08/29/2025
Osamu Dazai event on Friday, September 12
We are having a very exciting literary event online and in Tokyo! One Peace Books is commemorating the release of Retrograde, a collection of freshly translated Osamu Dazai short stories, by bringing together star translators and some of the biggest movers-and-shakers in contemporary Japanese translation for a series of interactive panel discussions. Please join us and ask some great questions for our translators, either online or in-person in Tokyo!
Here are the details:
In-person participation: 11:00 A.M., Saturday September 13
Ryozan Park Lounge, Sugamo Station, Tokyo
Remote participation: Friday September 12, 10:00 P.M. EST/7:00 P.M. PST
Live-Stream on YouTube
DISCUSSION #1: How to Translate Osamu Dazai
DISCUSSION #2: The Right to Be Translated: What does the English world need from Japanese literature today?
Moderators and panelists: Leo Elizabeth Takada (Retrograde, Perfect Days), Allison Markin Powell (Schoolgirl, The Ten Loves of Nishino), David Boyd (Breasts and Eggs, The Hole), Mark Gibeau (A Shameful Life, On the Street), Sarah Sherweedy (Dazai researcher at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies), Motoyuki Shibata (Founder, MONKEY Magazine).
BOOK RELEASE: Retrograde, translated by Leo Elizabeth Takada
“His lines in Leo Elizabeth Takada’s vibrant English are delivered with a lightness of touch that make them infectiously readable and often piercingly ironic… [It’s] critical that young and agile translators like Takada take up the work of a major writer whose penetrating obsessions with gender, race, individuality and anomie, even more debilitating in our internet-addled age, have made him an urgent novelist of the now” — Roland Kelts, author of JAPANAMERICA
On September 16, 2025, One Peace Books will release Retrograde, a collection of first-time and original translations of some of Osamu Dazai’s most controversial and exhilarating writing. “Retrograde” is the topsy-turvy tale of an anguished youth from the brink of death back to his early days. This story famously failed to win the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, leading to the start of Dazai’s unsurpassed literary anger and agony. The novella “Das Gemeine” tells of an aspiring literato who hitches his wagon to an eccentric violinist, dripping with irony and featuring a surprising autobiographical portrayal. The collection finishes with “Blossom-Leaves and the Spirit Whistle,” a fable told with uncharacteristic romance about an old woman recalling her sister’s final breaths as the cherry blossoms scatter from the trees. All three feature Dazai’s inimitable pathos and wit, and his unsurpassed resentment toward a cruelly modernizing Japanese society.
As a young man, Dazai wanted nothing more than to follow in his hero Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s footsteps and create literature that would change Japan. Instead, he confronted failure after agonized failure before finally crawling his way to the top of the literary world. Rising star translator Leo Elizabeth Takada—a bilingual poet and translator responsible for the screenplay translation of the award-winning film Perfect Days—has created translations that crackle with Dazai’s too-honest, agonized voice, reconstructing his meticulous literary accomplishment.
