Dazai Osamu

Author of «The Setting Sun. Novel and Short Prose»

Years of life 1909–1948.

Osamu Dazai (real name: Tsushima Shūji) was a classic of modern Japanese literature and an ego-novelist. He was a representative of the informal Decadent school that gained notoriety in the mid-20th century.

His effortless style, sincerity, and perceptiveness in narrating life's peculiarities quickly endeared him to readers. His literary adaptations of Japan's most famous folktales, otogi-zōshi, remain highly esteemed to this day. However, true popularity came to Dazai in the post-war years. Works like Pandora's Box (1946), Villon's Wife (1947), and No Longer Human (1948) became part of the golden canon of modern Japanese classics. The pinnacle of his career was the last work published during his lifetime, the bestseller The Setting Sun (1947).

Dazai reflected his life experiences in various ways, often bitter yet sometimes humorous. Nearly all his works are autobiographical, with most featuring a tragicomic self-portrait or caricature. His somber (self-)irony, profound weariness of life, skepticism, social indifference, and nonconformism—shaped by the post-war era and intensified by his illnesses, psychological struggles, and financial difficulties—were not literary manifestos, creative credos, or ideological stances. Rather, they were his way of living each day as it was. Thus, his final act of suicide with his beloved seems less like a performance and more like simply going with the flow.