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Born on June 19, 1909, the sixth son of the great landlord and House of Peers member Tsushima Gen'emon in Kanagi village, Kitatsugaru District, Aomori (today Kanagi-cho, Goshogawara City). His real name was Tsushima Shuji. Raised in the mansion 'Shayokan' (today the Dazai Osamu Memorial Hall), after old-system Hirosaki Higher School, in 1930 he entered the French Literature Department of the Faculty of Letters, Tokyo Imperial University (withdrew in 1935). In his life he experienced four suicide attempts: his first in November 1930 (a love-suicide with the waitress Tabe Shimeko at Koshigoe, Kamakura, where only the woman died), his second in March 1935 (an attempted hanging on the hill behind Kamakura Hachiman-gu), his third in March 1937 (an attempted lovers' suicide at Minakami Onsen with his common-law wife Koyama Hatsuyo), and his fourth in June 1948 (a successful drowning-suicide with his lover Yamazaki Tomie in the Tamagawa Canal). He also suffered from drug and alcohol addiction. In 1939, with Ibuse Masuji as go-between, he married Ishihara Michiko, and in a relatively stable period he wrote 'A Hundred Views of Mount Fuji,' 'Run, Melos!' (1940), 'Tsugaru' (1944), 'The Setting Sun' (1947, depicting the fallen nobility of the postwar period, winning women fans and making 'shayo-zoku' a popular term), 'Villon's Wife' (1947), and others. After the war, together with Sakaguchi Ango and Oda Sakunosuke, he was called part of the 'Buraiha' and 'Shin-gesakuha,' forming a new current in postwar Japanese literature. In March-May 1948 he wrote 'No Longer Human' (serialized in the coterie magazine 'Tenbo,' June-August issues), his representative work. Late on June 13, 1948, together with Yamazaki Tomie he drowned in the Tamagawa Canal in Mitaka, Tokyo; the body was found on June 19 (strangely, his 39th birthday). His grave is at Zenrin-ji in Mitaka.

A complex character in which extreme self-loathing and childlike dependence are mingled. 'I'm sorry to have been born' and 'I have led a life full of shame' are famous lines from the opening of 'No Longer Human,' but they were also the author's own real feelings. Guilt toward his wealthy birth family, setback in the proletarian movement, history with women and suicide attempts — he exposed his own weakness thoroughly and sublimated it aesthetically, bringing forth his own literature. While loving Ibuse Masuji as his 'lifelong master,' he showed fierce enmity toward Kawabata Yasunari and Shiga Naoya. The unity of dependence and rebellion as two sides of one coin resonated with the psychology of postwar youth, and even today the adjective 'Dazai-esque' is used as a word for the mental landscape of the young.

'No Longer Human' has topped cumulative circulation of 7 million copies, becoming one of the greatest bestsellers in the history of Japanese literature. 'Run, Melos!' is still a standard in middle school Japanese textbooks, widely read as a classic of 'friendship and trust.' Because Dazai's literature treats the universal themes of adolescent self-establishment, a sense of alienation, and self-negation, it has been handed down from the postwar era to the Reiwa era as 'the book of youth' for young people of each generation. The birthplace 'Shayokan' in Kanagi-cho, Goshogawara, Aomori, is designated an Important Cultural Property of the country, and as the Dazai Osamu Memorial Hall attracts more than 100,000 visitors a year. Dazai's grave is at Zenrin-ji in Mitaka, and every June 19 on 'Oto Memorial Day' (from his representative work 'Cherries'), large numbers of fans gather from across the country, and events such as haiku and readings are held. In 2019, the 110th anniversary of his birth, and in 2020, the 70th anniversary of his death, commemorative publications and exhibitions followed in succession, reaffirming the contemporaneity of Dazai literature. There have also been many film, TV drama, and anime versions, and around 2020 it has penetrated Generation Z through Yonezu Kenshi's song 'Ningen Shikkaku,' 'Bungo Stray Dogs,' and others.