Word: dazai
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Mishima's abrasive career ended in seppuku (disembowelment, then decapitation by a member of his private "army"). Kawataba and Dazai were not given to such self-dramatization, but they too died by their own hands. Indeed, it is no mere verbal swagger to define contemporary Japanese writing as a matter of life and death. In the '70s one Tokyo scholarly journal devoted an entire issue to "The Writer and Suicide." There is a death wish operating through Japanese literature. Says Masao Miyoshi, a Japanese lit erary scholar (Accomplices of Silence...
...LONGER HUMAN (177 pp.)-Osamu Dazai-New Directions...
...aged 38, Japanese Novelist Osamu Dazai committed suicide by jumping into Tokyo's Tamagawa Reservoir. It was Dazai's fifth attempt, but he had long courted self-destruction in alcoholism and morphine addiction. The son of a rich landowning family, Novelist Dazai was deeply, perhaps disastrously, Westernized. The title of his first novel, The Setting Sun, provided a tag line ("people of the setting sun") for postwar Japanese disillusionment and class disintegration. Spare, evocative and heavily autobiographical, Dazai's novels are monochromes of despair. Their only affirmation is the fact that the author took the trouble...
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