Schoolgirl (Modern Japanese Classics)

Product Information

I go about saying how pained and tormented, how lonely and sad I feel, but what do I really mean by that? If I were to speak the truth, I would die.’ A protagonista de “Schoolgirl” é basicamente um Holden Caulfield de quimono, mas mais insuportável, mais cruel, mais maledicente, mais imatura.

Dazai, Osamu; Keene, Donald (2002). The setting sun. Boston: Tuttle. ISBN 4805306726. OCLC 971573193. What is this book? A teenage girl eats breakfast, goes to school, eats dinner, goes to sleep. A short and tense day in the life of unrelenting bleakness. Schoolgirl follows the typical day of a young Japanese school girl. We are introduced to a lot of her inner feelings, including grief, mourning, happiness, and are shown her realism. With further revision, I have found out that this novella describes the social structures of a time in Japan, now lost, and how the young girl we follow struggles against them. The novella that first propelled Dazai into the literary elite of post-war Japan. Essentially the start of Dazai’s career, Schoolgirl gained notoriety for its ironic and inventive use of language. Now it illuminates the prevalent social structures of a lost time, as well as the struggle of the individual against them–a theme that occupied Dazai’s life both personally and professionally. This new translation preserves the playful language of the original and offers the reader a new window into the mind of one of the greatest Japanese authors of the 20th century. Schoolgirl by Osamu Dazai – eBook Details This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sourcesin this section. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. ( May 2019) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)I go about saying how pained and tormented, how lonely and sad I feel, but what do I really mean by that? If I were to speak the truth, I would die." Schoolgirl has been compared to Catcher in the Rye, and the parallels are obvious. For Schoolgirl’s young observer of the world, almost everything is depressing (she might say “lousy”), from her crippled dog (“I cant stand how poor and pathetic he is, and because of that I am cruel to him”) to her mother’s friends. The narrator’s father has recently died, and though she only considers the loss briefly, it clearly weighs on her: Kitabı okurken koskocaman, ama çok buruk bir tebessüm yüzümden hiç gitmedi. Sanırım şimdiye kadar düşünce biçimini ve akışını kendiminkine bu denli yakın hissettiğim bir karakter olmamıştı, bu sebeple okumaktan çok dertleşmeye yakın bir deneyim oldu. Çerezlik bir okuma niyetiyle başlamıştım ama incecik hâlinden hiç beklenmeyecek kadar etkiledi beni. Japonlar pek çerezlik yazmayı tercih etmiyorlar galiba zaten, ya da bana denk gelmedi henüz. :) What’s hard to discern in this critique is Dazai’s attitude towards women. His narrator prefers not to think about her gender (“[my] body had no connection to my mind,” she complains, “it developed on its own accord”), and instead, busies herself with abstract thoughts about the nature of life. Though there is an androgynous quality to many of her daydreams and observations, the narrator, as the title suggests, is decidedly female, and (as she turns the corner into adolescence) just beginning to confront many of the particular difficulties her gender poses. There are simple girlish pleasures in her life—she secretly embroiders flowers onto her underclothes and sneaks off to get her hair done with a friend—but her innocence has already largely eroded. On the train, she keeps her eyes and her thoughts to herself (“if I so much as grinned at them, I could very well be dragged off by one of these men, falling into the chasm of compulsory marriage”). When a group of gruff laborers mutter obscenities at her, she crumples inside. “I felt like I was about to cry,” she says. “I wish I would hurry up and grow stronger and purer so that such a trifling matter would no longer afflict me.” tomorrow will probably be another day like today. happiness will never come my way. i know that. but it's probably best to go to sleep believing that it will surely come, tomorrow it will come.

Classe, Olive, ed. (2000). The Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English, Vol. I. London & Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers. p.347. ISBN 1884964362. My first Osamu Dazai, and I guess I have to join his cult - why is the literary world outside Japan largely sleeping on him? This novella describes an average day of, you guessed it, a schoolgirl, and while the unnamed girl follows mundane routines and chores, the stream-of-consciousness opens up her inner world. In her mind, she is struggling with the loss of childhood and the transition into the world of adolscents, and while she mourns the loss of her father, she ponders concepts like morality, authenticity, human cruelty and responsibility. It's quite remarkable that the young woman is also an alter ego of the author, who often employed his main characters as stand-ins for his own trials and tribulations. I'm frantically torn between giving it 5 stars or 4 but then I decided to settle somewhere in between. O'Brien, James; G.K. Hall & Company (1999). Dazai Osamu. New York: G.K. Hall & Co. p.147. OCLC 56775972.This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.