Osamu Dazai

Born Shūji Tsushima to a wealthy landowning family in Aomori, he spent his life fleeing the respectability it demanded of him: expelled from elite schools, addicted to the painkiller Pabinal after surgery, and repeatedly involved in double-suicide pacts with women, one of which killed his partner in 1930 and left him alive.

After the war he became the star of the buraiha, or 'decadent school,' writing the collapse of the old order in real time: The Setting Sun, about an aristocratic family sliding into ruin, coined the very phrase 'people of the setting sun' for Japan's dispossessed gentry, and No Longer Human turned his own self-disgust into the confession of a man who has never felt entitled to be human.

In June 1948, days after finishing No Longer Human, he drowned himself with his lover Tomie Yamazaki in a Tokyo canal; their bodies surfaced on what would have been his thirty-ninth birthday.