The Flowers of Buffoonery

by Osamu Dazai

In my satanic insolence, I prayed for my salvation in the same breath that I prayed Sono would die.

Welcome to Sadness. Population one.

I might even put it this way, for good measure: deleting that first line would mean erasing my entire life thus far.

Behind any given suicide, there’s always going to be some external factor, something too big for the person who goes through with it to see.

Ever so careful with each other’s feelings, they tiptoe from one comment to the next, taking great pains to shelter their own feelings in the process.

Never mind. I hate describing scenery.

Wait, though. I have a line prepared to explain away this very failing: Beautiful feelings make bad literature.

Not a word they said was true. But if you tuned in for a moment, there were some unexpected windfalls of veracity. In the middle of a pompous speech, there would sometimes be a phrase of brutal honesty.

The things we say without a thought are often how the truth comes out.

I wanted this novel to be an atmospheric romance. Starting with the churning maelstrom of the first few pages.

failure. I can’t bear to have the secrets of my heart revealed.

Frankly, I’m losing faith in my abilities.

Playing with him throughout their childhood, he had come to the conclusion that this strangeness was a mark of his intelligence.

If only you could understand the sadness of the ones who grow the delicate flowers of buffoonery, protecting them from but the slightest gust of wind and always on the verge of despair!

Young people never say anything straight. You can tell they’re being honest if they hide behind a laugh.

Whenever they found themselves in a beautiful natural setting, they couldn’t help but stage a performance. Perhaps it was a way to commemorate the moment.

I cannot love a woman without smothering her with commentary. Proof that if a man is dumb enough, he can do harm without lifting a finger.

“It felt great. I knew the second that I jumped, all of my problems would be gone. No more worries about debts, or the academy, or family, or regrets, or my masterpiece, or shame, or Marxism, or even about any of my friends, or trees or flowers. Suddenly, I’m standing on that cliff and laughing. It felt great.”

A desire to console each other filled their hearts. They were suckers for fragility.

We’re all a bunch of clowns. If you want to see a farce, look in the mirror. A man crushed by reality puts on a show of endurance. If that’s beyond your comprehension, dear reader, then you and I will never understand each other. Life’s a farce, so we might as well make it a good one. But real life is a realm that I may never reach. The best that I can hope for is to loiter in the memory of these four days, so steeped with empathy. Four days that count more than five or ten years of my life. Four days that count more than a lifetime.

And then — no, that’s all I have.