Osamu Dazai
Né(e): June 19, 1909 – Kanagi, Aomori, Japan
Osamu Dazai was a Japanese novelist and short-story writer whose work explored alienation, identity, depression, and postwar social change. Best known for No Longer Human and The Setting Sun, he became a defining voice of modern Japanese literature; his books remain widely translated and continuously read in Japan and abroad.
Biographie et Parcours de l'Auteur
Osamu Dazai, born Shūji Tsushima in 1909 in Kanagi, Aomori Prefecture, emerged from a wealthy and politically prominent family yet spent much of his life writing from the vantage point of estrangement. The gap between privilege and inner instability became one of the defining tensions of his work. As a student, he was drawn to literature early and later entered Tokyo Imperial University to study French literature, though he attended irregularly and never completed his degree. His young adulthood was marked by political flirtations with leftist circles, repeated suicide attempts, troubled relationships, addiction, and periods of severe physical and psychological distress. These crises were not incidental to his career; they were the turning points that shaped his literary voice, sharpening his attention to shame, dependence, class anxiety, and the fragile performances by which people try to survive.
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Voix de la Communauté
"A journey to hell with Osamu Dazai, Japan's ultimate bad boy novelist"
— The Japan Times ((
"What I despise about Dazai is that he exposes precisely those things in myself that I most want to hide"
— Yukio Mishima ((
"Dazai's intimate, visceral writing now encounters a fresh audience"
— The Atlantic ((
"Dazai's brand of egoistic pessimism dovetails organically with the emo chic of this cultural moment and with the inner lives of teenagers of all eras"
— The New York Times ((
"From the point of view of wholesome common sense, Dazai's writings may be regarded as the soliloquies of a deviant"
— Yasunari Kawabata ((
"Dazai was one of Japan's foremost writers before his premature death in 1948 at the age of 39"
— Publishers Weekly ((
"Dazai was an aristocratic tramp, a self-described delinquent, yet he wrote with the forbearance of a fasting scribe"
— Patti Smith ((
"Dazai offers something permanent and beautiful"
— The New York Times Book Review ((
"Dazai was an adept comic writer who mixed the jocular with the melancholic to brilliant effect"
— Asian Review of Books ((