NO ONE KNOWS

A collection of stories featuring female narrators amid the turbulence and upheavals of mid-20th-century Japan.

Though Dazai often drew from his own life in his novels—a life marked by alcoholism, drug addiction, and time in a mental institution—both the voice and perspective are different here. In every story, the first-person protagonist is a young woman, generally in her early-to-mid-20s. Or younger, as in the day-in-the-life of “Schoolgirl,” one of the longest and best pieces. Proceeding chronologically, the stories cover an expanse from the late 1930s to the late ’40s. Early on, the narrators struggle with the constraints of gender and class, or how the male author believes his female characters felt about such issues. (It can be difficult to tell whether some of the disgust expressed by his self-lacerating narrators represent their own or the author’s attitude toward being female.) The pivot arrives with “December 8,” a slice of Japanese life from the day after Pearl Harbor, when the everydayness seems pretty much the same as it did before. From here, it won’t, as all hell breaks loose in the subsequent stories. Amid the bombing of houses, the disappearance of spouses, and the disintegration of familial relations, conventional morality pretty much collapses. There are no happy endings or glimmers of hope. In “Osan” (1947), a young wife tries to hold her home and family together as she suspects that her husband has embarked on an affair that brings him no happiness. It ends with the narrator lamenting, “I can’t stop trembling—not with sorrow or anger so much as disgust with the absolute idiocy of it all.” The author died by drowning in 1948 at the age of 38, seemingly in a double suicide with the lover for whom he had abandoned his own family.

Some of the earlier and lesser stories are merely diverting, but the longer and later ones are devastating.