Osamu Dazai

Born Tsushima Shūji on June 19, 1909, in Kanagi, a village in Aomori Prefecture at the northern tip of Honshu, he was the tenth of eleven children of a wealthy landowner who sat in the House of Peers. He grew up in a large house among servants and was raised largely by an aunt and a nursemaid. He wrote for school magazines from his teens, and in 1927 the suicide of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, the writer he most admired, struck him hard. He entered the French literature department of Tokyo Imperial University in 1930 but spent his time on left-wing politics, drink and women, and never graduated. That November he tried to drown himself with a Ginza café hostess, who died while he lived; he was questioned for abetting a suicide and cut off by his family. Under the pen name Dazai he published his first stories in the early 1930s. His 1935 story "Gyakkō" ("Retrograde") was shortlisted for the first Akutagawa Prize, and when it lost he answered the judge Yasunari Kawabata in print in a fury, then wrote to him privately pleading for the next one. A failed hanging, a hospital stay for addiction to the painkiller Pabinal, and a second double suicide attempt, with his partner Hatsuyo in 1937, ended that relationship. Guided by his mentor Masuji Ibuse, he married a schoolteacher named Michiko Ishihara in 1939 and produced his steadiest work, among it the story "Run, Melos!" (1940). After the war he became famous almost overnight: The Setting Sun (1947), built on the diary of Shizuko Ōta, and No Longer Human (1948), a confessional novel finished in the weeks before his death, made him the voice of a defeated generation. He died on the night of June 13, 1948, drowned in the Tamagawa Canal with Tomie Yamazaki; their bodies were found on his thirty-ninth birthday.

In 1935 Dazai's story Gyakkō was shortlisted for the first Akutagawa Prize and lost. The judge Yasunari Kawabata wrote that a cloud hung over the author's life, and Dazai answered him in print in a fury. Months later he wrote to Kawabata privately, begging to be given the next one.