During his short life, Oda Sakunosuke reinvented the comic novel of urban manners and customs in Japan and had a lasting influence on the development of post--World War II Japanese fiction, especially in its comic, absurdist, and satiric aspects. Together with the writers It Sei, Dazai Osamu, Ishikawa Jun, and Sakaguchi Ango, he has been classified in modern Japanese literary histories as a writer of the burai-ha (Libertine or Decadent School), and there is probably merit in this classification, for all of these novelists were marginal literary figures before the end of World War II, and they came into their own only in the immediate postwar period in their different capacities to represent the starvation, mass dislocation, and moral collapse brought about by the Allied destruction of the Japanese homeland.

Oda Sakunosuke was born on 26 October 1913 in Osaka, then Japan's second-largest city and a commercial center of the...