Osamu Dazai

Osamu Dazai (1909–1948) was a Japanese novelist born Tsushima Shūji into a wealthy landowning family in Aomori Prefecture. A leading figure of Japan's "Buraiha" or decadent school, he entered the literary world in the 1930s, and his early work The Setting Sun was shortlisted for the first Akutagawa Prize. In the postwar years he produced his most important writing, including The Setting Sun and No Longer Human, works marked by self-mocking confession and a gloomy, sentimental tone that portray outcasts, alienation, and self-destruction. His influence on later Japanese literature is profound. In 1948 he drowned himself with his lover, Yamazaki Tomie, at the age of 38. His fiction centers on self-exile, the disintegration of family, and the spiritual crisis of postwar Japan, and his decadent yet sincere style has earned him a wide readership in the Chinese-speaking world as well.