Shayokan

Published: Aug 11, 2026

Updated: Aug 11, 2026

Dazai OsamuShayokanKanagiImportant Cultural Propertyliterature

Representative image — not a photograph of this location.

Dazai Osamu wrote No Longer Human and The Setting Sun, drowned himself in 1948 at thirty-eight, and is read by essentially every Japanese teenager. He was born in 1909 in this house, in the small town of Kanagi on the Tsugaru plain, the tenth child of a landlord and moneylender rich enough to build something extraordinary: nineteen rooms across two floors, brick-walled, with a Western-style reception room, a huge interior staircase and a walled garden, put up in 1907 on the profits of tenant farming.

His discomfort with that inheritance runs through everything he wrote. The house was a ryokan for decades after the family lost it, was bought by the town in 1996, opened as a museum, and designated an Important Cultural Property in 2004. Walking through it makes the class distance in his work suddenly physical — this is what he was ashamed of.

Essential Information

Opening Hours

9:00 AM – 5:00 PM | Last entry 4:30 PM

Closed: Closed 29 December

Entrance Fee

¥600 general | ¥400 high school and university students | ¥250 elementary and junior high school students | Combination ticket with the Tsugaru Shamisen Hall available

Best Season

Year-round | Winter to combine with the stove train

Visit Duration

60–90 minutes

Getting There

Access Information

412-1 Asahiyama, Kanagi-machi, Goshogawara. About 5 minutes on foot from Kanagi Station on the Tsugaru Railway, which is the line that runs the winter stove train. Open 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM with last entry at 4:30 PM. Closed 29 December. Admission ¥600 general, ¥400 high school and university students and ¥250 elementary and junior high school students, with a combination ticket available for the Tsugaru Shamisen Hall. Phone 0173-53-2020.

Insider Guide

Premium

**Read something first.** Twenty minutes of No Longer Human or Tsugaru before you arrive turns a large old house into the specific thing he could not get away from. Both are widely available in English. **Look at the scale, not the objects.** Nineteen rooms, brick construction and a Western reception room in a Tsugaru farming village in 1907 is the exhibit. The family's wealth relative to the tenants around them is the biography. **Combine with the stove train.** Kanagi is on the Tsugaru Railway and the museum is five minutes from the station, which makes this the natural stop on a winter stove train run. **The Shamisen Hall is next door.** Tsugaru-jamisen, the hard percussive style of shamisen playing, comes from this area, and the combination ticket covers live demonstrations. **Open essentially every day.** Only 29 December closes it, which is unusual for a museum of this kind.

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