Confession of a defective person

“Confessions of a “Defective” Man” is perhaps the most famous work of Dazai Osamu, one of the greatest Japanese writers of modern times. It is believed that this story is a kind of autobiography of the writer, in which he talks not about the vicissitudes of his life’s path, but about the painful wanderings of his ego.

The epithet “inferior” is put in quotation marks for a reason. The spiritual vivisection to which the main character of the story exposes himself unexpectedly highlights both the deceitfulness of the surrounding society and the ability of “full-fledged” people to lie, incomprehensible to an “inferior” person, without fear of consequences. The hero's simple-minded confidence in his own inferiority becomes less and less convincing for the reader as he reads it.

The cover design features drawings by Dazai Osamu.