No one really understands how we suffer. One day, when we’re adults, we may come to recall this suffering, this misery, as silly and laughable, but how are we to get through the long, hateful period until then? No one bothers to teach us that.  Osamu Dazai was a master raconteur who plumbed—in an addictive, easy style—the absurd complexities of life in a society whose expectations cannot be met without sacrificing one’s individual ideals on the altar of conformity.

The gravitational pull of his prose is on full display in these stories. In “Lantern,” a young woman, in love with a well-born but impoverished student, shoplifts a bathing suit for him—and ends up in the local newspaper indicted as a crazed, degenerate communist. In “Chiyojo,” a high-school girl shows early promise as a writer, but as her uncle and mother relentlessly push her to pursue a literary career, she must ask herself: is this what I really want? Or am I supposed to fulfill  their own frustrated ambitions? In “Shame,” a young reader writes a fan letter to a writer she admires, only to find out, upon visiting him, that he’s a bourgeoise sophisticate nothing like the desperate rebels he portrays, and decides (in true Dazai style): “Novelists are human trash.

No, they’re worse than that; they’re demons. . .

They write nothing but lies.”This collection of 14 tales—a half-dozen of which have never before appeared in English—is based on a Japanese collection of, as Dazai described them, “soliloquies by female narrators.” No One Knows includes the quietly brilliant long story “Schoolgirl” and shows the fiction of this 20th-century genius in a fresh light.

‘A tender med­ita­tion on memory, familial bonds, and the evan­es­cence of every­ day moments … a profoundly affect­ing read’ – Storizen Magazine’A believable slice-of-life window into human nature that resonates on multiple levels’ – The Japan TimesFROM THE AUTHOR OF THE JAPANESE BESTSELLER IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD WHICH HAS SOLD OVER TWO MILLION COPIESThe fragrance of a single stem in a vase. The shimmering reflection of fireworks in a lake.

The quiet of a bookshop as evening falls. The feeling of opening a brand-new diary and beginning to write … Moments of beauty endure.

But what happens when you begin to forget?Yuriko leads a quiet, orderly life as a piano teacher. It’s New Year’s Eve and her grown-up son Izumi comes to visit. Yuriko makes him his favourite meal: omelette and hayashi rice.

Together, they look like a normal family. But Yuriko has a secret. Many years earlier, when Izumi was a boy, Yuriko suddenly disappeared for an entire year.

She returned, but the lost year was never discussed. Now as Yuriko begins to lose her memory, Izumi is forced to race against time as he seeks the truth behind this long-buried mystery. Will he learn to understand the woman his mother once was, before it is too late? And is he ready to become a father himself?One Hundred Flowers is a story about the preciousness of every moment, the beauty and pain of family love, and the healing power of letting go.