Early Life
Dazai was born Shūji Tsushima (津島修治, Tsushima Shūji?), the eighth surviving child of a wealthy landowner in Kanagi, a remote corner of Japan at the northern tip of Tōhoku in Aomori Prefecture. His father was a member of the House of Peers and was thus often away from home, and his mother was chronically ill after having given birth to 11 children, so he was brought up mostly by the servants.
Tsushima was sent to Aomori Prefectural Aomori High School and Hirosaki for higher school. An excellent student and an able writer even then, he edited student publications and contributed some of his own works. His life only started to change when his idol writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa committed suicide in 1927. Tsushima started to neglect his studies, spending his allowance on clothes, alcohol and prostitutes and dabbling with Marxism, at the time heavily suppressed by the government. He frequently expressed guilt in his earliest writing about having been born into what he thought of as the incorrect social class. On 10 December 1929, the night before year-end exams that he had no hopes of passing, Tsushima attempted to commit suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills, but he survived and managed to graduate the following year.
Tsushima enrolled in the French Literature Department of the Tokyo Imperial University and promptly stopped studying again. In October, he ran away with geisha Hatsuyo Oyama (小山初代 Oyama Hatsuyo) and was formally expelled from his family. Nine days after the expulsion, Tsushima attempted suicide by drowning off a beach in Kamakura with another woman (whom he barely knew), 19-year-old bar hostess Shimeko Tanabe (田辺シメ子 Tanabe Shimeko). Shimeko died, but Tsushima lived, having been rescued by a fishing boat, leaving him with a strong sense of guilt. Shocked by the events, Tsushima's family intervened to drop a police investigation, his allowance was reinstated and in December Tsushima and Oyama were married.
This moderately happy state of affairs did not last long, as Tsushima was arrested for his involvement with the banned Communist Party of Japan and, upon learning this, his elder brother Bunji promptly cut off his allowance again. Tsushima went into hiding, but Bunji managed to get word to him that charges would be dropped and the allowance reinstated yet again if he solemnly promised to graduate and swear off any involvement with the party, and Tsushima took up the offer.
Read more about this topic: Osamu Dazai, Biography
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