Schoolgirl (Modern Japanese Classics)

Product Information

the one who hates everything but still loves wildly, the morning emptiness and the hopeful daydreams, the one who puts her faith in her own cynicism, the one who fears her own courage, the one with pellucid thoughts and fumbling footsteps, the one with wildly intense emotions and kind, gentle words, the one who hopes to live ferociously and die silently, the one who wants everything but wishes for nothing, the one who wants to be found but loves to be lost.

I want to love everyone', I thought, almost tearfully. If you stare at the sky, it changes little by little. Gradually it turns bluish. [..] I had never seen anything as beautiful as the translucent leaves and grass. Gently, I reached out to the touch of the grass.” Dazai, Osamu; Keene, Donald (2002). The setting sun. Boston: Tuttle. ISBN 4805306726. OCLC 971573193. The narrator spirals from self-hatred to self-admiration as well and is heavily fixated on her own body image, though asserts that her ‘ body had no connection to my mind’ to try and separate her interior life from the waking world around her that causes her frequent disgust. ‘ I can’t stand it,’ she says of her body observing it’s aging away from the ‘ doll-like’ childhood body she wishes to retain forever. Yet, earlier when pursued by leering men, she thinks ‘ I wish I would hurry up and grow stronger and purer so that such a trifling matter would no longer afflict me,’ and she is frequently repulsed by her own childish habits and thoughts early in the novel, wanting to be more of an adult.

Default Title

A protagonista de “Schoolgirl” é basicamente um Holden Caulfield de quimono, mas mais insuportável, mais cruel, mais maledicente, mais imatura.

She’s just a kid. She’s a hypocrite. She’s bleeding. She’s drowning. She hates everyone, she wishes for everything. The world revolts her, but the world is beautiful, but the world is sad, but the world is glittering and peaceful. But the world is pain. Written in 1939 but only now translated into English for the first time, Osamu Dazai’s Schoolgirl—a slim, precocious novella narrated by a schoolgirl of indeterminate age—was stylish and provocative in its time. Almost three-quarters of a century later, its prescience seems eerie; hardly anything about this book seems to have aged, least of all the narrator herself, who is perfectly preserved somewhere along the road to adolescence. Though she’s still young enough to entertain herself with nonsensical songs and inventive daydreams as she walks home from school (“I thought today I will try to pretend that I am from somewhere else, someone who has never been to this country town before”), she’s old enough to know her childhood is fast coming to a close. “It made me miserable that I was rapidly becoming an adult and that I was unable to do anything about it,” she reflects.There I go again—pondering the purposelessness of my day-to-day life, wishing I had more ambition , and lamenting all the contradictions in myself—when I know it’s just sentimental nonsense.’ Alongside this Dazai also wrote Jugonenkan ( For Fifteen Years), another autobiographical piece. This, alongside Almanac of Pain, may serve as a prelude to a consideration of Dazai's postwar fiction. [17] Shizuko Ōta Synopsis of Japanese Short Stories ( Otogi Zoshi) at JLPP (Japanese Literature Publishing Project) (in English)