Happy New Year, to all a happy and healthy 2007!
(I almost wrote 2006. See how behind the times I am?)

A quick note for those interested in contemporary Japanese fiction – the non-autobiographical works of WW I and II era writer, Osamu Dazai, are tremendously underrated and underread here in America. He wrote a book of fairy tales – all, of course, with the satirical and dark twists that are the marks of his writing – that is not even completely available in English. Two of them, “Crackling Mountain” and and “Taking the Wen Away” appear in his Crackling Mountain and Other stories collection, but the best story in that book is “Undine,” a curiously familiar story of a girl who is transformed into a fish after her father attempts to rape her – reminded me of AS Byatt’s stories of female water spirits. His other book, Blue Bamboo, is a must-read. Dazai is very famous in Japan as a sort of Japanese-male-version of Sylvia Plath – he died of suicide at the age of 39 at the end of WW II, born from a rich family that disinherited him because of his radical leftist politics and tendency to sleep with – and have suicide-pacts with -“lower-class geisha.” But Blue Bamboo is a curious, lyrical collection, stories with the wit and irony of JD Salinger and the attitude of a writer who you might imagine living and writing today, not in the 1930s. One of the most arresting pieces of that book is when a family of siblings re-tells the story of Rapunzel with curious flourishes during a winter holiday, as their grandfather drinks Jack Daniels in the back room. I think Dazai got passed over here because American critics were not paying much attention to Japanese fiction during the 1930s and 40s, but this tremendously gifted author deserves as much literary attention as Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and manages to out-do both of them in his unsparing sense of humor towards himself and his lifelong despair. Much is being made these days of Japanses surreal novelist Haruki Murikami, but without Dazai, Murikami would not have existed. His flip inclusions of pop cultural references and humorous, dreary evocations of modern Japanese youth recall quite strongly the best in Dazai’s work.
This is one thing I’m grateful for in 2006 – in doing research for my second book, “The Anime Version of My Life,” I have discovered a magnitude of amazing Japanese writers I would never have encountered otherwise. It’s like having a splendid blind date who whisks you off to Paris – better than you could have imagined.