Epigraph

A few hours before writing this manuscript at an out-of-the-way lodging house in Ginza during my time in Tokyo, I was at a bar called Lupin with Osamu Dazai and Ango Sakaguchi—or I guess I should say Osamu Dazai was drinking beer, Ango Sakaguchi was drinking whiskey, and I was drinking coffee because I was going to be holed up all night writing this manuscript.

The conversation just so happened to shift to a certain fashionable novelist who uses his works as a tool to seduce women. Ango Sakaguchi claimed that this novelist was an idiot, while Osamu Dazai said we probably couldn’t use our writing to seduce women even if we wanted to. He said women are grossed out by novels like ours, and even if we tried to seduce them, we’d fail miserably…or in his words: “We’d fuzz it up.”

—Sakunosuke Oda, “The Literature of Possibility”