'Schoolgirl' is the novella that first established Dazai as a member of Japan's literary elite. Essentially the start of Dazai's career, the 1933 work gained notoriety for its ironic and inventive use of language, and how it illuminated the prevalent social structures of a lost time.

A Tokyo college student's discovery and eventual obsession with a stolen handgun awakens something dark inside him.
On a nighttime walk along a Tokyo riverbank, a young man named Nishikawa stumbles on a dead body, beside which lies a gun. From the moment Nishikawa decides to take the gun, the world around him blurs. Knowing he possesses the weapon brings an intoxicating sense of purpose to his dull university life. But soon Nishikawa's personal entanglements become unexpectedly complicated: he finds himself romantically involved with two women while his biological father, whom...

From the author of Strange Weather in Tokyo comes this funny, heartwarming story about love, life, and human relationships that features a delightfully offbeat cast of characters.

Objects for sale at the Nakano Thrift Shop appear as commonplace as the staff and customers that handle them. But like those same customers and staff, they hold many secrets. If examined carefully, they show the signs of innumerable extravagancies, of immeasurable pleasure and pain, and of the deep mysteries of the human heart.

Hitomi, the inexperienced young woman who works the register at Mr....

A darkly melancholic tale that combines Scorsese's Taxi Driver and Camus' The Fall set in Tokyo--Nakamura's Akutagawa Prize-winning novel, one of Japan's most prestigious literary awards, is the here translated into English for the first time and marks another high-water mark in this important writer's career.

The Akutagawa Prize-Winning Novel

As an unnamed Tokyo taxi driver works a night shift, picking up fares that offer him glimpses into the lives of ordinary people, he can't escape his own nihilistic thoughts. Almost without meaning to, he puts...