"It's not that I'm weak, it's that the suffering weighs down on me too heavily."
This was said, in 1938, by a writer whose life and death bring together crowds all around the country every year on June 19 in rituals of celebration and mourning — the two being difficult to separate given the nature of this man whose popularity has not waned to this day.
Osamu Dazai, suffering artist, was the author of such postwar classics as "No Longer Human" and "The Setting Sun" — the former the second most popular novel ever for the leading publishing house, Shinchosha; the latter its 10th most popular. In fact, Dazai is extensively published by numerous major publishers, including Chikuma, Iwanami and Kadokawa, and his novels and stories are continually being made into films.