Osamu Dazai

Education and literary beginnings

In 1916, Dazai began his education at Kanagi Elementary. On 4 March 1923, his father Gen'emon died from lung cancer. A month later, in April, Dazai moved to Aomori Junior High School, followed in 1927 by Hirosaki Higher School, a university preparatory school. He developed an interest in the culture of the Edo period and began studying gidayū, a form of chanted narration used in bunraku. Around 1928, Dazai edited a series of student publications and contributed some of his own works. He also published a magazine called Saibō Bungei (Cell Literature) with his friends, and subsequently became a staff member of the college's newspaper.

Dazai's success in writing was brought to a halt when his idol, the writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, committed suicide in 1927 at 35 years old. Dazai started to neglect his studies, and spent the majority of his allowance on clothes, alcohol, and prostitutes. He also dabbled in Marxism, which at the time was heavily suppressed by the government.

On the night of 10 December 1929, Dazai made his first suicide attempt by overdosing on Calmotin, but survived and was able to graduate the following year. In 1930, he enrolled in the French literature department of Tokyo Imperial University. Dazai knew no French when he elected this course (and apparently, through a complete neglect of his studies, never learned more than a few words), but at the time French literature was the chosen field of many young Japanese. In October, he ran away with a geisha named Hatsuyo Oyama and was formally disowned by his family.

In 1930, ten days after he was suspended from Tokyo Imperial University for non-payment of fees, Dazai attempted double suicide by drowning off a beach in Kamakura while simultaneously overdosing on Calmotin, with a 19-year-old bar hostess named Shimeko Tanabe. Tanabe died, but Dazai lived. He was rescued by the crew of a fishing boat, and was charged as an accomplice in Tanabe's death. Alarmed by the events, Dazai's family intervened to stop the police investigation. His allowance was reinstated, and he was released without any charges. In December, he recovered at Ikarigaseki and married Hatsuyo there.

Leftist movement

In 1929, when the principal of Hirosaki Higher School was found to have misappropriated public funds, the students, under the leadership of Ueda Shigehiko (Ishigami Genichiro), leader of the Social Science Study Group, staged a five-day strike, which resulted in the principal's resignation and no disciplinary action against the students. Dazai hardly participated in the strike, but in imitation of the Japanese proletarian literature of the time, he summarized the incident in a novel called Student Group and read it to Ueda. The Tsushima family was wary of Dazai's leftist activities. On 16 January of the following year, the Special High Police arrested Ueda and nine other students of the Hiroko Institute of Social Studies, who were working as activists for Seigen Tanaka's Communist Party.

In college, Dazai met activist Eizo Kudo, and made a monthly financial contribution of ten yen to the Japanese Communist Party. He was expelled from his family after his marriage to Hatsuyo Oyama in order to prevent any association of his illegal activities with his brother Bunji, who was a politician. After his marriage, Dazai was ordered to hide his sympathies and moved repeatedly. In July 1932, Bunji tracked him down, and had him turn himself in at the Aomori Police Station. In December, Dazai signed and sealed a pledge at the Aomori Prosecutor's Office to completely withdraw from leftist activities.

Early literary career

Dazai kept his promise and settled down. He managed to obtain the assistance of Masuji Ibuse, an established writer whose connections helped him get his works published and establish his reputation. The next few years were productive for Dazai. He wrote at a feverish pace and used the pen name "Osamu Dazai" for the first time in a short story called "Ressha" ("列車", "Train"), published in 1933. This story was his first experiment with the I-novel form that later became his trademark.

In 1935 it started to become clear to Dazai that he would not graduate. This was not surprising when one considers that he boasted of not having attended a single lecture in five years. He also failed to obtain a job at a Tokyo newspaper. He finished The Final Years (Bannen), which was intended to be his farewell to the world, and tried to hang himself on 19 March 1935, failing yet again. Less than three weeks later, he developed acute appendicitis and was hospitalized. In the hospital, he became addicted to Pavinal, a morphine-based painkiller. After fighting the addiction for a year, in October 1936 he was taken to a mental institution, locked in a room and forced to quit cold turkey. The treatment lasted over a month.

During this time Dazai's wife Hatsuyo committed adultery with his best friend Zenshirō Kodate. This eventually came to light, and on 15 March 1937, Dazai attempted to commit shinjū (joint suicide) with his wife by overdosing on Calmotin, but neither died. Soon after, Dazai divorced Hatsuyo. He quickly remarried, this time to a middle school teacher named Michiko Ishihara. Their first daughter, Sonoko, was born in June 1941.

The year before last I was expelled from my family and, reduced to poverty overnight, was left to wander the streets, begging help for various quarters, barely managing to stay alive from one day to the next, and just when I'd begun to think I might be able to support myself with my writing, I came down with a serious illness. Thanks to the compassion of others, I was able to rent a small house in Funabashi, Chiba, next to the muddy sea, and spent the summer there alone, convalescing. Though battling an illness that each and every night left my robe literally drenched with sweat, I had no choice but to press ahead with my work. The cold half pint of milk I drank each morning was the only thing that gave me a certain peculiar sense of the joy in life; my mental anguish and exhaustion were such that the oleanders blooming in one corner of the garden appeared to me merely flicking tongues of flame...

