![]() ![]() The narrator of The Flowers of Buffoonery uses the masculine first-person pronoun "Boku" ( 僕) to refer to himself. Dazai is said to have adapted this metafictional technique from the work of French novelist André Gide. At times the unnamed writer calls the book a masterpiece, while at other times he grumbles and dismisses it as the work of a hack. The Flowers of Buffoonery is narrated in the third-person, but the narrator, a self-conscious writer, makes frequent first-person asides, breaking the fourth wall as he comments on the quality or believability of the novel he is writing. Fuji, but from the hilltop, it is too cloudy to see. Just before dawn, they put on warm clothes and set off on a hike up the hill behind the sanatorium, which overlooks the coast. That night, Mano keeps Yōzō awake, telling him about the origins of the scar on her face. The three friends take a walk along the shore, so that Yōzō can point out the cliff that he and Sono jumped from. On the fourth day, the sanatorium director gives Yōzō a clean bill of health and directs Mano to remove his bandages. To steer the situation, Yōzō's brother has given him ¥200 (equivalent to ¥118,959 in 2019) and got him to sign a letter absolving their family from further responsibility. His friend Hida returns from speaking with the police with Yōzō's brother and announces that Yōzō is being charged with aiding suicide, although Sono's husband doesn’t seem committed to the case. Yōzō tries to sketch the ocean and is disappointed with the result. When Kosuge notices similarities to the sanatorium, Mano backpedals and says the story was made-up. Mano tells Yōzō and Kosuge a ghost story about seeing a phantom crab while keeping vigil with a dead patient. Later that night, Kosuge comes back to the hospital stinking of alcohol. He insists that the friends stay with him on nearby Enoshima. The next day, Yōzō's older brother arrives from their hometown far in the north and chides him for the trouble he's caused their family. Though they crack jokes and cause a stir at the hospital, they privately wonder if Yōzō is as well as he seems. His friends Hida and Kosuge travel down to visit, spending the night in a neighboring room. ![]() A young nurse named Mano, whose face is marked with a noticeable scar, is assigned to care for him. In late December, the day after a suicide pact, twenty-something artist Ōba Yōzō awakens at a seaside sanatorium for tuberculosis patients and finds his lover Sono did not survive. The story shares a protagonist with Dazai's novel No Longer Human (1948), which it preceded by thirteen years. ![]() In 1936, the novella was included in Dazai's first book-length fiction collection The Final Years. It was first published in the short-lived coterie journal Nihon romanha and has been described as a "major contribution" to the magazine. The Flowers of Buffoonery ( 道化の華, Dōke no Hana) is a 1935 Japanese novella by Osamu Dazai. ![]()
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