Early Light

Early Light offers three very different aspects of Osamu Dazai's genius: the title story relates his misadventures as a drinker and a family man in the terrible fire bombings of Tokyo at the end of WWII. Having lost their own home, he and his wife flee with a new baby boy and their little girl to relatives in Kofu, only to be bombed out anew. -Everything's gone,- the father explains to his daughter: -Mr. Rabbit, our shoes, the Ogigari house, the Chino house, they all burned up,- -Yeah, they all burned up,- she said, still smiling. -One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji,- another autobiographical tale, is much more comic: Dazai finds himself unable to escape the famous views, the beauty once immortalized by Hokusai and now reduced to a cliche. In the end, young girls torment him by pressing him into taking their photo before the famous peak: -Goodbye,- he hisses through his teeth, -Mount Fuji. Thanks for everything. Click.- And the final story is -Villon's Wife,- a small masterpiece, which relates the awakening to power of a drunkard's wife. She transforms herself into a woman not to be defeated by anything, not by her husband being a thief, a megalomaniacal writer, and a wastrel. Single-handedly, she saves the day by concluding that -There's nothing wrong with being a monster, is there? As long as we can stay alive.-