I read this book after reading Alan Booth's comments on Dazai and his life - so I have to admit, I was rather cynical.

I very much warmed to Dazai through these excellent translations by Ralph McCarthy. The tales have many ingredients which will appeal to lovers of Akutagawa and Kawabata. Those who like to see Chinese stories through Japanese eyes will not be disappointed.

There is also a fine preface, giving a historical perspective to the stories.

This was really a good little book. i picked it up several months ago, and subsequently forgot about it, but after finishing a book by yasunari kawabata, i saw this book on my shelf and decided to give it a shot. . . i finished it in two days. this book is very entertaining some of the stories are sad while others are very funny. . . you will not forget Taro the wizard, Jirobei the fighter, and saburo the liar for a long time pick this book up you will not be disapointed

This is a wonderful book with a good message about the value of inner strength as opposed to external size. The pictures are great and the rhyme scheme throughout the story adds a lot. My 2nd grade students want me to read it again and again!

I got this book a while ago and I really love it! The pictures are beautiful and it's a lovely story. I'lld definately recomend it to anyone aged 5-105!

It's not half as poignant or meaningful as the review on the cover makes it sound. Exactly like all the other books of Ryu that I've read--a lightwieght amusement, nothing more. The book had great promise, albeit an unfulfilled one. And I don't think that the translation is the problem--I've read the Korean version, and because Korean and Japanese have almost the same language structure, translating tends to be easy and exact. Actually, the translation was very good and the humorous word play and black humour came through as very fun indeed. But nothing else really gripped me. The protagonist's rambling struck me as too ordinary (you'll see my meaning if you've been in a Korean or Japanese school once--everyone talks about everything like Ryu does) and self-pitying. And since nothing except the word play was of any interest, that made me think--if that didn't survive the translation, there's probably nothing worth reading anyway. So choose this book with caution. Don't expect too much, or you'll be disappointed. Sorta like a Wannabe Catcher in the Rye but without the insight or meaning.

Those looking for a book about sex don't read this one. Hehe, the 69 here refers to the year 1969 not the position. The hero of this book is Ken Yazaki. A very intelligent 17 year old who wants to be on the top of popular culture. He spews off the names of french writers, poets, and film directors, without having read their work or watced their movies. Ken, however, is a very charismativ individual who gets people to follow him easily. His main two followers are his best friends Adama and Iwase. Ken is bored living in his small town in westerrn Kyushu and wants to do something dramatic. First he joins a Communist clique in his school that he takes over as soon as he joins, and later he throws a rock festival.

The book is quite funny. Ken is a very likeable individual who starts off many paragraphs with tall tales and then he says that really didn't happen. It is quite entertaining. I have read three of Murakami's books now, and I believe this one falls somewhere between _Almost Transparent Blue_ and _Coin Locker Babies_ Good book that gives the reader a glimpse of late 60s Japan.

This book is nothing short of hilliarious

This is a collection of the autobiographical stories that made Dazai's reputation in Japan during the 1930s and 40s. Dazai, like many Tanizaki characters, shows that a good analysis is only a good analysis, not a means to change. He did not lack for insight into his pathologies, and he wrote with considerable wit about his self-defeating and self-destructive patterns (especially parasitism, lack of any ability to associate with others casually, alcoholism, and, for a time, addiction to pain-killer medication). Dazai sounds like a wittier version of the European Romantic artist suffering on the road to suicide, not made for the crass world, but feeling less superior to it than European romantics.

Like many bright provincials, he went to the metropolis, Tokyo. "To this charmless, featureless plain, people from all over Japan roll up in droves to push and shove and sweat, to fight for an inch of ground, to live lives of alternating joy and sorrow, to regard one another with jealous, hostile eyes, females crying out to males, males merely strutting about in a frenzy."

As boorish as was the figure of himself that he wrote, and as debunking of many verities, there is still something delicate in his perceptions as in both his resistance to the cult of Mount Fuji and how he is affected by it and by other natural phenomena. "One hundred views of Mount Fuji" and "Eight scenes of Tokyo" are self-lacerating, but not wholly self-absorbed. That is, there are other characters. There is even, in "Early light," reportage of being on the ground during the incendiary bombings at the end of World War II (lacking in rancor, preoccupied with surviving and taking care of the children). There's nothing about the American Occupation.