Intermediate Japanese Learning with Dazai Osamu

So, welcome to the first paragraph  of Dazai’s Suisen… “Daffodil.”
Now, in this part of the lesson I won’t really deal at all with the Japanese, I’ll just tell you in English what this paragraph is about and what  subsequent paragraphs are about.

So, in this first part of the lesson what we’ll do is I’ll just describe to you what Dazai is talking about in the story. So, I won’t mess with any Japanese or  anything like that… it’ll just be what each paragraph is about in English.  No Japanese right now. So, relax.

(In) the first paragraph, Dazai introduces us  to what he’s going to be talking about… right? So, he says, this title… he tells us…  rather, the title of a novel that he’s read. He says: “I’ve read this book, it’s  called ‘On the Conduct of Lord Tadano’.” And, he tells us he read it when he was young  boy… somewhere around the age of thirteen or fourteen. And he hasn’t read it again since  that time—it’s been many years since he’s
last read it—and yet, the storyline of this  one particular piece is one he can’t forget. So, still to this day—some 20 odd years later—he  remembers this storyline.

And then lastly, at the end of the paragraph he says that he found the story to be, oddly, sad.

And that’s it. That’s the first paragraph.  So let’s break it down in the next lesson…

Maplopo Schoolhouse, Osamu Dazai, Daffodil 太宰治,「水仙」
Maplopo 1 / 33