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The Flowers Of Buffoonery
is a 1935 Japanese novella by Osamu Dazai. Initially titled in an early draft Dazai shared with friends, the work 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''. The story shares a protagonist with Dazai's novel ''No Longer Human'' (1948), which it preceded by thirteen years. Synopsis In late December, the day after a suicide pact, twenty-something artist Ōba Yōzō awakens at a seaside sanatorium for tuberculosis patients and finds his lover Sono did not survive. A young nurse named Mano, whose face is marked with a noticeable scar, is assigned to care for him. His friends Hida and Kosuge travel down to visit, spending the night in a neighboring room. Though they crack jokes and cause a stir at the hospital, they privately wonder if Yōzō is as well as he seems. The next day, Yōzō's older broth ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Osamu Dazai
was a Japanese author. A number of his most popular works, such as '' The Setting Sun'' (''Shayō'') and ''No Longer Human'' (''Ningen Shikkaku''), are considered modern-day classics. His influences include Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Murasaki Shikibu and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. While Dazai continues to be widely celebrated in Japan, he remains relatively unknown elsewhere, with only a handful of his works available in English. His last book, ''No Longer Human'', is his most popular work outside of Japan. Early life , who was later known as Osamu Dazai, was born on June 19, 1909, the eighth surviving child of a wealthy landowner in Kanagi, a remote corner of Japan at the northern tip of Tōhoku in Aomori Prefecture. At the time of his birth, the huge, newly-completed Tsushima mansion where he would spend his early years was home to some thirty family members. The Tsushima family was of obscure peasant origins, with Dazai's great-grandfather building up the family's wealth as a moneyl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Yasunari Kawabata
was a Japanese novelist and short story writer whose spare, lyrical, subtly shaded prose works won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968, the first Japanese author to receive the award. His works have enjoyed broad international appeal and are still widely read. Early life Born into a well-established family in Osaka, Japan, Kawabata was orphaned by the time he was four, after which he lived with his grandparents. He had an older sister who was taken in by an aunt, and whom he met only once thereafter, in July 1909, when he was ten. She died when Kawabata was 11. Kawabata's grandmother died in September 1906, when he was seven, and his grandfather in May 1914, when he was fifteen. Having lost all close paternal relatives, Kawabata moved in with his mother's family, the Kurodas. However, in January 1916, he moved into a boarding house near the junior high school (comparable to a modern high school) to which he had formerly commuted by train. After graduating in March 1917 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Novels By Osamu Dazai
A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, typically written in prose and published as a book. The present English word for a long work of prose fiction derives from the for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itself from the la, novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of ''novellus'', diminutive of ''novus'', meaning "new". Some novelists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ann Radcliffe, John Cowper Powys, preferred the term "romance" to describe their novels. According to Margaret Doody, the novel has "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in the Ancient Greek and Roman novel, in Chivalric romance, and in the tradition of the Italian renaissance novella.Margaret Anne Doody''The True Story of the Novel'' New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996, rept. 1997, p. 1. Retrieved 25 April 2014. The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism, especially the historica ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1935 Novels
Events January * January 7 – Italian premier Benito Mussolini and French Foreign Minister Pierre Laval conclude Franco-Italian Agreement of 1935, an agreement, in which each power agrees not to oppose the other's colonial claims. * January 12 – Amelia Earhart becomes the first person to successfully complete a solo flight from Hawaii to California, a distance of 2,408 miles. * January 13 – A plebiscite in the Saar (League of Nations), Territory of the Saar Basin shows that 90.3% of those voting wish to join Germany. * January 24 – The first canned beer is sold in Richmond, Virginia, United States, by Gottfried Krueger Brewing Company. February * February 6 – Parker Brothers begins selling the board game Monopoly (game), Monopoly in the United States. * February 13 – Richard Hauptmann is convicted and sentenced to death for the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh Jr. in the United States. * February 15 – The discovery and clinical development of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Aozora Bunko
Aozora Bunko (, literally the "Blue Sky Library", also known as the "Open Air Library") is a Japanese digital library. This online collection encompasses several thousands of works of Japanese-language fiction and non-fiction. These include out-of-copyright books or works that the authors wish to make freely available. Since its inception in 1997, ''Aozora Bunko'' has been both the compiler and publisher of an evolving online catalog.IntuteIntute web site, ''Aozora Bunko'' project description/ref> In 2006, ''Aozora Bunko'' organized to add a role as a public policy advocate to protect its current and anticipated catalog of freely accessible e-books. History and operation ''Aozora Bunko'' was created on the Internet in 1997 to provide broadly available, free access to Japanese literary works whose copyrights had expired. The driving force behind the project was Michio Tomita ( :ja:富田倫生, 1952–2013), who was motivated by the belief that people with a common interest sh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fourth Wall
