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(4.52/5)A good way to see if Dazai is for you
I read this because it's free and only 6 pages long, and you should too. Osamu Dazai is an iconic Japanese author I've been wanting to read for awhile so this was a good first introduction. The story is about a young woman waiting at a train station and it's quite atmospheric. It's more about the mood than the physical situation. It uses slightly older language than you'll find in modern Japanese, but it's more familiar than early 1900's works like Natsume Soseki's.
I've read a handful of short stories by 太宰 and this was by far the easiest. It has little in the way of old grammar and the vocabulary is neither extensive nor extremely old fashioned. That said, I somehow landed it at 26 (as of May 2022) and feel it's probably closer to the 28-30 range for "comfortable" reading, but regardless I don't think it will prove too much for anyone who can read modern novels. It's only about 6 pages long as well, so not a huge time investment.
Plot wise, it's a poetic monologue of someone sitting at the train station, waiting. I enjoyed the atmosphere of it a lot, as I usually do with this author.
Normally I don't do much stock in listicles, but I found a really good list of things for people who want to learn by reading and it seemed a lot more in-depth and well crafted than you usually get from list articles, so I took note and decided to try this short story which was one of the shorts they recommended, here's the link if anyone wants it: https://www.fluentu.com/blog/japanese/learn-japanese-by-reading/#toc_1
This is a very short little vignette about a woman sitting at a train station and mostly contemplating her anxieties and existential musings. The first page was probably the toughest and there were definitely some words and phrases that felt like they might be a bit more archaic than what you usually see since this was written sometime during WWII (I saw an interesting Kanji I haven't seen before in the word 不埒). That said, sticking with it was rewarding and after the first page hump I feel like I was able to get most of it, or at least understand the point of each passage and I think it was a nice sort of tone poem that gets you inside a scene from this character's life. I liked this kind of atmosphere and vibe and definitely want to check out more of Dazai.