The Cherry Anniversary Still Remembered

There is a novelist I was infatuated 💓with in my high school days. His name is Osamu Dazai (#太宰治). As I progressed into my late teens, however, I became somewhat hesitant to confess my attachment to his works. A passion for him was—or perhaps still is—generally regarded as a tell-tale sign of a self-absorbed teenager (自意識過剰).
 
Besides being a good writer who adeptly depicted the sweetness of self-destruction, he was a womaniser whose life eventually ended in a double suicide. On top of all that, he was good looking too. The combination of these factors is enough to cast a potent spell over 🪄 any bookish school girl.
 
But after having spent over half a century ⏳ on the Earth, I have grown a thick skin and am able to overcome my inhibitions on this matter.
📢So consider this my “coming out” as a Dazaist (i.e. a Dazai fan)!
And this happens to coincide exactly with the date of the 75th anniversary of his death.
Why not? After all, he writes so beautifully and his words are magical.
 
In feeding myself a diet of all of his works, alongside other fine literature, at such tender age, I dreamed 😍 of becoming an editor at a publishing house (Ha! A dream shared by millions of country girls in those days) and opted for a university known for producing talents in the mass media.
 
Well, things did not turn out quite as I wanted.
But being a translator in Germany is the second best thing that could have happened to me. ☺
 
Shuji Terayama (#寺山修司), a poet and dramatist 🎭, who, like Dazai, is also from Aomori, wrote the following Haiku (俳句) poem. 

他郷にて のびし髭剃る 桜桃忌
 
✍ Here is my parody version:
 
他郷にて 追えし夢あり 桜桃忌
Stranded upon a foreign shore
in search of the end of the rainbow –
the Cherry Anniversary still remembered
 
The date that commemorates Dazai’s death has a poetic name: #Otouki (#桜桃忌), the Cherry Anniversary 🍒. My memory goes back to the sweet and sour turmoil I went through as a teenager.

#太宰治没後75年 #寺山修司没後40年 #makingof #TranslationServiceArai