"Joseito" by Dazai Osamu

2017-08-07 : previous : next : index : [books]


"Joseito" (Female Student) by Dazai Osamu. The content is exactly as the title promised -- a day in the life of a female student, written in first person perspective.

Actually it's slightly more than the title promised, this particular edition came with three other short stories before the main content: "Father" describes the events of an irresponsible father, and did so while trying to draw analogies to Abraham and the Sacrifice of Isaac. This was a good story with very vivid characters, and fun in a sarcastic kind of way. "Chikusei" is a retelling of the story with the same title from Liao Chai (Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, published in 1740). This version has much more personality than the original, with roughly 8 times more detail (the single paragraph introduction was expanded into a full 4 pages, for example). Last bonus content was "Fuyu no Hanabi" (Fireworks in Winter), a depressing play about family relationships after the war. "Chikusei" was the best among these and made the whole book worthwhile.

"Joseito" follows through the inner monologue of a female student as she experience the day, going through great detail in everything she observed. Details like how she hates her glasses, how she had her train seat taken by a salaryman but couldn't decide who was being arrogant in trying to claim that seat, how she cooked minimalist dishes and called them Rococo style dishes, and so forth. The text rambles slightly and there isn't exactly a coherent central story, but the individual segments from paragraph to paragraph are interesting on their own. If you like reading diaries or things that resemble blogs, this particular (fictional) diary is written by one of the best authors ever.

The reason why I read "Joseito" at all was because it was referenced recently in the anime series "Tsuki ga kirei" ("the moon is beautiful", a not so subtle reference to Natsume Souseki). A distinguishing feature for "Joseito" was supposedly having a male author writing detailed narratives from the perspective of a female student, but on the merits of just this feature, I found "Wagahai wa Neko de aru" ("I Am a Cat", by Natsume Souseki) to be a superior novel. Both are cynical monologues written from vantage points foreign to the authors, but "Wagahai wa Neko de aru" is more humorous overall.

So my impression from this book ends in recommendations to read two other books ("Liao Chai" and "Wagahai wa Neko de aru"), but it's not that this book is bad at all, it's fairly good and consistent with other works by Dazai. Definitely worth reading for Dazai fans.

Although the real reason why you might want to buy this edition specifically is because it's the "large print" edition. You don't always know the size of things you buy online, and I ended up buying this edition because I couldn't find the same book from my preferred publisher. And it was indeed large:
https://goo.gl/photos/CaCAyLFaL9NVpoJ36


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