Yz can point out the cliff that he and Sono jumped from. Yz and Mano barely sleep that night. Just before dawn, they put on warm clothes and hike up the hill behind the sanatorium to take in the view of Mt. Fuji, but at the top of the cliffs, it's too cloudy to see.
Style
'The Flowers of Buffoonery' is narrated in the third-person, but the narrator, a self-conscious writer, makes frequent first-person asides, commenting on the quality or believability of the novel he is writing. At times the unnamed writer calls the book a masterpiece, while at other times he grumbles and dismisses it as the work of a hack.
Unlike 'No Longer Human', in which the unnamed first-person narrator of the foreword and afterword uses the gender-neutral personal pronoun , the narrator of 'The Flowers of Buffoonery' uses the masculine first-person pronoun .
Translations
The first translation, into Italian, was published in 1990 by Lolli Santini in the journal 'Il Giappone'. A French version by Juliette Brunet and Yuko Brunet was included in their book-length translation of 'The Final Years' in 1997. The novella was first translated into Russian by Tatiana Sokolova-Delyusina in 2004, as part of a collection of selected works, and again in 2018, as a standalone book translated by . South Korean translator Roh Jae-myung published a Korean translation in a 2005 collection titled 'Woman's Duel', after a different Dazai story also included in the volume. A Chinese translation was published by Taiwanese translator Liu Tzu-Chien in 2017.
See also
*'No Longer Human'
*'The Final Years'
References
Buy The Flowers of Buffoonery now from Amazon
<-- Return to books from 1935