“Dazai was born in the northernmost part of Honshū, the tenth child of his parents. The household included not only parents and the surviving children but many relatives, ranging down from Dazia’s great-grandmother to small cousins, and also fourteen or fifteen cooks, maids, manservants, and other domestics, who swelled to total number of people living under the one roof to more than thirty. The Tsushima family (Dazai’s real name was Tsushima Shūji) was one of the richest in that part of Japan. The wealth was not of long standing: the founder of the family fortune was Dazai’s great-grandfather who, shortly after the Meiji Restoration, had established a trading company that had prospered. He used the profits to increase the family property holdings by buying up fields abandoned by the samurai, who were free after 1871 to sell their land. The great-grandfather’s business acumen enabled him to rank among the dozen highest taxpayers in Aomori Prefecture and he eventually obtained political office. His grandson, Dazai’s father, increased the family fortune and built the imposing house in which Dazai was born. Dazai often referred to himself as a farmer’s son, but this no doubt was by way of apology to the world for the privileges he had enjoyed as a child. Wherever he went in the vicinity he was treated with the deference due to a ‘young master.’ Dazai’s mother, perhaps exhausted by repeated childbirths, was unable to look after him, and he was left in the care of an aunt whom he supposed for years to be his mother. A feeling that he had been rejected by his mother may account for his unhappy disposition.”
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