David Vernon

In June 1948, the writer Osamu Dazai and his last love, Tomie Yamazaki, drowned themselves in the Tamagawa Aqueduct near Tokyo. It was a murky ending to a life which had begun in wealth and social status but which rapidly descended into alcoholism, depression, impoverishment – and literary genius. During his short life – he died at 38 – Dazai produced a substantial body of work: novels and stories which helped define Japanese literature of the 1930s and 1940s and which are enjoying a significant global reputation now. Often autobiographical in nature, playing games with the blurred borders between reality and illusion, they chart disordered, chaotic lives, exploring isolation, poverty and debauchery with a sly wit and brutal honesty.

Language, it has been said, is the only true democracy – changed by the people that use it. But as with any democracy, there is plenty of disagreement about what alterations are either possible or permissible. Japanese uses three distinct writing systems – kanji, hiragana and katakana – and the relationship between two of them, kanji and katakana, is a key theme of last year’s prizewinning speculative fiction Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Rie Qudan – a lyrical, witty, satirical but meditative and meticulous text, now published in Jesse Kirkwood’s vibrant and faithful English translation. We are in the sprawling metropolis of Tokyo in the lightly altered mid-2020s.

The catalogue of 20th-century writers who committed suicide is long and sad: Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway and Sarah Kane, Stefan Zweig and Marina Tsvetaeva, to name only a few. Yet even amid this litany of literary misery, one name stands out for being perhaps more famous for their death than their work: Yukio Mishima (1925-70), who attempted a military coup before performing ritual suicide – hara-kiri – in the immediate aftermath of its failure. His long-planned, stage-managed, ostentatious and disturbing demise is not unconnected to his work, but it has dominated discussion of the writer ever since, significantly overshadowing his achievements – which were considerable, and led to his nomination for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times in the 1960s.