The author of the global bestseller No Longer Human and The Setting Sun, Osamu Dazai (1909-1948) was famous for confronting head-on the social and moral crises of postwar Japan. He committed suicide by drowning in Tokyo’s Tamagawa Aqueduct.Donald Keene, the author of dozens of books in both English andJapanese as well as the famed translator of Dazai, Kawabata, and Mishima, was thefirst non-Japanese to receive the Yomiuri Prize for Literature.

"What I despise about Dazai is that he exposes precisely those things in myself that I most want to hide."