But there is an edge to her idle thoughts. She is a whimsical narrator, given to flights of fancy and sudden mood swings her inner world is largely ruled by her imagination and impulses. Such things happen to me from time to time. It felt as if the past, the present, and the future had collapsed into one single instant. Her morning deliberations are particularly dreamy and metaphysically indulgent:Īt the moment, I had the odd sensation that I had been staring like this for a very long time, and would be staring from now on, just like this, sitting here in the doorway to the kitchen, in the same pose, thinking the same thing, looking at the trees out front. So much sadness rises up, I can’t bear it,” she laments. Schoolgirl takes place entirely in the course of one day, and from the very moment the narrator first opens her bleary eyes in the morning, it’s apparent the day will be an emotional roller-coaster: “Mornings seem forced to me. “It made me miserable that I was rapidly becoming an adult and that I was unable to do anything about it,” she reflects. Though she’s still young enough to entertain herself with nonsensical songs and inventive daydreams as she walks home from school (“I thought today I will try to pretend that I am from somewhere else, someone who has never been to this country town before”), she’s old enough to know her childhood is fast coming to a close. Almost three-quarters of a century later, its prescience seems eerie hardly anything about this book seems to have aged, least of all the narrator herself, who is perfectly preserved somewhere along the road to adolescence.

Written in 1939 but only now translated into English for the first time, Osamu Dazai’s Schoolgirl-a slim, precocious novella narrated by a schoolgirl of indeterminate age-was stylish and provocative in its time.

Dazai book