Dazai Osamu: Otogizoshi: The Fairy Tale Book of Dazai Osamu

“I hate carrying things.”

“Oh, I see. Well, shall I go in your place, then? How would that be? All I have to do is lie face down at the entrance to the forest, correct? I’ll go right now. Or are you afraid it won’t work?”

“You should go.”

“What nerve you have. Telling me I should go, when it’s all a big, transparent lie! All right, then, I’m really going to do it. You’re sure it’s all right with you?”

“Well, you do seem to want that basket…”

“Yes, yes, that’s right-all I care about is the gift. I’m such a greedy person, after all. Ha! I know it’s ridiculous, but here I go! I can’t bear the sight of you sitting there looking so smug. I’ll wipe that holier-than-thou expression from your face. Just wait and see. Lie face down in the snow and you get to go to the Sparrows Inn-ah, ha, ha, ha! It’s ridiculous, but, oh well-I’ll just follow your exact instructions. Don’t try to tell me later that you were only kidding!”

There’s no backing down now. Obaa-san puts away her sewing and wades off into the deep snow of the bamboo forest.

As to what happens next, not even the author knows exactly. At dusk, Obaa-san’s cold body is found face down in the snow with an enormous wicker basket strapped to her back. Apparently the basket was too heavy to get out from under when she awoke, and she froze to death. The basket turns out to be chock-full of sparkling gold coins.

Whether or not it’s because of all that gold, Ojii-san soon enters government service and is eventually promoted to Minister of State. The public refer to him as the “Sparrow Minister” and attribute his success to his long-standing affection for those birds. But whenever Ojii-san is subjected to such flattery, he is said to reply, with only a hint of his famous wry smile, “No, no. I owe it all to my late wife. I put that poor woman through hell.”

I would like to thank Dazai Osamu for being, like, my favorite writer ever; Kita Morio for turning me on to Dazai many years ago; Edward Lipsett for suggesting we do this book and then shepherding it all the way through to completion; Joel Cohn for his terrific introduction and for pointing out a number of embarrassing gaffes and mistranslations; Sakai Akinobu for patiently elucidating passages that had me baffled; Nancy H. Ross for her excellent editing; Mary McCarthy and Fred Walton for their perspicacious critiques of the manuscript; Poe Ballantine (greatest living American novelist) for his advice and encouragement; and YOU, dear reader, for giving this book a chance. I hope you like it. I and I alone am responsible for any and all mistakes and infelicities.

R.F.M.

Ralph F. McCarthy lives in Southern California. He has translated two previous collections of Dazai stories, Self Portraits and Blue Bamboo , as well as a number of novels by Murakami Ryu, including In the Miso Soup and Popular Hits of the Showa Era . His most recent translation is Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama .

Joel Cohn is Associate Professor of Japanese Literature and former Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He has translated several works of Japanese literature from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. His translation of Natsume Soseki’s novel Botchan (1906) was co-winner of the 2006 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. He is also the author of Studies in the Comic Spirit in Modern Japanese Fiction (Harvard University Asia Center, 1998).