Osamu DazaiFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to: navigation, search In this Japanese name, the family name

is "Dazai". Osamu Dazai Dazai Osamu Born 19 June 1909(1909-06-19) Kanagi, Aomori, Japan Died 13 June 1948(1948-06-13) (aged 38) Tokyo, Japan Occupation Writer Genres novels, short stories Literary movement I novel, Buraiha -------------------------------------------------------------------------------Influences[show]Rynosuke Akutagawa, Masuji Ibuse Osamu Dazai ( , Dazai Osamu?, June 19, 1909 June 13, 1948) was a Japanese author wh o is considered one of the foremost fiction writers of 20th-century Japan. Contents [hide] 1 Biography 1.1 Early life 1.2 Early literary career 1.3 Wartime years 1.4 Postwar career 2 Writing style 2.1 Major works 2.2 Legacy in Japanese pop culture 2.3 Selected bibliography of English translations 3 References 4 External links [edit] Biography The year before last I was expelled from my family and, reduced to poverty overnight, was left to wander the streets, begging help for various q uarters, barely managing to stay alive from one day to the next, and just when I 'd begun to think I might be able to support myself with my writing, I came down with a serious illness. Thanks to the compassion of others, I was able to rent a small house in Funabashi, Chiba, next to the muddy sea, and spent the summer t here alone, convalescing. Though battling an illness that each and every night l eft my robe literally drenched with sweat, I had no choice but to press ahead wi th my work. The cold half pint of milk I drank each morning was the only thing t hat gave me a certain peculiar sense of the joy in life; my mental anguish and e xhaustion were such that the oleanders blooming in one corner of the garden appe ared to me merely flicking tongues of flame... Seascape with Figures in Gold (1939), Osamu Dazai

[edit] Early lifeDazai was born Shji Tsushima (, Tsushima Shji?), the eighth surviv child of a wealthy landowner in Kanagi, a remote corner of Japan at the norther n tip of Thoku in Aomori Prefecture. His father was a member of the House of Peer s and was thus often away from home, and his mother was chronically ill after ha ving given birth to 11 children, so he was brought up mostly by the servants. Tsushima in an undated high school yearbook photo.Tsushima was sent to Aomori Pr efectural Aomori High School and Hirosaki for higher school. An excellent studen t and an able writer even then, he edited student publications and contributed s ome of his own works. His life only started to change when his idol writer Rynosu

ke Akutagawa committed suicide in 1927. Tsushima started to neglect his studies, spending his allowance on clothes, alcohol and prostitutes and dabbling with Ma rxism, at the time heavily suppressed by the government. He frequently expressed guilt in his earliest writing about having been born into what he thought of as the incorrect social class.[citation needed] On 10 December 1929, the night bef ore year-end exams that he had no hopes of passing, Tsushima attempted to commit suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills, but he survived and managed to graduate the following year. Tsushima enrolled in the French Literature Department of the Tokyo Imperial Univ ersity and promptly stopped studying again. In October, he ran away with geisha Hatsuyo Oyama ( Oyama Hatsuyo) and was formally expelled from his family. Nine days after the expulsion, Tsushima attempted suicide by drowning off a beach in Kamak ura with another woman (whom he barely knew), 19-year-old bar hostess Shimeko Ta nabe ( Tanabe Shimeko). Shimeko died, but Tsushima lived, having been rescued by a shing boat, leaving him with a strong sense of guilt. Shocked by the events, Tsu shima's family intervened to drop a police investigation, his allowance was rein stated and in December Tsushima and Oyama were married. This moderately happy state of affairs did not last long, as Tsushima was arrest ed for his involvement with the banned Communist Party of Japan and, upon learni ng this, his elder brother Bunji promptly cut off his allowance again. Tsushima went into hiding, but Bunji managed to get word to him that charges would be dro pped and the allowance reinstated yet again if he solemnly promised to graduate and swear off any involvement with the party, and Tsushima took up the offer. [edit] Early literary careerIn what was probably a surprise to all parties conce rned, Tsushima kept his promise and managed to settle down a bit. He managed to obtain the assistance of established writer Masuji Ibuse, whose connections enab led him to get his works published, and who helped establish his reputation. The next few years were productive, Tsushima wrote at a feverish pace and used t he pen name "Osamu Dazai" for the first time in a short story called Ressha ( Trai n 1933): his first experiment with the first-person autobiographical style that later became his trademark. But in 1935, it started to become clear that Dazai c ould not graduate, and he failed to obtain a job at a Tokyo newspaper as well. H e finished The Final Years, intended to be his farewell to the world, and tried to hang himself on 19 March 1935 - failing yet again.

