Oda Sakunosuke: Life and Major Works

Born in 1913 in Ikutamae-chō, Osaka (now part of Tennōji Ward, Osaka City). He dropped out of the Third Higher School and spent his youth on a footloose, literary life. In 1940 he won recognition in the literary world with "Fūfu Zenzai" ("Meoto Zenzai"), a vivid portrait of ordinary life in Osaka, and continued thereafter to depict the streets and human warmth of his native city in his own light, buoyant voice. A devoted admirer of Ihara Saikaku, he rebelled against the established realism of the I-novel and pursued the sheer entertainment and fictionality of storytelling. After the war, alongside Dazai Osamu and Sakaguchi Ango, he came into the spotlight as a standard-bearer of the Buraiha ("decadent," or neo-gesaku) writers, living lives of decadence and rebellion, and vigorously published provocative works such as "Sesō" ("The State of the World") and "Kanōsei no Bungaku" ("The Literature of Possibility"). But in the midst of it all he died suddenly of pulmonary tuberculosis in 1947 at the young age of 33. He is fondly remembered by the nickname "Odasaku."