Osamu Dazai

Shūji Tsushima (津島 修治), known by his pen name Osamu Dazai (太宰 治), was a Japanese novelist and author. A number of his most popular works, such as The Setting Sun (Shayō) and No Longer Human (Ningen Shikkaku), are considered modern-day classics.

His influences include Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Murasaki Shikibu and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. While Dazai continues to be widely celebrated in Japan, he remains relatively unknown elsewhere, with only a handful of his works available in English. His last book, No Longer Human, is his most popular work outside of Japan.

Early life
Shūji Tsushima was born on June 19, 1909, the eighth surviving child of a wealthy landowner and politician in Kanagi, a remote corner of Japan at the northern tip of Tōhoku in Aomori Prefecture. He was the tenth of eleven children born by his parents. At the time of his birth, the huge, newly-completed Tsushima mansion, where he would spend his early years, was home to some thirty family members. The Tsushima family was of obscure peasant origins, with Dazai's great-grandfather building up the family's wealth as a moneylender, and his son increasing it further. They quickly rose in power and, after some time, became highly respected across the region.

Dazai's father, Gen'emon, was a younger son of the Matsuki family, which due to "its exceedingly 'feudal' tradition" had no use for sons other than the eldest son and heir. As a result, Gen'emon was adopted into the Tsushima family to marry the eldest daughter, Tane. He became involved in politics due to his position as one of the four wealthiest landowners in the prefecture, and was offered membership into the House of Peers. This caused Dazai's father to be absent during much of his early childhood; and with his mother, Tane, being ill, Dazai was brought up mostly by the family's servants and his aunt Kiye.

Education and literary beginnings
In 1916, Dazai began his education at Kanagi Elementary. On March 4, 1923, his father Gen'emon died from lung cancer. A month later, in April, Dazai attended Aomori Junior High School, followed by entering Hirosaki University's literature department in 1927. He developed an interest in Edo culture and began studying gidayū, a form of chanted narration used in bunraku. Around 1928, Dazai edited a series of student publications and contributed some of his own works. He also published a magazine called Saibō bungei (Cell Literature) with his friends, and subsequently became a staff member of the college's newspaper.

Dazai's success in writing was brought to a halt when his idol, the writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, committed suicide in 1927 at 35 years old. Dazai started to neglect his studies, and spent the majority of his allowance on clothes, alcohol, and prostitutes. He also dabbled with Marxism, which at the time was heavily suppressed by the government. On the night of December 10, 1929, Dazai made his first suicide attempt, but survived and was able to graduate the following year. In 1930, Dazai enrolled in the French Literature Department of Tokyo Imperial University and promptly stopped studying again. In October, he ran away with a geisha named Hatsuyo Oyama and was formally disowned by his family.

Nine days after being expelled from Tokyo Imperial University, Dazai attempted suicide by drowning off a beach in Kamakura with another woman, 19-year-old bar hostess Shimeko Tanabe. Tanabe died, but Dazai lived, was rescued by a fishing boat, and was charged as an accomplice in Tanabe's death. Shocked by the events, Dazai's family intervened to stop a police investigation. His allowance was reinstated, and he was released of any charges. In December, Dazai recovered at Ikarigaseki and married Hatsuyo there.

Leftist movement
In 1929, when its principal's misappropriation of public funds was discovered at Hirosaki High School, the students, under the leadership of Ueda Shigehiko (Ishigami Genichiro), leader of the Social Science Study Group, staged a five-day allied strike, which resulted in the principal's resignation and no disciplinary action against the students. Dazai hardly participated in the strike, but in imitation of the proletarian literature in vogue at the time, he summarized the incident in a novel called Student Group and read it to Ueda. The Tsushima family was wary of Dazai's leftist activities. On January 16 of the following year, the Special High Police arrested Ueda and nine other students of the Hiroko Institute of Social Studies, who were working as activists for Seigen Tanaka's armed Communist Party.

