Born in Kanagi Village, Kitatsugaru District, Aomori Prefecture, as the sixth son of Tsushima Gen'emon, one of the prefecture's leading landowners, and his mother Tane. He was the tenth of eleven children. His father, Gen'emon, was an adopted son-in-law from the Matsuki family, a wealthy farming family in Kizukuri Village, and was a local dignitary who served as a prefectural assemblyman, a member of the House of Representatives, and a member of the House of Peers due to his high tax contributions; the Tsushima family was known as the "Lords of Kanagi." Because his father was busy with work and his mother was sickly, he was raised by a wet nurse immediately after birth. After that nurse left within a year, his aunt Kie took over, and from age three until he entered elementary school, a maid about eleven years his senior named Chikamura Take served as his nanny. He entered Kanagi First Ordinary Elementary School. While children of the Tsushima family were given top marks regardless of actual performance, Dazai's actual grades were excellent, and he was said to be the most brilliant student since the school's opening. After graduating elementary school, he attended Meiji Higher Elementary School for one year. This was reportedly to supplement his academic ability so he wouldn't fall behind, as his elder brothers Eiji and Keiji had dropped out of Hirosaki Middle School due to poor performance. In April, he entered Aomori Prefectural Aomori Middle School, living in a boarding house away from home. He excelled academically, serving as class president from the second term of his first year until graduation, ranking 4th out of 148 students at the end of his fourth year. He avidly read Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Naoya Shiga, Saisei Muroo, and Kan Kikuchi, and was so excited by Masuji Ibuse's "Salamander" that he couldn't remain seated while reading. Around age 17, he wrote the draft "The Last Taiko" for the school magazine and published twelve issues of the coterie magazine "Mirage" with friends. He began aspiring to be a novelist. However, a habit of laziness began to show; when his eldest brother Bunji looked at Dazai's middle school textbooks, they were filled with caricatures of teachers and siblings. On July 24th, while home in Kanagi for summer break, he was shocked to learn of Ryunosuke Akutagawa's death and shut himself away upon returning to his Hirosaki boarding house. Around this time, he met the geisha Hatsuyo Koyama. Despite knowing no French, he admired French literature and entered the Department of French Literature at Tokyo Imperial University, moving to the capital. Unable to keep up with lectures, he considered transferring to Art History. He became a disciple of Masuji Ibuse to become a novelist. Ten days after being expelled from university, on November 28th, he attempted double suicide with 18-year-old Shimeko Tanabe, a waitress at the Ginza bar "Hollywood," at Koshigoe Cape using Calmotin; only Dazai survived. He held a private wedding ceremony with Hatsuyo at Shibata Inn in the Ikarigaseki Onsen district, but they did not officially register the marriage. He uses the first-person pronoun "Watashi" and the second-person "Kimi," speaking in a manner like "Pray, do [such and such]." He has a manic-depressive temperament. After the failure of his leftist activities, he repeatedly attempted suicide and abused drugs, yet continued to publish works from before through after WWII. His major works include "Run, Melos!" and "No Longer Human." "The Setting Sun," which features a woman from a fallen aristocratic family as the protagonist, became a bestseller. After the war, his style led him to be grouped with Ango Sakaguchi, Sakunosuke Oda, Jun Ishikawa, and Kazuo Dan as the "Buraiha" (Decadent School). He is a man who maintains relationships with multiple women at once and borrows vast sums of money from those around him. During the WWII draft, he was called for literary mobilization, but after a physical exam at the Hongo Ward Office, he was exempted due to a chest ailment. He first met Chuya Nakahara in 1934 at Kazuo Dan's house and at a tavern. At the time, Dazai, two years younger, respected the poet Nakahara, but Nakahara was a mean drunk who would aggressively harass Dazai when intoxicated. When Nakahara taunted him, saying, "You've got a face like a blue mackerel floating in the sky. What flower do you like?" Dazai answered fearfully, "P... peach blossoms." One day, a drunken Nakahara barged into Dazai's home. Right in front of Dazai, he shouted "Idiot! Idiot!" at the top of his lungs repeatedly. Dazai was so terrified by Nakahara's violent verbal abuse that he crawled under his futon and sobbed until it was over. In 1935, Dazai's "Gyakkō" (Retrogression) was a finalist for the 1st Akutagawa Prize. However, he lost. Selection committee member Yasunari Kawabata wrote in his review, "I cast a slight chill upon the author's current life. There is an unpleasant cloud that hinders the honest expression of his talent." This was an implicit criticism of Dazai's private life at the time, including his drug addiction and suicide attempts. Reading this, Dazai was enraged and published an open letter titled "To Yasunari Kawabata" in the magazine Bungei Tsushin. In it, Dazai wrote extreme words like, "I'll stab him. That's what I thought. I thought he was a great villain." Dazai's height is 175cm. In an era where the average height for an adult male in the early Showa period was about 160–162cm, a physique over 175cm was an overwhelming giant, equivalent to 185–190cm today. However, the delicate and self-conscious Dazai, far from boasting about this blessed stature, genuinely hated it. In his short story "On Fashion," he lied about his height, claiming it was a few centimeters shorter: "I am on the large side for a Japanese man, and I stand out a bit when walking down the street. (...) I was told I measured five shaku seven sun (approx. 173cm), but I don't believe it. I think I am really about five shaku six sun five bu (approx. 171cm)." Nakahara (150cm), who continued to tease Dazai because he wouldn't fight back, seemed to find amusement in the gap between Dazai's "huge body and his constant trembling."