Worse was yet to come, as less than three weeks after his third suicide attempt Dazai developed acute appendicitis and was hospitalized, during which time he be come addicted to Pabinal, a morphine-based painkiller. After fighting the addict ion for a year, in October 1936 he was taken to a mental institution, locked in a room and forced to quit cold turkey. The "treatment" lasted over a month, duri ng which time Dazai's wife Hatsuyo committed adultery with his best friend Zensh ir Kodate. This eventually came to light and Dazai attempted to commit double sui cide with his wife. They both took sleeping pills, but neither one died, so he d ivorced her. He quickly remarried, this time to a middle school teacher named Mi chiko Ishihara ( Ishihara Michiko). Their first daughter, Sonoko (), was born i 941.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Dazai wrote a number of subtle novels and short stories that are frequently autobiographical in nature. His first story, Gyofukuki ( 1933), is a grim fantasy involving suicide. Other stories written during this period i nclude Dke no hana (The Flowers of Buffoonery, 1935), Gyakk ( Against the Current, 1 935), Kygen no kami ( The God of Farce, 1936), and those published in his 1936 colle tion Bannen (Declining Years), which describe his sense of personal isolation an d his debauchery. [edit] Wartime yearsJapan entered the Pacific War in December, but Dazai was exc

used from the draft because of his chronic chest problems (he was diagnosed with tuberculosis). The censors became more reluctant to accept Dazai's offbeat work , but he managed to publish quite a bit anyway, remaining one of the very few au thors who managed to turn out interesting material in those years.[citation need ed] A number of the stories, which Dazai published during World War II were rete llings of stories by Ihara Saikaku (16421693). Wartime works included Udaijin San etomo (Minister of the Right Sanetomo, 1943), Tsugaru (1944), Pandora no hako (P andora's Box, 194546), and the delightful Otogizshi (Fairy Tales, 1945) in which h e retold a number of old Japanese fairy tales with vividness and wit. His house was burned down twice in the American air raids against Tokyo, but Daz ai's family escaped unscathed, with a son, Masaki (), born in 1944. His third chil d, daughter Satoko (), later became a famous writer under the pseudonym Yko Tsushim a (), was born in May 1947. [edit] Postwar careerIn the immediate post-war period, Dazai reached the height of his popularity. He depicted a dissolute life in postwar Tokyo in Viyon no Tsuma (Villon's Wife, 1947). The narrator is the wife of a poet, who has abandoned her. She takes a jo b for a tavern keeper from whom her husband has stolen money. Her determination to survive is tested by hardships, rape and her husband's self-delusion, but her will is not broken.

In July 1947 Dazai's best-known work, Shayo (The Setting Sun, translated 1956) d epicting the decline of the Japanese nobility after World War II was published, propelling the already popular writer into a celebrity. This work was based on t he diary of Shizuko ta (). ta was one of the fans of Dazai's works and first met hi n about 1941. She bore him a daughter Haruko () in 1947. Always a heavy drinker, he became an alcoholic; he had already fathered a child out of wedlock with a fan, and his health was also rapidly deteriorating. At thi s time Dazai met Tomie Yamazaki (), a beautician and war widow who had lost her husb and after 10 days of married life. Dazai effectively abandoned his wife and chil dren and moved in with Tomie, writing his quasi-autobiography Ningen Shikkaku (, No Longer Human, 1948, translated. 1958) at the hot-spring resort Atami. Ningen Shikkaku deals with a character hurtling headlong towards self-destructio n, all the while despairing of the seeming impossibility of changing the course of his life. The novel is told in a brutally honest manner, devoid of all sentim entality. The book is one of the classics of Japanese literature and has been tr anslated into several foreign languages. Dazai and Tomie's bodies discovered in 1948In the spring of 1948, he was working on a novelette scheduled to be serialized in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, title d Guddo bai (Goodbye). On 13 June 1948, Dazai and Tomie finally succeeded in kil ling themselves, drowning in the rain-swollen Tamagawa Canal near his house. The ir bodies were not discovered until June 19, which by eerie coincidence was his 39th birthday. His grave is at the temple of Zenrin-ji, in Mitaka, Tokyo. There has been a persistent rumor that his final, successful suicide attempt was not a suicide at all, but that he was murdered by Tomie Yamazaki, who then kill ed herself after dumping his body in the canal. While providing a plot for vario us subsequent fictional novels and a Japanese TV drama, there has been no proof that there is any veracity in this rumor.

