His two final books, The Setting Sunand No Longer Human, were released in the late 1940s and are often recognized as among the most important Japanese novels of the twentieth century. By most accounts he reached the pinnacle of his literary powers in the early postwar period. During the war years, he avoided becoming an outright propagandist but was hardly antigovernment, retreating from the issues of the day by writing historical pieces and retold fairy tales. In the 1930s he came to prominence as a writer of stories and novels. Dazai was born into the Japanese aristocracy of the early twentieth century, and as a young man he fell in with literary types, prostitutes, and Communists. This creator of moody, Dostoevskian heroes-toeing the line between brutality and beauty, cynicism and élan-has the kind of biography that threatens to overshadow the work itself, and that’s before you realize that most of what Dazai wrote is taken to be autobiographical.
Much mythologized in his home country, the mid-twentieth-century Japanese writer Osamu Dazai remains little known in the West, even some seventy years after he was first translated into English.
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