Osamu Dazai

Osamu Dazai was a Japanese author who is considered one of the foremost fiction writers of 20thcentury Japan. A number of his most popular works, such as The Setting Sun and No Longer Human , are considered modernday classics in Japan. With a semiautobiographical style and transparency into his personal life, Dazais stories have intrigued the minds of many readers. His books also bring about awareness to a number of important topics such as human nature, mental illness, social relationships, and postwar Japan.

Dazai was born Shji Tsushima , the eighth surviving child of a wealthy landowner in Kanagi, a remote corner of Japan at the northern tip of Thoku in Aomori Prefecture. He spent these early years in the Tsushima mansion with some thirty people. Despite coming from very humble beginnings, the Tsushima family quickly rose in power and after some time, became highly respected across the region. Dazais father, Genemon Tsushima, became politically involved and was offered membership into the House of Peers. This made Dazais father absent during much of his early childhood, and with his mother, Tane, chronically ill after having given birth tochildren, Tsushima was brought up mostly by the familys servants.

Source: Wikipedia