In college, Dazai met activist Eizo Kudo, and made a monthly financial contribution of ¥10 to the Japanese Communist Party. The reason he was expelled from his family after his marriage to Hatsuyo Oyama was to prevent the association of illegal activities with Bunji, who was a politician. After his marriage, Dazai was ordered to hide his sympathies and moved repeatedly. In July 1932, Bunji tracked him down, and had him turn himself in at the Aomori Police Station. In December, Dazai signed and sealed a pledge at the Aomori Prosecutor's Office to completely withdraw from leftist activities.

Early literary career
Dazai kept his promise and settled down a bit. He managed to obtain the assistance of established writer Masuji Ibuse, whose connections helped him get his works published and establish his reputation. The next few years were productive for Dazai. He wrote at a feverish pace and used the pen name "Osamu Dazai" for the first time in a short story called "Ressha" ("列車", "Train") in 1933. This story was his first experiment with the I-novel that later became his trademark.

In 1935 it started to become clear to Dazai that he would not graduate. He failed to obtain a job at a Tokyo newspaper as well. Dazai finished The Final Years (Bannen), which was intended to be his farewell to the world, and tried to hang himself March 19, 1935, failing yet again. Less than three weeks later, Dazai developed acute appendicitis and was hospitalized. In the hospital, he became addicted to Pavinal, a morphine-based painkiller. After fighting the addiction for a year, in October 1936 he was taken to a mental institution, locked in a room and forced to quit cold turkey.

The treatment lasted over a month. During this time Dazai's wife Hatsuyo committed adultery with his best friend Zenshirō Kodate. This eventually came to light, and Dazai attempted to commit shinjū with his wife. They both took sleeping pills, but neither died. Soon after, Dazai divorced Hatsuyo. He quickly remarried, this time to a middle school teacher named Michiko Ishihara (石原美知子). Their first daughter, Sonoko (園子), was born in June 1941.

The year before last I was expelled from my family and, reduced to poverty overnight, was left to wander the streets, begging help for various quarters, barely managing to stay alive from one day to the next, and just when I'd begun to think I might be able to support myself with my writing, I came down with a serious illness. Thanks to the compassion of others, I was able to rent a small house in Funabashi, Chiba, next to the muddy sea, and spent the summer there alone, convalescing. Though battling an illness that each and every night left my robe literally drenched with sweat, I had no choice but to press ahead with my work. The cold half pint of milk I drank each morning was the only thing that gave me a certain peculiar sense of the joy in life; my mental anguish and exhaustion were such that the oleanders blooming in one corner of the garden appeared to me merely flicking tongues of flame...

In the 1930s and 1940s, Dazai wrote a number of subtle novels and short stories that are autobiographical in nature. His first story, Gyofukuki (魚服記, "Transformation", 1933), is a grim fantasy involving suicide. Other stories written during this period include Dōke no hana (道化の花, "Flowers of Buffoonery", 1935), Gyakkō (逆行, "Losing Ground", 1935), Kyōgen no kami (狂言の神, "The God of Farce", 1936), an epistolary novel called Kyokō no Haru (虚構の春, False Spring, 1936) and those published in his 1936 collection Bannen (Declining Years or The Final Years), which describe his sense of personal isolation and his debauchery.

Wartime years
Japan widened the Pacific War by attacking the United States in December, but Dazai was excused from the draft because of his chronic chest problems, as he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. The censors became more reluctant to accept Dazai's offbeat work, but he managed to publish quite a bit regardless, remaining one of very few authors who managed to get this kind of material accepted in this period. A number of the stories which Dazai published during the war were retellings of stories by Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693). His wartime works included Udaijin Sanetomo (右大臣実朝, "Minister of the Right Sanetomo", 1943), Tsugaru (1944), Pandora no Hako (パンドラの匣, Pandora's Box, 1945–46), and Otogizōshi (お伽草紙, Fairy Tales, 1945) in which he retold a number of old Japanese fairy tales with "vividness and wit."