[edit] Writing styleThe single most distinguishing feature of Dazai's works is t heir first person viewpoint, a style known in Japanese as "I Novels (, Shishsetsu?)" All of his stories are autobiographical in some manner. His modes of expression

could take the form of a diary, essay, letter, journalistic type reporting, or s oliloquy. Dazai's works are also characterized by a profound pessimism, not surprising fro m an author who made several unsuccessful suicide attempts before finally succee ding. In his novels the protagonist similarly consider suicide as the only viabl e alternative to a hellish existence, yet (often) fail to kill themselves due to an equally savage apathy towards their own existence i.e. the question of wheth er to live or not becomes trivial. In his works, he shifts from pathos to comedy , from melodrama to humor, adjusting his vocabulary accordingly. His opposition to the prevailing social and literary trends was shared by fellow members of the Buraiha school, including Ango Sakaguchi and Sakunosuke Oda. [edit] Major worksMajor works by Dazai include: Year Japanese Title English Title Comments 1933 Omoide Memories in 'Bannen' 1935 Dke no Hana Flowers of Buffoonery in 'Bannen' 1936 Bannen The Late Years Collected short stories 1937 Nijusseiki Kishu A standard-bearer of the twentieth century 1939 Fugaku Hyakkei One hundred views of Mount Fuji Joseito Schoolgirl 1940 Onna no Kett Women's Duel Kakekomi Uttae An urgent appeal Hashire Merosu Run, Melos! 1941 Shin-Hamuretto New Hamlet 1942 Seigi to Bisho Right and Smile 1943 Udaijin Sanetomo Minister of the Right Sanetomo 1944 Tsugaru Tsugaru 1945 Pandora no Hako Pandora's Box Shinshaku Shokoku Banashi A new version of countries' tales Sekibetsu A farewell with regret Otogizshi Fairy Tales 1946 Fuyu no Hanabi Winter's firework Play 1947 Viyon No Tsuma Villon's Wife Shay The Setting Sun 1948 Nyozegamon I heard it in this way Essay t A Cherry Ningen Shikkaku No Longer Human Guddo-bai Good-Bye Unfinished / Osamu Dazai (1909-1948) - Pseudonym of Tsushima Shuji

Japanese novelist and a master storyteller, who became at the end of World War I I the literary voice and literary hero of his generation. Dazai's life ended in double-suicide with his married mistress. In many books Dazai used biographical material from his own family background, and made his self-destructive life the subject of his books. For a time he joined the communist movement. His oppositio n to the prevailing social and literary trends was shared by fellow members of B urai-ha (Decadents). "Dazai's life and work, many Japanese critics have pointed out, are closely inte rtwined. The more reader knows of Dazai's life, so the argument goes, the more D azai can and should be admired for finding a literary means to bare his soul." ( J. Thomas Rimer in Reader's Guide to Japanese Literature, 1999) "Mine has been a life much shame." (The opening sentence of No Longer Human, 184

