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.
Donald Keene, the author of dozens of books in both English and
Japanese as well as the famed translator of Dazai, Kawabata, and
Mishima, was the
first non-Japanese to receive the Yomiuri Prize for Literature.
"What I despise about Dazai is that he exposes precisely those
things in myself that I most want to hide."
*Yukio Mishima*
"From the point of view of wholesome common sense, Dazai’s writings
may be regarded as the soliloquies of a deviant."
*Yasunari Kawabata*
"No Longer Human is his masterpiece, though all his work is worthy.
Dazai was an aristocratic tramp, a self described delinquent, yet
he wrote with the forbearance of a fasting scribe."
*Patit Smith*
"Dazai’s brand of egoistic pessimism dovetails organically with the
emo chic of this cultural moment."
*Andrew Martin - The New York Times*
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