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There’s no question that Japanese literature has been one of the outstanding successes for British bookshops in recent years: in 2024 close to half of the bestselling translated fiction titles were from Japan. Much of the Japanese fiction translated into English fits into broad categories – cats, crime, coffee shops – but one surprise bestseller stands alone.
Sales of books by Osamu Dazai, who killed himself in 1948 aged 38, have rocketed in the last few years. His best-known novel, No Longer Human (1948), has sold more than 75,000 copies in the UK alone. An intense semi-autobiographical account of one man’s alienation, it 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 the age of 21. He lived what his translator Donald Keene called a “life of wild dissipation”, including morphine addiction and a number of relationships.
Until recently, Dazai’s work has been available only in imported editions from the US publisher New Directions. But 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 into English, tells me 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”.
In recent years, Barton adds, 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 even more surprising, since Dazai’s novels are not traditional bestseller material. They are bleak, nihilistic and riddled with their narrators’ self-loathing.
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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.”
The relentless pessimism in Dazai’s work risks seeming overwhelming or indulgent but, as Barton puts it, Dazai “leans into [the self-loathing] with a kind of exuberance”. Indeed, his appeal in part lies in this “unashamed emotional quality, but also tempered with enormous intelligence”.
Tynan Kogane, the editor-in-chief at New York-based 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.”
Dazai’s popularity among younger readers may have spread online – on Reddit and TikTok, where commenters praise him as the only person that understands me”. But his renaissance also has unexpected roots in a 2016 Japanese anime TV series called Bungo Stray Dogs, which has fictionalised versions of real writers as its central characters.
This bizarre series, featuring a “swashbuckling” version of Osamu Dazai, has been a godsend for book sales, says Chris Wait, an editor at New Directions. Soon after the TV series was released in America in 2018, New Directions noticed sales of Dazai’s books growing.
“Before that we were selling dozens or hundreds of copies [a year],” Kogane says. As Bungo Stray Dogs fever grew, 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.” Is it true that sales of No Longer Human bought New Directions a new office floor? “Yes,” replies Wait. “And our previous carpeting was very much in need of an update.”
But the appeal of Dazai’s work goes much further than this cartoon cameo. His books have both style and substance. There’s “a natural gregariousness to his storytelling,” Wait says, “this raconteurship that keeps you reading no matter what he’s talking about”.
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.”
Similarly, 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 tells me, “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 inextricably 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. But his work – now more than ever – lives on.
Schoolgirl by Osamu Dazai, translated by Polly Barton, is published by Penguin Classics. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
