Osamu Dazai turned a turbulent life into Japan's most confessional modern classics
Born into one of the richest landowning families in northern Japan, Shūji Tsushima enrolled to study French literature without knowing French and boasted he never attended a single lecture in five years. Writing as Osamu Dazai, he poured his own disgrace into fiction, and No Longer Human became his best-loved book abroad.
He was born on 19 June 1909 in Kanagi, Aomori Prefecture, the tenth of eleven children, in a new mansion that housed about thirty relatives. His great-grandfather had made the family fortune lending money, and his father, one of Aomori's four richest landlords, went into politics and was invited into the House of Peers. As a schoolboy Dazai studied gidayū, the chanted narration of puppet theatre, and edited student magazines. The death of his idol Ryūnosuke Akutagawa in 1927 knocked him off course, and he drifted into drink, spending and Marxist sympathies.
His early adulthood was chaotic. At Tokyo Imperial University he ran off with a geisha, Hatsuyo Oyama, and was disowned. He paid ten yen a month to the banned Japanese Communist Party until his brother Bunji, a politician, made him surrender to police in 1932 and sign a pledge to quit leftist activity. He survived several suicide attempts in these years, and a hospital stay for appendicitis left him addicted to a morphine-based painkiller, which ended with over a month of forced withdrawal in an asylum in 1936.
With help from the established writer Masuji Ibuse, he began publishing, and in 1933 first used the name Osamu Dazai for a story called Train, his first try at the autobiographical I-novel that became his trademark. Tuberculosis kept him out of military service. In 1942, when other writers praised Pearl Harbor, he published December 8, about a poor housewife carrying on as if it were an ordinary day, a rare refusal of the patriotic mood. American bombing burned his Tokyo house down twice.
After the war he reached his peak. The Setting Sun, published in July 1947, portrayed the decline of the aristocracy and drew partly on the diary of an admirer, Shizuko Ōta. The young Yukio Mishima openly despised him, listing his face among his objections. Heavy drinking wrecked his health, and he died on 13 June 1948, days before turning 39.
Source: Osamu Dazai
