One Big Joke: Translating the Humor in Osamu Dazai

Fiction writer and Japanese translator Sam Bett, whose recent translations include the work of 1930s literary titan Osamu Dazai and contemporary novelist Mieko Kawakami, explores the pop-cultural lineages of Dazai’s resurgent comic novels (newly translated and published by New Directions), including Alice in Wonderland and early Looney Tunes, through a discussion and performance with Maine-based artist and educator Kerry Anderson.

“Seventy-five years later, No Longer Human still reads with an apt urgency. As the musician Patti Smith once put it, Dazai ‘wrote at the pace of a dying man, yearning for…the solution to an unresolved equation.’ With the new translation of the novel’s prequel, The Flowers of Buffoonery, Dazai’s intimate, visceral writing now encounters a fresh audience. Taken together, the two works assert his mastery of the ironized confession. They also make clear a great paradox of his writing: For all his novels’ reputation as sketches of alienation, they’re equally potent as modern portraits of human connection.” — Jane Yong Kim, The Atlantic

Sam Bett is a fiction writer and Japanese translator whose work has appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times. A winner of the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature, he has translated fiction by Izumi Suzuki, Yukio Mishima, and Mieko Kawakami, including projects shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. In addition to The Beggar Student, he is also the translator of Osamu Dazai’s The Flowers of Buffoonery.

Kerry Anderson currently teaches all levels of German at Maranacook Community High School in Readfield, and serves as the faculty lead for the school’s Teen Issues Program. Over the years she has performed in both German- and English-language productions, most recently playing the role of Sofia’s Mom/Janie in Two Cent Theatre’s production of Do You Feel Anger? by Mara Nelson-Greenberg. Kerry holds a MA in German from Bowling Green State University.