Do we like Osamu Dazai?
Our score: 5 out of 10. Nothing harmful turned up in his work, but the record is thin and his life was messy, so it's a middle score.
Dazai was born Tsushima Shuji in 1909, one of eleven children in a wealthy landowning family in Aomori. His parents were largely absent, and he was raised by nursemaids and relatives. Out of that came the confessional style he's famous for.
As a young man he was drawn to Communism, wrote left-leaning fiction and handed out leaflets, until pressure from his powerful family led him to pledge to step back from the party and focus on writing. He also drank heavily in those years. It's a portrait of a restless young man, not a campaigner.
He pioneered the shishosetsu, the confessional I-novel, and his best-known books are The Setting Sun (1947) and No Longer Human (1948). His work has been translated into more than sixty languages. He died in 1948, so there are no recent posts, donations or company-keeping to check.
On the harm test, I found nothing in what I read where he campaigned against any group or pushed conspiracy theories. The caveat is that I couldn't open much scholarship on how his writing treats women, so this is a pass on a thin record rather than a clean bill of health.
The recent buzz is mostly anime. Bungo Stray Dogs features a fictionalised character with his name, and that has pushed a new generation towards his novels, helped along by BookTok. Where fans go from the cartoon to the real man, they find a writer obsessed with loneliness and shame, and a life that was a lot messier than the character.