More than 70 years after his death, Japanese author Osamu Dazai has become an unlikely publishing sensation, with a new generation of readers, particularly young men, drawn to the bleak, self-lacerating honesty of his fiction. His best-known novel, No Longer Human, has sold over 75,000 copies in the UK, and Penguin Classics is capitalising on the surge by releasing Schoolgirl, the first new UK edition of his work in almost 70 years.

Dazai, born in 1909, attempted suicide twice before the age of 21 and lived a turbulent life marked by addiction, before finally taking his own life in 1948 aged 38, shortly after completing No Longer Human. Regarded in Japan as one of the "big three" fathers of modern literature alongside Yukio Mishima and Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, his work is prized by translators and editors for combining raw nihilism with intelligence and even exuberance. His revival has been fuelled partly by online communities on Reddit and TikTok, as well as anime adaptations, introducing his despairing narrators to readers who say his words feel uniquely understanding.