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June 19, 2012

Famous Birthdays Today: 1909 - Osamu Dazai, Japan, novelist!

Osamu Dazai (June 19, 1909 – June 13, 1948) was a Japanese author who is considered one of the foremost fiction writers of 20th-century Japan.

Hugo Kempeneer (English)

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Osamu Dazai (June 19, 1909 – June 13, 1948) was a Japanese author who is considered one of the foremost fiction writers of 20th-century Japan.

Dazai was born Shūji Tsushima, the eighth surviving child of a wealthy landowner in Kanagi, a remote corner of Japan at the northern tip of Tōhoku in Aomori Prefecture. His father was a member of the House of Peers and was thus often away from home, and his mother was chronically ill after having given birth to 11 children, so he was brought up mostly by the servants.

Tsushima was sent to Aomori Prefectural Aomori High School and Hirosaki for higher school. An excellent student and an able writer even then, he edited student publications and contributed some of his own works. His life only started to change when his idol writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa committed suicide in 1927. Tsushima started to neglect his studies, spending his allowance on clothes, alcohol and prostitutes and dabbling with Marxism, 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. On 10 December 1929, the night before 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 University and promptly stopped studying again. In October, he ran away with geisha Hatsuyo Oyama and was formally expelled from his family. Nine days after the expulsion, Tsushima attempted suicide by drowning off a beach in Kamakura with another woman (whom he barely knew), 19-year-old bar hostess Shimeko Tanabe. Shimeko died, but Tsushima lived, having been rescued by a fishing boat, leaving him with a strong sense of guilt. Shocked by the events, Tsushima's family intervened to drop a police investigation, his allowance was reinstated and in December Tsushima and Oyama were married.

This moderately happy state of affairs did not last long, as Tsushima was arrested for his involvement with the banned Communist Party of Japan and, upon learning 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 dropped 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.

In 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 job 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) depicting 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 the diary of Shizuko Ōta (太田静子). Ōta was one of the fans of Dazai's works and first met him in about 1941. She bore him a daughter Haruko (治子) 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 this time Dazai met Tomie Yamazaki (山崎富栄), a beautician and war widow who had lost her husband after 10 days of married life. Dazai effectively abandoned his wife and children and moved in with Tomie, writing his quasi-autobiography Ningen Shikkaku (人間失格, No Longer Human, 1948, translated. 1958) at the hot-spring resort Atami.

Ningen Shikkaku deals with a character hurtling headlong towards self-destruction, 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 sentimentality. The book is one of the classics of Japanese literature and has been translated into several foreign languages.

In the spring of 1948, he was working on a novelette scheduled to be serialized in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, titled Guddo bai (Goodbye). On 13 June 1948, Dazai and Tomie finally succeeded in killing themselves, drowning in the rain-swollen Tamagawa Canal near his house. Their 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 killed herself after dumping his body in the canal. While providing a plot for various subsequent fictional novels and a Japanese TV drama, there has been no proof that there is any veracity in this rumor.

Source: Wikipedia, read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osamu_Dazai

This article was translated by Microsoft Translator.

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