Osamu Dazai, the novelist of despair whom new translations reveal as a comedian

Osamu Dazai

Photo: Not stated / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 19, 1909 Kanagi
Died	June 13, 1948 (38)
Occupation	Writer

Osamu Dazai has been dead for seventy-eight years and keeps finding new readers. This summer Tuttle Publishing brought out Justice with a Smile, a diary novel he wrote during the war, in its first official English translation, by Michael Day. New Directions has spent the past few years issuing Sam Bett’s versions of stories English readers had never been offered, starting with The Flowers of Buffoonery. And in Japan the paperback of No Longer Human goes on selling to teenagers who suspect it was written about them.

Part of that traffic comes from a manga. In Bungo Stray Dogs, Kafka Asagiri’s series about detectives and gangsters named after famous authors, one of the heroes is a handsome, joking, death-obsessed young man called Dazai. Fans who arrive through the anime tend to discover that the real one was stranger, sadder and a far better comedian than his reputation suggests.

He was born Shūji Tsushima on 19 June 1909 in Kanagi, in the far north of Aomori Prefecture, the tenth of eleven children of one of the richest landowning families in the region. His father was mostly away on public business, and the boy was raised largely by an aunt and the household servants. At school in Aomori and then at Hirosaki Higher School he read Ryūnosuke Akutagawa with devotion, and Akutagawa’s suicide in 1927 shook him badly. In 1930 he enrolled in French literature at Tokyo Imperial University without knowing any French. He later boasted that he never attended a single lecture.

The early Tokyo years read like a list of disasters. He ran off with a geisha, Hatsuyo Oyama, and was struck from the family register. In November 1930 he and a young bar hostess, Shimeko Tanabe, attempted suicide together near Kamakura; she died and he survived. After an appendicitis operation in 1935 he became addicted to the painkiller Pavinal, and in 1936 his family had him committed to a Tokyo psychiatric hospital to break the habit.

The writing, meanwhile, had found its voice. He first signed himself Osamu Dazai in 1933, on a short story called “Ressha” (Train), and with the novelist Masuji Ibuse as his mentor he began turning his own life into fiction in the confessional manner of the Japanese I-novel. The Flowers of Buffoonery (1935) places a young man named Yōzō Ōba in a seaside sanatorium after a failed double suicide, surrounded by friends who crack jokes so they never have to talk about what happened. That same year his story Gyakkō was shortlisted for the first Akutagawa Prize, named after his idol. It lost. Yasunari Kawabata, on the jury, remarked on the dark clouds over the author’s private life, and Dazai answered him in print. His first collection, Bannen, appeared in 1936.

Stability, when it came, came through Ibuse. Dazai married the schoolteacher Michiko Ishihara at his mentor’s house in January 1939, and that September the couple settled in Mitaka, on the western edge of Tokyo, where he made his home for the rest of his life. The next two years produced some of his most precise work: Schoolgirl, a single day inside the head of a teenage girl, built from a diary a young reader had sent him and praised by Kawabata this time; One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji; and Run, Melos! (1940), a retelling of a classical tale of loyalty that has sat in Japanese middle-school textbooks almost without interruption since the war. Women narrate a striking amount of his fiction, and they are often its sharpest voices.

Excused from military service because of his lungs, Dazai kept publishing through the war as the censors grew warier. He wrote The New Hamlet (1941); Justice with a Smile (1942), shaped from the teenage diary of the future kabuki actor Yasuhisa Tsutsumi, younger brother of one of his disciples; and Tsugaru (1944), a journey back through his home region. Otogi-zōshi (1945) retold Japanese fairy tales with a comic ease that surprises readers who know only the late novels.

Peace made him famous. Villon’s Wife (1947) follows the wife of a dissolute poet who simply refuses to stop living. The Setting Sun, serialised that year and published as a book in December, drew on the diary of his lover Shizuko Ōta to chart the decline of an aristocratic family after the defeat. It became a bestseller and turned “the setting-sun people” into a catchphrase for a whole impoverished class. By then he was drinking heavily, his health was failing, and he had left his family for Tomie Yamazaki, a beautician whose husband had been killed in the war.

In the spring of 1948 he wrote No Longer Human, beginning it at an inn in the hot-spring town of Atami and finishing it in May in Ōmiya. Its narrator, Yōzō Ōba again, has spent his life playing the clown to hide a conviction that he does not qualify as a human being. Dazai was also writing Good Bye, a comic serial for the Asahi Shimbun that he never finished. On 13 June 1948 he and Yamazaki drowned in the Tamagawa Aqueduct near his home. Their bodies were found on 19 June, the day he would have turned thirty-nine. He is buried at Zenrin-ji in Mitaka, facing the grave of Mori Ōgai, and readers still gather there every June for Ōtōki, the memorial day named after one of his last stories.

The sales explain why publishers keep coming back. By 2021 the Shinchosha paperback of No Longer Human had passed 7.2 million copies, second on that imprint only to Natsume Sōseki’s Kokoro. Mika Ninagawa filmed his final years in 2019 with Shun Oguri as Dazai. What the new translations add is range. Dazai is easy to file under despair, but the books now arriving in English, with their unreliable diarists, deadpan jokes and women who talk back, show a writer who could be wildly funny about the very things that were killing him.

Tags: novelists, writers, Osamu Dazai, Bungo Stray Dogs, No Longer Human, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa