Sales of books by Osamu Dazai, who died by suicide in 1948 aged 38, have rocketed in recent years. His best-known novel, No Longer Human (1948), has sold more than 75,000 copies in the UK alone. The intense semi-autobiographical account of one man’s alienation was the last work of fiction completed before Dazai’s death.
Born in the north of Japan in 1909 to a wealthy family, Dazai was a brilliant student but showed early signs of mental ill health, making two suicide attempts by age 21. He lived what his translator Donald Keene called a “life of wild dissipation”, including morphine addiction and numerous relationships.
Unexpected popularity and new edition
Until recently, Dazai’s work was available only in imported editions from US publisher New Directions. This month, Penguin Classics capitalises on his unexpected popularity by publishing the first UK edition of Dazai’s work in almost 70 years: a collection of short stories from a female perspective, titled Schoolgirl.
Polly Barton, who selected and translated the stories, says that although Dazai may be relatively new to English-speaking readers, in Japan he is “one of the big three, along with Yukio Mishima and Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, that everyone talks about as the fathers of modern Japanese literature”.
Barton adds that in recent years he has been discovered by a new generation of younger readers. “The sense I get is that he’s particularly popular with young men – the demographic that we’re constantly told is not reading books.” This is surprising since Dazai’s novels are bleak, nihilistic and riddled with narrators’ self-loathing.
Themes and appeal
No Longer Human comprises a series of notebooks by a formerly “handsome young man” who declares his incompatibility with the human race. For him, the world is “a place of bottomless horror”; he concludes that “living itself is the source of sin”. The narrator of the title story of Schoolgirl takes a similar view: “the problem is that I’m corrupt. I’m a bad girl.”
Barton says Dazai “leans into [the self-loathing] with a kind of exuberance”. His appeal lies in this “unashamed emotional quality, but also tempered with enormous intelligence”. Tynan Kogane, editor-in-chief at New Directions, agrees: “I think a lot of young readers see themselves in Dazai’s works.” He adds that “there’s a lot of nihilism and despair in Dazai’s work, and it’s unfortunate for our country at the moment, but there’s a lot of nihilism and despair [here too]. The unhappy man in postwar Japan really resonates with a lot of readers.”
Anime boost and lasting impact
Dazai’s popularity among younger readers may have spread online – on Reddit and TikTok – but his renaissance also has roots in a 2016 Japanese anime TV series called Bungo Stray Dogs, which features fictionalised versions of real writers. The series includes a “swashbuckling” version of Osamu Dazai. Chris Wait, an editor at New Directions, says the show has been a godsend for book sales. Soon after the TV series was released in America in 2018, sales grew.
“Before that we were selling dozens or hundreds of copies [a year],” Kogane says. At the height of Bungo Stray Dogs fever, Dazai’s sales went stratospheric. “At the height of it,” Wait adds, “the annual figure was something like 150,000 copies, which for us is pretty rare.” When asked if sales of No Longer Human bought New Directions a new office floor, Wait replied: “Yes. And our previous carpeting was very much in need of an update.”
Beyond the heartfelt despair of No Longer Human, novellas such as The Flowers of Buffoonery (1935) and The Beggar Student (1940) are frequently playful and funny; self-referential and self-mocking. “Why do I bother writing novels?” the narrator of The Beggar Student asks. “Am I lured by the glory of literary celebrity? Or do I simply want to write bestsellers and cash huge cheques? Let me spare you the theatrics. I want both. So bad it hurts.”
Schoolgirl, with its exclusively female viewpoints, presents a different side to Dazai. The authenticity of the voice may be in part because the title story, as Barton says, “was heavily based on the diary of a real 19-year-old schoolgirl that Dazai was sent in the post”.
But Dazai’s most famous book remains linked with his own life and death. In No Longer Human, the narrator has survived a suicide pact in which his girlfriend died. Soon after finishing the book, Dazai completed his own suicide pact with his lover Tomie Yamazaki. Their bodies were recovered six days later, on what would have been his 39th birthday. His work lives on more than ever.
