Osamu Dazai Biography and List of Works

Japanese novelist who, at the end of World War II became the literary voice of his generation. Dazai's life ended in double-suicide with his married lover. In many books Dazai used biographical material from his own family background as the son of wealthy landowner and politician. He also wrote children's stories and historical narratives. Dazai rejected the idealistic circle of authors with aristocratic pretensions and joined for a time the communist movement. His opposition to the prevailing social and literary trends was shared by fellow members of Burai-ha (Decadents).

Dazai was born in Kanagi, in northern Honshu, as the tenth of eleven children. He studied French literature at the University of Tokyo but dropped his studies. Dazai first attracted attention in 1933 when his short stories began to appear in magazines. Between the years 1930 and 1937 he made three suicide attempts, and dealt the subject many of his short stories, among them 'Doke no hana' (1936, in BANNEN) and 'Tokyo hyakkei' (1941). In 1939 Dazai married Ishihara Michiko, which started a new period in his life.

After the war Dazai became friends with the writer Masuji Ibuse. The tone of his post-war works was dark, reflecting self-indulgent excess and suicidal thoughts. Dazai's works attracted a large and dedicated readership for whom his troubled life, spirit of rebelliousness and depiction of the lost generation of youth, struck a responsive chord. Dazai wrote in a simple and colloquial style. His best stories were based on his own experiences and were classified in the category known as shishosetsu, or autobiographical/confessional fiction. In his masterpieces, such as SHAYO (1947, The Setting Sun), addressing many social, human and philosophical issues, and NINGEN SHIKKAKU (1948, No Longer Human), an attack on the traditions of Japan, Dazai captured the post-war crisis of Japanese cultural identity.

Shayo is a tragic story of life in post-war Japan, dealing with the fall of an aristocratic family. The protagonist, Kazuko, a young woman, wears Western clothes, but her outlook is Japanese. She is evacuated from Tokyo during the war with her mother. They look hopefully to the return of the son from Southeast Asia. He does return, but as a drug addict. She survives the death of her mother and her drug-addicted brother Naoji, an intellectual ravaged by his own and by society's spiritual failures. Kazuko spends a sad, sordid night with the dissipated writer Uehara, and conceives a child in the hope that it will be the first step in a moral revolution.

No Longer Human (its actual Japanese title is "Disqualified as a Human") deals with the turmoil of sexuality. It recounts the formational episodes of the author's life, most of which involve women, his sister, his wife, and his mistress. The book is one of the classics of Japanese literature and has been translated into several languages. Among Dazai's finest short stories is 'Viyon no tsuma' (1947, Villon's Wife). The narrator is a wife of a poet, who has virtually abandoned her. She finds meaning in her existence by taking a job for a tavern keeper from whom her husband has stolen money. Her determination to survive is tested by hardships, rape and her husband's self-delusion, but her will is not broken.

After the war, Dazai's alienation continued. He made observations of those who had supported the militaristic regime before and in the new political situation embraced democracy. On June 13, in 1948, Dazai drowned himself in Tokyo and left behind unfinished novel GOODBYE. Dazai's daughter Yukio Tsushima also became a writer and published her first short story in 1969. Her works in the 1970s arose from the collapse of the economic bubble and coincided with a return to the Japanese variant of the first-person novel, shishosetsu, in which vivid descriptions of the mundane reality of the author's own private world predominate.

For further information: The Immutable Despair of Dazai Osamu by D. Brudnoy (Monumenta Nipponica, 23/1968); Traditions and Modernity in Modern Japanese Fiction by G.B. Gunn (Japan Christian Quaterly, 35/1969); Landscapes and Portraits by D. Keene (1971); Accomplices of Silence: The Modern Japanese Novel by Masao Miyoshi (1974); Dazai Osamu by J. O'Brien (1975); Modern Japanese Fictioin and Its Traditions by J. Thomas Rimer (1978); Dawn to the West by Donald Keene (1984); The Saga of Dazai Osamu by Phyllis I. Lyons (1985); Akutagawa and Dazai: Instances of Literary Adaptation, ed. by James O'Brien (1988); Suicidal Narrative in Modern Japan: The Case of Dazai Osamu by Alan Stephen Wolfe (1990); The Origins of Modern Japanese Literature by Kojin Karatani (1993) - See also: Yukio Mishima, who committed suicide in 1970

DOKE NO HANA, (1935)