Dazai osamu biography of michael

Osamu Dazai is one of Japan’s most celebrated modern writers. He was born in , at the end of Japan’s era of rapid modernization known as the Meiji Period. He began writing as a high school student, moved by the suicide of the great Japanese short story writer, Ryonosuke Akutagawa in

Dazai is a writer of great genius, as remembered for his colorful life story as he is for his fiction. He had a complex, decade-long relationship with an apprentice geisha. He developed addictions to alcohol and opioids. He attempted suicide with multiple lovers, and eventually succeeded in Their bodies were discovered on what would have been his thirty-ninth birthday.

Dazai’s biography is so interesting to readers in part because Dazai was also a master manipulator of the semi-autobiographical I-novel genre—in many ways, his fiction is his biography. Most of his writing is, if not strictly autobiographical, at least deeply influenced by his own life experiences. Readers who frequent Dazai will find themselves on familiar ground in the latest collection of his work in translation, Early Light.

The first two stories in particular include the kind of narrator Dazai most frequently employs and the whole I-novel genre most celebrates—flawed, self-loathing, uncomfortable with his own genius, able to see the needs of others but unwilling to put anyone else’s needs before his own.

The title story, translated by Ralph McCarthy, chronicles a family in the late days of the Pacific War. Together with his wife and two children, the protagonist-narrator must strive to survive American firebombing. (This account has autobiographical roots. Dazai’s own home was destroyed twice during air raids.)

“One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji”, also translated by McCarthy, takes place some years earlier. The protagonist retires to the famous tourist site to rethink his life. The meditative narrative plays with the printmaker Hokusai’s famous collection of the same name to reconsider how the sam

&#;As he would have been first to admit, by ordinary standards Osamu Dazai (–) was not what most of us would call a “decent” man. In the words of poet and critic Kenneth Rexroth, his was an “extremely disorganized” life. Though for sure the adjective applies, Rexroth might as accurately have said “supremely” or even “magnificently,” for Dazai’s life was nothing less than a monument of disorganization, a litany of self-inflicted wounds and disasters culminating in not only his own but two other suicides.

&#;Born Shūji Tsushima (he acquired his pseudonym in ) to an upper-class Japanese family, from an early age Dazai demonstrated a precocious talent for writing. He was a diligent student and seemed bound for success. Things took a turn for the worse, however, starting in when his literary hero, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, committed suicide. He started neglecting his studies. Before long the pattern of Dazai’s life was established, with him failing at school, squandering his allowance on alcohol and prostitutes, dabbling in Marxism, and courting—symbiotically—women and suicide.

&#;You would not expect all of this “disorganization” to add up to a career of any sort, let alone that of a distinguished and remarkable author whose works are considered to be classics of Japanese literature, and for whom a prestigious literary prize is named. But that only goes to show that—when it comes to artists in general and in particular to literary artists—“ordinary standards” don’t apply.

&#;If I single out literary artists, it’s because unlike (say) Picasso, whose personal flaws and disasters were relevant to his art only insofar as they distorted its subjects, Dazai made his flaws the very subject of his art. So closely do his novels and short stories hew to his personal defeats, disasters, disgraces, and debacles, reading them one gets the ominous feeling that he lived as he did at least partially to furnish himself with a subject, namely dissolution; namely his own. At ti

The character or the author?

The character, I’m not sure it’s come up. Correct me if I’m wrong. The author? I also don’t think it’s clear, honestly. Maybe? Some of his works certainly have characters who aren’t inclined to believe in God, or at least don’t have a charitable view thereof, but that doesn’t necessarily equate to his own beliefs or lack thereof (although, admittedly, Dazai blurs the line between character and author in No Longer Human).

That said, Dazai uses a lot of Christian imagery and explores the religion in a lot of his works (particularly TheSetting Sun); scholars have written whole theses on it, actually. He also clearly drew on a lot of Dostoyevsky’s works, which were very much inspired by Dostoyevsky’s existentialist faith, although the conclusions tend to be rather different. I don’t know if his works really seek to answer the questions of life and faith, though. I’m also not sure it matters insofar as interpreting his works go.

Please chime in if you know anything, though! I don’t believe I’ve ever read anything about what he personally believed or didn’t believe, but I’m curious to learn if people know things I don’t!

Dazai Osamu () is one of Japan&#;s most famous literary suicides, known as the earliest postwar manifestation of the genuinely alienated writer in Japan. In this first deconstructive reading of a modern Japanese novelist, Alan Wolfe draws on contemporary Western literary and cultural theories and on a knowledge of Dazai&#;s work in the context of Japanese literary history to provide a fresh view of major texts by this important literary figure. In the process, Wolfe revises Japanese as well as Western scholarship on Dazai and discovers new connections among suicide, autobiography, alienation, and modernization. As shown here, Dazai&#;s writings resist narrative and historical closure; while he may be said to serve the Japanese literary establishment as both romantic decadent and representative scapegoat, his texts reveal a deconstructive edge through which his posthumous status as a monument of negativity is already perceived and undone. Wolfe maintains that cultural modernization pits a Western concept of the individual as realized self and coherent subject against an Eastern absent self&#;and that a felt need to overcome this tension inspires the autobiographical fiction so prevalent in Japanese novels. Suicidal Narrative in Modern Japan shows that Dazai&#;s texts also resist readings that would resolve the gaps (East/West, self/other, modern/premodern) still prevalent in Japanese intellectual life.

Originally published in

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