I’d like to use this opportunity that I’ve been given by Odyssey admins to dedicate some of my weekly articles to a poet or author that’s not usually covered in U.S. schools. I don’t know about you, but most of what I remember from my English curriculum was basically all dead British or American white guys from hundreds of years ago. Some of their works have lasted the test of time, while others, well, not so much.

Sometimes even works from the same authors can vary in how well they age. The Bard’s Hamlet still is one of the most genius literary works ever created by mankind, while Taming of the Shrew is, was and always will be a pile of steaming shit.

I’ll mostly be focusing on foreign poets from areas like former Soviet states, the Middle East and Asia, but I’ll also be including those in the U.S. that haven’t gotten the attention that they deserve from Western audiences.

Some are wildly popular in their areas of origin like the one we’re covering today and are slowly beginning to make their way into the West, while others may have a more complicated relationship with their native country’s population like the one I’ll be covering next week and others may still be slowly coming out of obscurity, both in the West and in their native land. Also, if you guys have any suggestions for African or South and Latin American writers that I should look into. I’d love to hear who you think I should cover.

Without further ado, here’s my first entry: Dazai Osamu, the Dostoyevsky of the Far East.

Dazai Osamu is huge in Japan, especially with the young. I’ve spent the past three weeks of the my life devouring Dazai’s works-- "Memories" (a short creative-non fiction piece about his love for his maid), Schoolgirl, The Setting Sun and No Longer Human. I’ll be mostly talking about the latter two.

A little background on Dazai for those who only know his Bungou Stray Dogs incarnation. He was born into a wealthy family, his mother was always sick and his father often forgot he existed (of course he was the second youngest out of 11 kids so, it’d be a more surprising if his father actually did notice him). He spent much of his earnings on women, booze and drugs. Three things that both Bungou Stray Dogs Dazai and real Dazai have gotten themselves way too interested in. Dazai finally committed a double suicide in 1948 with his wife by drowning themselves in a river.

So why do I call Dazai “the Dostoyevsky of the Far East”? It’s because that’s sort of what he is. There’s a lot of parallels between him and Dostoevsky. Both were alcoholics who converted to Christianity and both wrote works about the human condition from the point of view of a troubled individual. Dazai even references Dostoevsky in the third section of No Longer Human. Although, Dostoevsky isn’t the only Western writer or artist he talks about in his works. Faust often comes up several times in The Setting Sun and Kessel in Schoolgirl.

Something that I noticed is that Dazai oftentimes has a self-insert character. In No Longer Human, it’s Yozo, the protagonist. In The Setting Sun, it’s Naoji, the protagonist’s drug-addicted brother. One thing that I found often when reading his works is that I heard another voice narrating--as if Dazai himself was reading it aloud in my head. This means one of three things:

1. He’s such a great writer that he’s able to transcend space and time and come up from the Forest of Suicides in Dante’s Hell, and the 14th century Italian poet is screaming in his grave because of it.

2. Descartes was wrong, I don’t exist except inside of Dazai’s head as an imaginary friend born from a drug-induced hallucination and neither are you, being that this article doesn’t exist, so you wouldn’t be reading it, because how I could type it if I don’t have a physical body let alone a laptop or fingers?

3. I’ve developed a schizophrenic prison of my own mind out of sheer loneliness.

For the sake of both us, let’s hope it’s not the second one.