8) Dazai Osamu was born Tsushima Shuji in Kanagi, in northern Honshu, the tenth of eleven children. His father was a wealthy landowner and politician. Dazai was br ought up mainly by servants. After attending the Hirosake Higher School, he ente red in 1930 the University of Tokyo, where he studied French literature. During this period Dazai came into contact with Marxism, though his commitment to polit ics ended in distrust in all social institutions. In 1931 he married Oyama Hatsu yo, saying later that it "was truly a shameless, imbecilic time. I scarcely show ed up at school at all, of course. I abhorred all effort, and spent my time lyin g around watching H[atsuyo] indifferently." Before marrying Hatsuyo, he had met a nineteen year old bar hostess, Tanabe Shimeko. They spent two days drinking, t ook sleeping pills, and then threw themselves into the sea. Shimeko drowned. While at the university, Dazai met the writer Masuji Ibuse, his literary hero an d mentor. Dazai had read at the age of fourteen Ibuse's Sanshouo (1929, The Sala mander). "I felt with excitement that I had discovered a hidden, anonymous geniu s." Dazai gradually dropped his studies, and developed a persona that in his nov els appeared both sensitive and cynical, a suffering clown and a misfit, who saw through the hypocrisy and shallowness of others. Dazai first attracted attention in 1933 when his stories began to appear in maga zines. Between the years 1930 and 1937 he made three suicide attempts. The subje ct was also brought up many of his short pieces, among them 'Doke no hana' (1936 , in BANNEN) and 'Tokyo hyakkei' (1941). 'A Clown among Clowns' describes Dazai trying to describe his first suicide attempt. "Well, that one didn't work. Suppo se we have a try at the panoramic method." In 1939 Dazai married Ishihara Michiko and turned a new leaf in his life. A numb er of the stories, which Dazai published during World War II, were retellings of stories by Ihara Saikaku (1642-1693). Also German authors, among them the poet Friedrich Schiller, inspired Dazai's work. Dazai wrote in a simple and colloquial style. Many of his stories were based on his own experiences and were classified in the category known as the watakushi s hosetsu, or "I-novel", autobiographical / confessional fiction. He also wrote ch ildren's stories and historical narratives. The tone of Dazai's postwar fiction was dark, but his scandalous life, drug addiction and alcoholism, love affairs, despair, and spirit of rebelliousness touched the lost generation of youth. In h is masterpieces, such as SHAYO (1947, The Setting Sun), about the decline of an aristocratic family, Dazai addressed many social, human and philosophical issues . The word 'shayo' (setting sun) gave rise to the word 'shayozoku' (impoverished aristocracy), covering those whose world died in the war. NINGEN SHIKKAKU (1948 , No Longer Human) was an attack on the traditions of Japan, capturing the postw ar crisis of Japanese cultural identity. "I never personally met the madman who wrote these notebooks..." begins the epilogue of the story. Shayo is a tragedy in postwar Japan. It deals with the fall of an aristocratic f amily, and how traditions or "proper etiquette" is destroyed by the war. "This m ay not be the way of eating soup that etiquette dictates, but to me it is most a ppealing and somehow really genuine. As a matter of fact, it is as Mother does, sitting serenely erect, that when you look down to it. But being, in Naoji's wor ds, a high-class beggar and unable to eat with Mother's effortless ease, I bend over the plate in the gloomy fashion prescribed by proper etiquette." The protagonist, Kazuko, a young woman, wears Western clothes, but her outlook i s Japanese. She is evacuated from Tokyo during the war with her mother. They loo k hopefully to the return of the son from southeast Asia. He does return, but as a drug addict. At the end of the war, Kazuko loses her mother. Her brother Naoj i is caught in the web of his own and society's failures, driving him eventually to kill himself. Kazuko decides to have a child with the disillusioned intellec

tual Uehara, hoping that the child will be her moral revolution. No Longer Human (its actual Japanese title is "Disqualified as a Human") was Daz ai's second novel. The book is one of the classics of Japanese literature and ha s been translated into several languages. The protagonist is a young man, who fe el himself alienated from society but reveals his true thoughts to the reader. T he story also gives an account of the author's personal decline and his relation ships to women. "I have been sickly ever since I was a child and have frequently been confined to bed. How often as I lay there I used to think what uninspired decorations sheets and pillow cases make. It wasn't until I was about twenty tha t I realized that they actually served a practical purpose, and this revelation of human dullness stirred dark depression in me." Among Dazai's finest short stories is 'Viyon no tsuma' (1947, Villon's Wife). Th e narrator is the wife of a poet, who has virtually abandoned her. She finds mea ning in her existence by taking a job for a tavern keeper, from whom her husband has stolen money. Her determination to survive is tested by hardships, rape, an d her husband's self-delusion, but her will is not broken. In 'O-san', translate d in Japan Quarterly (October-December, 1958), the wife revals the disparity bet ween the writer's reasons and his actual reasons for suicide. Dazai's story 'Has hire Merosu' (Run, Merosu!) was adapted into screen in 1966 by the director Senk ichi Taniguchi under the title Kiganjo no boken (Adventures of Takla Makan). The film, starring Toshiro Mifune, Tadao Nakamaru, Tatsuya Mihashi, and Makoto Sato , was partly shot in Iran near Isfahan and at Toho Studios (Tokyo). In the story , set in the distant past, a Japanese adventurer and a priest travel the silk ro ad in their search for Buddha's ashes. After the war, Dazai's alienation continued. He made observations of those who h ad supported the militaristic regime before but in the new political situation e mbraced democracy. Dazai himself had said after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 19 41 that he was "itching to beat the bestial, insensitive Americans to a pulp." O n June 13, in 1948, Dazai drowned himself in Tokyo and left behind unfinished th e novel GUTTO BAI (Goodbye). Shortly before his death, Dazai wrote a letter in w hich he described Ibuse as an "evil man". There is a theory that the lady, Yamaz aki Tomie, who drowned with Dazai actually pushed him in; and she possibly wrote the note in question, some claimed. Ibuse insisted in 'Parting Regrets' (1948), that Dazai died "without leaving behind anything written for me." Dazai's daugh ter Yuko Tsushima also became a writer and published her first short story in 19 69. Her works in the 1970s arose from the collapse of the economic bubble and co incided with a return to the Japanese variant of the first-person novel, in whic h vivid descriptions of the mundane reality of the author's own private world pr edominate. / Dazai Osamu 1909-1948 (Born Tsushima Shuji) Japanese short story writer, novelist, and essayist.

