A Shameful Life (Ningen Shikkaku)

Osamu Dazai is one of the most famous—and infamous—writers of 20th-century Japan. A Shameful Life (Ningen Shikkaku) is his final published work & has become a bestselling classic for its depiction of the tortured struggle of a young man to survive in a world that he cannot comprehend.

Paralleling the life & death of Dazai himself, the delicate weaving of fact & fiction remorselessly documents via journals the life of Yozo, a university student who spends his time in increasing isolation & debauchery. His doomed love affairs, suicide attempts, & constant fear of revealing his true self haunt the pages of the book & reveal a slow descent into madness. This dark tale nevertheless conveys something authentic about the human heart & its inability to find its true bearing.

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OSAMU DAZAI was born in 1909 into a powerful landowning family of northern Japan. A brilliant student, he entered the French department of Tokyo University in 1930, but later boasted that in the five years before he left without a degree, he had never attended a lecture. Dazai was famous for confronting head-on the social & moral crises of postwar Japan before he committed suicide by throwing himself into Tokyo’s Tamagawa Aqueduct. His body was found on what would have been his 39th birthday.