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Osamu Dazai was a Japanese writer. He is best known as the novelist who emerged at the end of World War II as the literary voice of his time.
Background
The youngest of ten children, Dazai was born in Kanagi, a town in northern Japan (now Aomori Prefecture, Japan) on June 19, 1909. His family was wealthy, owning land worked by tenant farmers, and Dazai grew up a physically and emotionally sensitive child in a comfortable home. Later in his life, self-consciousness about his prosperous background contributed to his sense of isolation, as did a deeply ingrained image of himself as that freakish creature— the artist. “The true artist," he wrote, “is an ugly ban”.
Education
Dazai attended an elementary school in Kanagi, as well as a middle school in Aomori City. By the time he attended Hirosaki Higher School from 1927 to 1930, enrolled in the literature department, Dazai had begun living in the unconventional, hectic style for which he became famed through his autobiographical fiction. Alcoholism, drug addiction, affairs with geishas, suicide attempts alone or with another, and frequent psychological traumas of various sorts were situations integral to Dazai’s existence. In 1930 he entered the department of French literature at Tokyo University. Though academic success had always come easily to Dazai, he was not particularly intent on benefiting from his university courses, and later claimed never to have set foot in a college classroom.
In the 1930s and 1940s, the author wrote a number of subtle novels and short stories that are autobiographical in nature. His first story, Gyofukuki (1933), is a grim fantasy involving suicide. Other stories written during this period include Gyakkō (Against the Current, 1935), Kyōgen no kami (The God of Farce, 1936), an epistolary novel Kyokō no Haru (False Spring, 1936). His publication, a collection of short stories titled Bannen (1936), contains the directly autobiographical “Remembrances”. It also offers such pieces as “Ha” (“Leaves”) and “Sarugashima” (“Monkey Island”), which succeed in displaying the author's attainment of an artistic imagination and a skillful narrative technique. Bannen was fairly well received both by critics and the reading public, allowing Dazai to pursue a literary career.
In his other major work, the novel Doke no hana (1935), Dazai began the story with an account of his first double suicide attempt. Throughout Doke no hana, the title of which has been translated as “The Flowers of Buffoonery”, Dazai suggested the complex and perhaps ridiculous nature of autobiographical fiction. Dazai also used retellings of well-known works to examine himself. For example, in the novel Shin Hamuretto the “new Hamlet” of the title serves as another of Dazai’s literary selves. Among his most successful reworkings of stories by other authors are Shinshaku shokoku banashi and Otogi zoshi, adaptations of classic Japanese fiction and fairy tales. As critics have remarked, the stories of these collections are among the few works of artistic value produced by a Japanese author under the strict government censorship during World War II. His wartime works included Udaijin Sanetomo (Minister of the Right Sanetomo, 1943), Tsugaru (1944), Pandora no hako (Pandora's Box, 1945–46), and the delightful Otogizōshi (Fairy Tales, 1945) in which he retold a number of old Japanese fairy tales with vividness and wit.
It was after the war that Dazai wrote his most popular and highly regarded work, The Setting Sun and No Longer Human. The Setting Sun, like Dazai’s other works, is also discussed as an autobiographical record of the author himself, whose personality traits are distributed among the various characters in the story. He depicted a dissolute life in postwar Tokyo in Viyon no Tsuma (Villon's Wife, 1947). In July 1947, Dazai's best-known work, Shayo (The Setting Sun, translated 1956) depicting the decline of the Japanese nobility after World War II was published, propelling the already popular writer into a celebrity.
More directly autobiographical is Ningen Shikkaku (No Longer Human, 1948, translated in 1958), the novel most often considered Dazai’s greatest work. Told in the form of three notebooks by a narrator who is described in the epilogue as a “madman,” this story outwardly parallels the author’s own life-one characterized by the use of alcohol and drugs, confinement in a mental institution, disastrous romantic affairs, and a failed double suicide attempt.
Achievements
Dazai is considered one of the most important novelists of postwar Japan. In 1939 he received the Kitamura Tokoku Award.
Dazai's literary work, No Longer Human, has received quite a few adaptations: a film directed by Genjiro Arato, the first four episodes of the anime series Aoi Bungaku, and a manga serialized in Shinchosha's Comic Bunch magazine. The book is also the central work in one of the volumes of the Japanese light novel series Book Girl, Book Girl and the Suicidal Mime.
Early in his life, Dazai became involved in left-wing politics.
Views
Dazai believed that “the writer should voice his intent in his story until his voice becomes hoarse and his strength expires”. Dazai’s intent was the fictional re-creation and dissection of the crises that made up his life.
Personality
The social and psychological upheavals of Dazai's novels parallel those of his contemporaries in Europe and America, especially his combining a strong need for personal expression with a fine sense of artistic construction. His volatile life and violent death are told and foretold throughout a body of works.
Connections
After the university, Dazai renewed his relationship with Koyama Hatsuyo, a geisha he had known while he was at Hirosaki Higher School. His family’s disapproval of this relationship led him to attempt suicide by drowning with a woman who was a hostess in a bar. Though his companion died, Dazai survived and was saved from being charged as an accomplice to suicide by the intervention of his older brother. This episode, among several instances of double suicide in Dazai’s fiction, is retold in No Longer Human. On at least three other occasions, Dazai attempted to take his own life. Although his family later granted him permission to marry Hatsuyo, the couple eventually separated, and Dazai went on to a second marriage with Ishihara Michiko and numerous other romantic affairs. Dazai had three children - a daughter Haruko, a son, Masaki and a daughter Satoko. Later Dazai met Tomie Yamazaki, a war widow who had lost her husband after 10 days of having been married. Dazai abandoned his wife and children and moved in with Tomie. His relationships ended in a double suicide with Tomie in 1948.
One of Dazai's works was based on the diary of Shizuko Ōta. Ōta was an admirer of Dazai's works, she was the mother of Haruko.
Father:
Tshushima Gen’emon
Mother:
Tshushima Tane
1-st wife:
Koyama Hatsuyo
2-nd wife:
Ishihara Michiko
His second wife was a school teacher.
Daughter:
Haruko Dazai
Son:
Masaki Dazai
Daughter:
Yūko Tsushima
Born as Satoko Dazai, she was a Japanese fiction writer, essayist and critic
Partner:
Shizuko Ōta
Partner:
Tomie Yamazaki
References
Dawn to the West
Japanese Literature in the Modern Era (History of Japanese Literature, Vol. 3); This is the third book in a multivolume history of modern Japanese literature by the world's authoritative translator and scholar of Japanese culture and literature.
Modern Japanese Fiction and Its Traditions: An Introduction
Thomas Rimer's book seeks to explain the background, structural principles, and development of pre-modem and modern Japanese fiction in a way that is comprehensive, methodical, and accessible.
