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Osamu Dazai (1909-1948), the pen name of Shuji Tsushima, was born, the tenth of eleven children, into a family of wealthy landowners in northern Japan. He began writing short stories while studying French at Tokyo Imperial University and soon became well known among the younger generation for his excessive bohemian lifestyle. After World War II, he gained wide recognition in the West for his pessimistic novels, notably The Setting Sun (1947) and No Longer Human (1948). Despite his troubled life and rebellious spirit—he made several suicide attempts and eventually ended his life with a married lover—Dazai wrote about a wide range of personal experiences in a simple and colloquial style.

James A. O’Brien is Professor of Japanese in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He received his Ph.D in Japanese from Indiana University. He is the author of many works on Japanese literature, including Dazai Osamu (1975) and the edited volume Akutagawa and Dazai: Instances of Literary Adaptation (1988).