Osamu Dazai

Japanese author

Fame64.8
Momentum5.6
Japan rank#223

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Fame64.8
Momentum5.6
Japan rank#223
Writers rank#122
Wikipedia123.3K

Lived 1909–1948, aged 39Japan

Japan WritersWriter / Author

Wikipedia
55 languages
Cross-language footprint
Rank in Japan
#223
Writers
Era
1909–1948
Aged 39
Known for
Human Lost
2019

Summary

Updated 2026-06-08

He wrote about despair with such clarity that readers still can't look away. No Longer Human — his final novel before his 1948 death — became one of the best-selling books in Japanese history, a portrait of alienation so precise it reads like confession.

Biography

About

Shūji Tsushima was born in 1909 and took the pen name Osamu Dazai, drawing on Dostoevsky, Akutagawa, and Murasaki Shikibu to shape a voice steeped in psychological unraveling. The Setting Sun made him a fixture of postwar Japanese literature, but it was No Longer Human — published the year he died — that became his defining work, the one that traveled farthest beyond Japan. He also wrote under the name Shunpei Kuroki for Illusion of the Cliffs. He drowned in June 1948, six days before his thirty-ninth birthday, leaving behind novels that turned self-interrogation into an art form.

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from Osamu Dazai

Osamu Dazai

saidundated

The weak fear happiness itself. They can harm themselves on cotton wool. Sometimes they are wounded even by happiness.

Osamu Dazai

saidundated

I have always shook with fright before human beings.

— The First Notebook

Osamu Dazai

saidundated

As long as I can make them laugh, it doesn’t matter how, I’ll be alright. If I succeed in that, the human beings probably won’t mind it too much if I remain outside their lives.

— The First Notebook

Osamu Dazai

saidundated

There are some people whose dread of human beings is so morbid that they reach a point where they yearn to see with their own eyes monsters of ever more horrible shapes.

— The Second Notebook

Osamu Dazai

saidundated