Early Light

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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.