Home to Tsugaru
Osamu Dazai, Shelley Marshall (translation)As World War II was coming to an end, Osamu Dazai (born Shuji Tsushima) returned to his home in the northern tip of Honshu, Japan on assignment from a publisher to travel & write about the part of Japan where he was born & raised.
He writes with humor & warmth about old friends, the people (family & servants) who nurtured him, his obsession with crabs, & his worries over sake in times of rationing. He writes with pride about his home even as he learns about some of its customs & history for the first time. This travel journal is part travelogue, part history lesson, & part love story.
Osamu Dazai (1909-1948) was a twentieth century Japanese author. He is best known for the novels The Setting Sun & No Longer Human.
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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.