Author

Osamu Dazai

Japanese novelist of the Showa period; one of the most celebrated literary figures of 20th-century Japan

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Confessional fiction, Japanese modernismKnown for

OSAMU DAZAI was born in 1909 into a powerful landowning family of northern Japan. A brilliant student, he entered the French department of Tokyo University in 1930, but later boasted that in the five years before he left without a degree, he had never attended a lecture. Dazai was famous for confronting head-on the social and moral crises of postwar Japan before he committed suicide by throwing himself into Tokyo’s Tamagawa Aqueduct. His body was found on what would have been his 39th birthday.

Born1909 · Kanagi, Aomori, Japan

Notable works No Longer HumanThe Setting SunRun, Melos!A Shameful Life

Mine has been a life of much shame.— No Longer Human (1948)