The fourth wall is a performance convention in which an invisible, imaginary wall separates actors from the audience. While the audience can see through this ''wall'', the convention assumes the actors act as if they cannot. From the 16th century onward, the rise of illusionism in staging practices, which culminated in the realism and naturalism of the theatre of the 19th century, led to the development of the fourth wall concept. The metaphor suggests a relationship to the mise-en-scène behind a proscenium arch. When a scene is set indoors and three of the walls of its room are presented onstage, in what is known as a box set, the fourth of them would run along the line (technically called the proscenium) dividing the room from the auditorium. The ''fourth wall'', though, is a theatrical convention, rather than of set design. The actors ignore the audience, focus their attention exclusively on the dramatic world, and remain absorbed in its fiction, in a state that ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bungei Shunjū (magazine)
is a Japanese monthly magazine based in Tokyo, Japan. History and profile ''Bungei Shunjū'' was started by writer Kikuchi Kan (1888–1948) in 1923. The name of the magazine and publishing house came from the title of the literary review column in the magazine ''Shinchō'' by Kan. ''Bungei Shunjū'' is published on a monthly basis. The magazine's stance is described as conservative, with strong support for the emperor. The headquarters of the magazine is in Tokyo. ''Bungei Shunjū'' covers a wide range of topics from politics to sports. Each issue usually contains about 30 articles by politicians, researchers, journalists or non-fiction writers. It is claimed that the magazine never features articles by members of the Japanese Communist Party or the Social Democratic Party but this is actually false as there are some exceptions. It has published writing by Takako Doi, former leader of the Japan Socialist Party, in September 2005, and by Tetsuzo Fuwa, the chairman of the secret ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Takako Takahashi
was a Japanese author. Her maiden name was . Biography Takahashi was born in Kyoto, as the only child of well-to-do parents, with the maiden name of Okamoto. In 1954 she received her undergraduate degree from Kyoto University in French literature, with a senior thesis on Charles Baudelaire. Six months later she married fellow student Kazumi Takahashi, subsequently a well-known writer and ideological leader of the student protest movement. She supported him in the first two years of their marriage by a series of odd jobs, then returned to Kyoto University in 1956 to receive a master's degree in French literature in 1958 for a thesis on François Mauriac. From 1958 to 1965, Takahashi and her husband lived in Osaka, where she began a first novel in 1961 (“A Ruined Landscape”). Her husband won a major literary award in 1962, making his name and providing sufficient funds so that Takahashi could quit her job, work on her novel, and publish a translation of Mauriac's ''Thérèse ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Setting Sun
is a Japanese novel by Osamu Dazai first published in 1947. The story centers on an aristocratic family in decline and crisis during the early years after World War II. Plot summary Twenty-nine year old Kazuko, her brother Naoji, and their widowed mother are members of an impoverished aristocratic family living in post-war Tokyo. Kazuko had been married, but divorced and returned to the family household after claiming that she had had an extramarital affair with a painter she admired. The child she had been expecting was stillborn. Naoji, who served with the military in the South Pacific, is declared missing. Kazuko recalls a time when she burned snake eggs, thinking that they were viper eggs. It is revealed that at the time of Kazuko's father's death, there were many snakes present in and around the house, which therefore have become ominous in her and her mother's eyes. Kazuko and her mother move to the Izu peninsula countryside with the help of a relative, and she begins w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Donald Keene
Donald Lawrence Keene (June 18, 1922 – February 24, 2019) was an American-born Japanese scholar, historian, teacher, writer and translator of Japanese literature. Keene was University Professor emeritus and Shincho Professor Emeritus of Japanese Literature at Columbia University, where he taught for over fifty years. Soon after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, he retired from Columbia, moved to Japan permanently, and acquired citizenship under the name . This was also his poetic and occasional nickname, spelled in the ''ateji'' form . Early life and education Keene was born in 1922 in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, New York City and attended James Madison High School. He received a Bachelor's degree from Columbia University in 1942 and studied under Mark Van Doren, Moses Hadas, Lionel Trilling, and Jacques Barzun. He then studied the Japanese language at the United States Navy Japanese Language School in Boulder, Colorado and in Berkeley, California, and serve ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Japanese Grammar
Japanese is an agglutinative, synthetic, mora-timed language with simple phonotactics, a pure vowel system, phonemic vowel and consonant length, and a lexically significant pitch-accent. Word order is normally subject–object–verb with particles marking the grammatical function of words, and sentence structure is topic–comment. Its phrases are exclusively head-final and compound sentences are exclusively left-branching. Sentence-final particles are used to add emotional or emphatic impact, or make questions. Nouns have no grammatical number or gender, and there are no articles. Verbs are conjugated, primarily for tense and voice, but not person. Japanese adjectives are also conjugated. Japanese has a complex system of honorifics with verb forms and vocabulary to indicate the relative status of the speaker, the listener, and persons mentioned. In language typology, it has many features different from most European languages. Distinctive aspects of modern Japanese senten ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
