Osamu Dazai

Osamu Dazai was the pen name of Shūji Tsushima, a Japanese novelist and author born on June 19, 1909, in Kanagi, at the northern tip of the Tōhoku Region in Aomori Prefecture. He died on June 13, 1948. Dazai became one of the writers whose work helped define modern Japanese fiction, with books such as The Setting Sun and No Longer Human considered modern classics. His last book, No Longer Human, became his most popular work outside Japan.

Dazai grew up in a large, newly completed Tsushima mansion that held about thirty family members in his early years. He was the eighth surviving child of a wealthy landowner and politician, and the tenth of eleven children born to his parents. The family had risen quickly from humble peasant origins: his great-grandfather built wealth as a moneylender, and later generations increased both wealth and local standing. His father, Gen’emon, was often absent because of politics, while his mother, Tane, was ill. Dazai was raised mainly by his aunt Kiye and the family’s servants, and he also suffered abuse by multiple servants.

His education began at Kanagi Elementary in 1916. After his father died of lung cancer in 1923, Dazai went on to Aomori Junior High School, then Hirosaki Higher School in 1927. There he became interested in the culture of the Edo period and studied gidayū, a chanted narration used in bunraku. He edited student publications, published a magazine called Saibō Bungei with friends, and worked on the college newspaper. His literary influences included Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Murasaki Shikibu, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Akutagawa’s suicide in 1927 deeply affected him, and Dazai began to neglect his studies.

The years that followed were marked by political pressure, self-destruction, and intense writing. Dazai dabbled in Marxism at a time when it was heavily suppressed by the government, contributed money to the Japanese Communist Party, and later signed a pledge in 1932 to withdraw completely from leftist activities. He made several suicide attempts, struggled with addiction to a morphine-based painkiller after hospitalization for appendicitis, and spent time in a mental institution where he was forced to quit cold turkey. He married Hatsuyo Oyama, later divorced her, and then married the middle school teacher Michiko Ishihara, with whom he had a daughter, Sonoko, in June 1941.

Dazai first used the pen name “Osamu Dazai” in the 1933 short story “Train,” his first experiment with the I-novel form that later became his trademark. He also used the pseudonym Shunpei Kuroki for Illusion of the Cliffs. His writing was helped by the support of Masuji Ibuse, an established writer whose connections aided publication and helped Dazai build a reputation. For readers of quotations, his line “Love flies out the window when poverty comes in the door, they say, and it’s true” carries the plain force found across his life and work: a sharp sense of pressure, shame, need, and human weakness, stated without decoration.