No One Knows: Stories by Osamu Dazai

Here we experience the pathos of a dying young woman who invents for herself a tragic poet whose love for her is doubly doomed, by his lack of social standing and her disease. A talented high school writer's passion for literature is spoiled by the machinations of her family and tutor. The owner of an inn cannot help but serve drink after drink and meal after meal, even as her finances and health are ruined-is this compassion, or a perverse extreme of politeness? A young reader writes a fan letter to an author she admires, only to discover that he's a bourgeois sophisticate nothing like the desperate rebels he portrays: "Novelists are human trash. No, they're worse than that; . they're demons... They write nothing but lies."

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