Osamu Dazai has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 6 narrators, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 27 ratings. The most-rated is No Longer Human.
No Longer Human
Summary
Portraying himself as a failure, the protagonist of Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human narrates a seemingly normal life, even while he feels himself incapable of understanding human beings. Oba Yozo's attempts to reconcile himself to the world around him begin in early childhood, continue through high school, where he becomes a "clown" to mask his alienation, and eventually lead to a failed suicide attempt as an adult. Without sentimentality, he records the casual cruelties of life and its fleeting moments of human connection and tenderness.
©1958 New Directions Publishing Corporation (P)2016 Tantor
No Longer Human
Summary
No Longer Human was an attack on the traditions of Japan, capturing the postwar crisis of Japanese cultural identity. Framed by an epilogue and prologue, the story is told in the form three notebooks left by ba Yz, whose calm exterior hides his tormented soul. Osamu Dazai was a Japanese author who is considered one of the foremost fiction writers of 20th century Japan. A number of his most popular works, such as Shay (The Setting Sun) and Ningen Shikkaku (No Longer Human), are considered modern-day classics in Japan. Japanese novelist and a master storyteller, who became at the end of World War II the literary voice and literary hero of his generation. Dazai's life ended in double-suicide with his married mistress. In many books Dazai used biographical material from his own family background, and made his self-destructive life the subject of his books.
©2020 Strelbytskyy Multimedia Publishing (P)2020 Strelbytskyy Multimedia Publishing
Wish Fulfilled
Summary
As we edge toward the 75th anniversary of Osamu Dazai's death, much of his masterful prose remains surprisingly unknown to most English-language audiences. This observational vignette written by a youthful Dazai offers a lovely introduction to the introspective master widely known and loved in Japan. Translated in Japan by Reiko Seri and Doc Kane of Maplopo, this semi-autobiographical account should serve as a nice introduction to those unaware of Dazai's genius. For those well aware of his talents (and possibly the several decades-old translation of this particular work) this updated translation in English provides a fresh look at this masterful vignette.
©2019 Reiko Seri, Doc Kane (P)2019 Reiko Seri, Doc Kane
The Setting Sun
Summary
This powerful novel of a nation in social and moral crisis was first published by New Directions in 1956 - and now, for the first time, is available in audio, with the spellbinding narration of June Angela. Set in the early postwar years, it probes the destructive effects of war and the transition from a feudal Japan to an industrial society. Ozamu Dazai died, a suicide, in 1948. But the influence of his book has made "people of the setting sun" a permanent part of the Japanese language, and his heroine, Kazuko, a young aristocrat who deliberately abandons her class, a symbol of the anomie which pervades so much of the modern world.
©1956 New Directions Publishing Corp. (P)2020 New Directions Publishing Corp.