INTRODUCTION Dazai Osamu is considered one of the most important storytellers of postwar Japa n. While known primarily as a novelist, Dazai also earned recognition for his nu merous short stories, including Omoide (Memories), Sarugashima (Monkey Island), and ves), which were published in Bannen, his first collection of short stories. Like most of his longer fiction, Dazai's short stories are autobiographical and refl ect a troubled life marred by alcoholism, drug addiction, and several suicide at tempts. Nevertheless, Dazai's fiction showcases his artistic imagination and uni que confessional narrative technique. Biographical Information Dazai was born the youngest of ten children in Kanagi, a small town in northern

Japan, to one of the wealthiest families in the region. While Dazai's later year s were turbulent, he grew up a sensitive child in comfortable surroundings. Late r in his life, however, his wealthy background led to self-consciousness, contri buting to a nagging sense of isolation that is an undercurrent throughout his fi ction. Dazai underwent his apprenticeship in writing during the 1920s while atte nding secondary schools in Aomori and Hirosaki and published many of his early s tories in magazines founded and run by aspiring young authors. By the time he at tended Hirosaki Higher School, however, Dazai began to live the unconventional l ifestyle that brought him much fame. Despite his widely recognized talent, howev er, alcoholism, drug addiction, affairs with geishas, suicide attempts, and freq uent psychological traumas plagued him the rest of his life. In 1930, Dazai enro lled in the Department of French Literature at Tokyo University, but by the end of his first year, he ceased attending classes. Instead, Dazai became involved w ith left-wing politics, caroused, and renewed his relationship with a geisha he met while attending Hirosaki Higher School. His family disapproved of this relat ionship, leading to one of Dazai's suicide attempts. He attempted to take his ow n life on at least three other occasions and finally succeeded in a double suici de with a young war widow in 1948. This episode, among several instances of doub le suicide in Dazai's fiction, is retold in his widely acclaimed novel, No Longe r Human.

Major Works of Short Fiction Dazai's highly autobiographical fiction first garnered popular and critical atte ntion after the publication of his first collection, Bannen (The Final Years). T he first and most significant of these stories is Omoide(Memories). With its highly personal tone, Memories reveals a common narrative technique in Dazai's writing. R evealing his childhood and adolescent traumas, as well as his need for companion ship and love, Dazai's first-person narrative attracts the reader's sympathy whi le raising doubts about the authenticity of the narration because of exaggerated rhetoric. Gangu (Toys), another tale in Bannen, illustrates Dazai's playfulness. In this tale, the narratorafter briefly relating his financial troublesdetails his p lans to concoct a tale recounting the memories of an infant. While these and oth er early pieces exemplify the personal tone of much of Dazai's work, another gro up of tales shows his talent for imaginative storytelling. Two talesGyofukuki, tran slated as Metamorphosis, and Sarugashima, translated as Monkey Islandprovide good exam les of this. In place of the Dazai-like protagonist present throughout most of h is other short fiction, Metamorphosis is about a peasant girl who, on the verge of puberty, takes on the appearance and identity of a fish. Monkey Island presents t wo humanoid monkeys as its protagonists. In astonishment, one of the monkeys soo n realizes they are the objects of attention, rather than the spectators, of the humans walking through the zoo. In his final years, he composed a series of sto ries that evince his interest in domestic issues, as titles such as Villon's Wife , Father, and Family Happinesssuggest. As critics have remarked, the stories of these collections are among the few works of artistic value produced by a Japanese aut hor under the strict government censorship during World War II. Critical Reception While famous in Japan and avidly readespecially by the younger generationDazai has not achieved the international stature of Japanese writers such as Natsume Ssek i, Kawabata Yasunari, Mishima Yukio, and End Shusaku. This is partly due to prob lems with translating Dazai's highly personal style. Yet Dazai has earned himsel f a position in modern Japanese letters more or less comparable to that of an F. Scott Fitzgerald, as opposed to a William Faulkner, in modern American literatu re. Donald Keene, Dazai's principal English translator, has described him as a J apanese writer who emerged at the end of World War II as the literary voice of hi s time. While Dazai's body of work is sometimes criticized for its narrow scope, many critics maintain that his fiction contains some of the most beautiful prose in modern Japanese literature. Source: Short Story Criticism, 2001 Gale Cengage. All Rights Reserved. Full copyr

ight. /