User:Dsra229/Osamu Dazai

Post-War Career
In the immediate post-war period, Dazai reached the height of his popularity. He depicted a dissolute life in postwar Tokyo in Viyon no Tsuma (Villon's Wife, 1947), depicting the wife of a poet who had abandoned her and her continuing will to live through several hardships.

In 1946, Osamu Dazai releases 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 reaffirms 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 expresses his beliefs through this Almanac of Pain.

Along side this he 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. Moreover, these two pieces are also situated strategically within Dazai's own postwar literary production, constituting as they do overtly autobiographical retrospectives linking Dazai's life and writing to the history of Japan and stating in abstract, polemical terms the ideological concerns that emerge fleshed out in the explosive production of fiction during these next few years.

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 celebrity. 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. She bore him a daughter, Haruko, (治子) in 1947.

A heavy drinker, Dazai became an alcoholic; he had already fathered a child out of wedlock with a fan, and his health was rapidly deteriorating. At this time Dazai 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 Ningen Shikkaku (人間失格, No Longer Human, 1948) at the hot-spring resort Atami. He moved to Ōmiya with Tomie and stayed there until mid-May, finishing his novel. The novel, a quasi-autobiography, depicts a young, self-destructive man seeing himself as disqualified from the human race. The book is one of the classics of Japanese literature and has been translated into several foreign languages.

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