On June 22, playwright and novelist Hisashi Inoue appeared on national broadcaster NHK's television program, "Close Up Gendai." The occasion was the centenary of the birth of the novelist Osamu Dazai.
Inoue, who was invited as an expert on Dazai, had penned a sympathetic portrait of the novelist in his 1989 play "Ningen Gokaku" ("Forever Human") — whose title plays on the title of Dazai's most popular novel, "Ningen Shikkaku" ("No Longer Human").
Dazai was born in Kanagi on the Tsugaru Peninsula in northern Honshu; and Inoue hails from a small town in Yamagata Prefecture, which is also in Japan's northern Tohoku region.