— Seascape with Figures in Gold (1939), Osamu Dazai, trans. Ralph F. McCarthy (1992)

In the 1930s and 1940s, Dazai wrote a number of novels and short stories that are autobiographical in nature. His first story, Gyofukuki (魚服記, "Transformation", 1933), is a grim fantasy involving suicide. Other stories written during this period include Dōke no hana (道化の花, "Flowers of Buffoonery", 1935), Gyakkō (逆行, "Losing Ground", 1935), Kyōgen no kami (狂言の神, "The God of Farce", 1936), an epistolary novel called Kyokō no Haru (虚構の春, False Spring, 1936) and the stories in the collection Bannen (1936; Declining Years or The Final Years) and Josei-to( "Schoolgirl", 1939), which describe his sense of personal isolation and his debauchery.

Wartime years

Dazai was excused from the draft during World War II because of his chronic chest problems, as he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. The censors became more reluctant to accept his work, but he managed to publish anyway. In contrast to other literary publications coming out in the wake of Pearl Harbor with praises of the date of December 8 and the new unified will of the nation, Dazai published a work entitled Jūnigatsu Yōka (十二月八日, "December 8", 1942) depicting a poor housewife needing to take care of her daily necessities as though it were any other day. This has been noted as a very rare rejection of the overwhelming intellectual depiction of national commitment to the war.

A number of the stories that he published during the war were retellings of stories by Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693). Dazai's wartime works include Udaijin Sanetomo (右大臣実朝, "Minister of the Right Sanetomo", 1943), Tsugaru (1944), Pandora no Hako (パンドラの匣, Pandora's Box, 1945–46), and Otogizōshi (お伽草紙, Fairy Tales, 1945) in which he retells a number of Japanese fairy tales.

Dazai's house was burned down twice in the American bombing of Tokyo, but his family escaped unscathed and gained a son, Masaki, who was born in 1944. His third child, his daughter Satoko, who later became a writer under the pseudonym Yūko Tsushima, was born in May 1947.

Postwar career

In the immediate postwar period, Dazai reached the height of his popularity. He depicted a dissolute life in postwar Tokyo in Viyon no Tsuma (ヴィヨンの妻, "Villon's Wife", 1947), depicting the wife of a poet who had abandoned her and her continuing will to live through hardships.

In 1946, Dazai published a controversial memoir, Kuno no Nenkan ("Almanac of Pain"), in which he describes the immediate aftermath of Japan's defeat and seeks to encapsulate how the Japanese felt at the time. Dazai reaffirmed his loyalty to Hirohito, the Emperor of Japan, and his son Akihito. However, Dazai also expressed his Communist beliefs in this memoir. Dazai also wrote Jugonenkan (For Fifteen Years), another autobiographical piece.

On 14 December 1946, a group of writers that included Dazai was joined by Yukio Mishima for dinner at a restaurant. The latter recalled that on that occasion, he gave vent to his dislike of Dazai. According to a later statement by Mishima:

The disgust in which I hold Dazai's literature is in some way ferocious. First, I dislike his face. Second, I dislike his rustic preference for urban sophistication. Third, I dislike the fact that he played roles that were not appropriate for him.

Other participants at the dinner could not remember if events occurred as Mishima described. They did report that he did not enjoy Dazai's "clowning" and that he and Dazai had a dispute about Ōgai Mori, a writer whom Mishima admired.

In July 1947, Dazai's novel Shayo (The Setting Sun, translated 1956) was published. It depicts the decline of the Japanese nobility after the war. It was partly based on the diary of Shizuko Ōta, an admirer of Dazai's work who first met him in 1941. The pair had a daughter, the writer Ōta Haruko in 1947.

A heavy drinker, Dazai became an alcoholic and his health deteriorated rapidly. At this time he met Tomie Yamazaki, a beautician whose husband had been killed in the war after just ten days of marriage. Dazai abandoned his wife and children and moved in with Tomie.

Dazai began writing his novel No Longer Human (人間失格 Ningen Shikkaku, 1948) at the onsen in Atami. He then moved to Ōmiya with Tomie and stayed there until mid-May 1948, finishing his novel. A quasi-autobiography, it depicts a self-destructive young man who believes that he is disqualified from being human. The book has been translated into several languages.

In the spring of 1948, Dazai worked on Goodbye, a novella scheduled to be serialized in the Asahi Shimbun. It was never finished.

Death

On 13 June 1948, Dazai and Tomie drowned themselves in the rain-swollen Tamagawa Aqueduct, near his house. Their bodies were not discovered until six days later, on June 19, which would have been his 39th birthday.

At the time, there was a lot of speculation about the incident. Keikichi Nakahata, a kimono merchant who frequented the young Tsushima family, was shown the scene of the suicide by a detective from Mitaka police station. He speculated that "Dazai was asked to die, and he simply agreed, but just before his death, he suddenly felt an obsession with life."

Dazai's grave is within the Zenrin-ji temple complex in Mitaka, Tokyo. It faces the grave of Mori Ōgai, whom Dazai respected.

In popular media

The character of Osamu Dazai in the manga series Bungo Stray Dogs (2012-present) is partly modeled on Dazai. The popularity of the character in the long-running series and its many anime and film adaptations have helped to revitalize Dazai's works.

In 2019, Mika Ninagawa directed the film Ningen Shikkaku: Osamu Dazai and the three women, a biographical film about Dazai, starring Shun Oguri. The film remained in the top 5 at the box office in its first 2 weeks.