Dazai's house was burned down twice in the American bombing of Tokyo, but his family escaped unscathed and gained a son, Masaki (正樹), who was born in 1944. His third child, daughter Satoko (里子), who later became a famous writer under the pseudonym Yūko Tsushima, was born in May 1947.

Postwar career
In the immediate postwar period, Dazai reached the height of his popularity. He depicted a dissolute life in postwar Tokyo in Viyon no Tsuma (ヴィヨンの妻, "Villon's Wife", 1947), depicting the wife of a poet who had abandoned her and her continuing will to live through hardships.

In 1946, Osamu Dazai released a controversial literary piece titled Kuno no Nenkan (Almanac of Pain), a political memoir of Dazai himself. It describes the immediate aftermath of losing the second World War, and encapsulates how Japanese people felt following the country's defeat. Dazai reaffirmed his loyalty to the Japanese Emperor of the time, Emperor Hirohito and his son Akihito. Dazai was a known communist throughout his career, and also expressed his beliefs through this Almanac of Pain.

On December 14, Dazai and a group of writers were joined by Yukio Mishima at a restaurant for dinner. The latter recalled that on that occasion, he gave vent to his dislike of Dazai. According to a later statement by Mishima:

"The disgust in which I hold Dazai's literature is in some way ferocious. First, I dislike his face. Second, I dislike his rustic preference for urban sophistication. Third, I dislike the fact that he played the roles that were not appropriate for him."

Other participants at the dinner could not remember if events occurred as Mishima described. They did report that he did not enjoy Dazai's "clowning" and that they had a dispute about Ōgai Mori, a writer Mishima admired.

Alongside this Dazai also wrote Jugonenkan (For Fifteen Years), another autobiographical piece. This, alongside Almanac of Pain, may serve as a prelude to a consideration of Dazai's postwar fiction.

In July 1947, Dazai's best-known work, Shayo (The Setting Sun, translated 1956) depicting the decline of the Japanese nobility after the war, was published, propelling the already popular writer into celebrityhood. This work was based on the diary of Shizuko Ōta (太田静子), an admirer of Dazai's works who first met him in 1941. The pair had a daughter, Haruko, (治子) in 1947.

A heavy drinker, Dazai became an alcoholic and his health deteriorated rapidly. At this time he met Tomie Yamazaki (山崎富栄), a beautician and war widow who had lost her husband after just ten days of marriage. Dazai effectively abandoned his wife and children and moved in with Tomie.

Dazai began writing his novel No Longer Human (人間失格 Ningen Shikkaku, 1948) at the hot-spring resort Atami. He moved to Ōmiya with Tomie and stayed there until mid-May, finishing his novel. A quasi-autobiography, it depicts a young, self-destructive man seeing himself as disqualified from the human race. The book is considered one of the classics of Japanese literature, and has been translated into several foreign languages.

In the spring of 1948, Dazai worked on a novella scheduled to be serialized in the Asahi Shimbun, titled Guddo bai (the Japanese pronunciation of the English word "Goodbye") but it was never finished.

Death
On June 13, 1948, Dazai and Tomie drowned themselves in the rain-swollen Tamagawa Canal, near his house. Their bodies were not discovered until six days later, on June 19, which would have been his 39th birthday. His grave is at the temple of Zenrin-ji, in Mitaka, Tokyo.

At the time, there was a lot of speculation about the incident, with theories of forced suicide by Tomie. Keikichi Nakahata, a kimono merchant who frequented the young Tsushima family, was shown the scene of the water ingress by a detective from the Mitaka police station. He speculated that "Dazai was asked to die, and he simply agreed, but just before his death, he suddenly felt an obsession with life".

Works
Since 2024, the complete works of Osamu Dazai are being translated into English for the first time and are planned to be published in twelve volumes by Erika Strohbach and Ananda Albuquerque Azevedo.


 * Dazai Osamu's Works (Volume 1): The complete works of the Japanese author in several volumes. Königswinter 2024. (translated by Erika Strohbach & Ananda Albuquerque Azevedo) ISBN 9798328945356