About the Author

The author of the global bestseller No Longer Human and The Setting Sun, Osamu Dazai (1909-1948) was famous for confronting head-on the social and moral crises of postwar Japan. He committed suicide by drowning in Tokyo’s Tamagawa Aqueduct.
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.

Reviews

"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*