"Bannen" (later years) by Dazai Osamu. Despite the title, this is his first book. It was also meant to be his last book, hence the title and the suicide attempt immediately following this book. Fortunately for us readers, that suicide was not successful, and he went to produce other great works. This book proves to be a good sample of Dazai's life and his various writing styles.
One style that seem to be more prevalent in these stories than later stories are these introspective narratives, especially in the story "Doukei no Hana" (clown's flower) where both the story and the mental state of the writer progresses in parallel. It starts with "Ooba Youzou is the perfect name for my character" and ends with "and then... no, that's it." The style reminds me of "Notes from Underground" by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, where part of the humor comes from the narrator reacting to his own words, although in this story both the narrator and the narrative seemed more realistic. For one thing, Dazai Osamu probably was really proud of this "Ooba Youzou" name, which later appears in "No Longer Human".
Humor is definitely a highlight of this book, including some self-deprecating ones like the stories above, and humor of the more ironic sort. Example from "Romanesque": the main character tried to become fashionable wizardry skills, and failed because these archaic skills do match modern fashion styles. Bizarre, but timeless. My favorite of these stories is "Sarugashima" (monkey island), which includes ironic humor and also a very cleverly crafted climax. Features that got me back to reading more of Dazai Osamu's works.
The first sentence of the first story was "I thought about dying", combined with the title of this book, and I thought this was going to be a depressing book like "No Longer Human". It turns out to be not entirely depressing and actually quite entertaining, well worth the time to read it.
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