Osamu Dazai

Osamu Dazai (Shuji Tsushima, 1909–1948) is one of the most beloved and most troubling figures in Japanese literary history — a writer whose fiction of self-destruction, shame, and social alienation has spoken to generations of Japanese readers with an intimacy that feels almost inappropriate. Born into a wealthy family in Aomori, he spent his short life in a pattern of alcoholism, drug addiction, suicide attempts, and literary brilliance that ended when he drowned himself with a lover in the Tamagawa Canal in 1948, at thirty-eight.

His masterwork No Longer Human (Ningen Shikkaku, 1948) — the confessions of a man who has spent his life performing normalcy while feeling utterly estranged from humanity — is one of the most widely read Japanese novels and one of the great accounts of social shame in world literature. The Setting Sun, published the year before, is an equally powerful portrait of the dissolution of Japan's aristocratic class in the aftermath of defeat. His self-destructive life and his frank fiction about it have made him a permanent fixture in Japanese culture — No Longer Human consistently ranks as one of Japan's bestselling novels of all time.