The Setting Sun

Osamu Dazai

Jan 1968 · New Directions Publishing

About this ebook

This powerful novel of a nation in social and moral crisis was first published by New Directions in 1956. Set in the early postwar years, it probes the destructive effects of war and the transition from a feudal Japan to an industrial society. Ozamu Dazai died, a suicide, in 1948. But the influence of his book has made "people of the setting sun" a permanent part of the Japanese language, and his heroine, Kazuko, a young aristocrat who deliberately abandons her class, a symbol of the anomie which pervades so much of the modern world.

Ratings and reviews

Hopeful, hopeless, joyful, depressing, desolate, lively. This book is certainly a must read in my opinion, if you have read no longer human and enjoyed it you will definitely enjoy this book. Dazai masterfully describes the hopelessness of humanity and the shortcomings of being cursed with the human condition forced to suffer from birth until death.

I had heard good things about this book, and I had to give it a try. By the end of the sample read, I was emotional. You can feel the emotions the character had from her letter. The book did have a slow start, but I believe that to be for a reason. Overall, I would recommend this for anyone.

Very emotional and powerful book about human existence. A MUST read!

About the author

Osamu Dazai was born in 1909 into a powerful landowning family of northern Japan. A brilliant student, he entered the French department of Tokyo University in 1930, but later boasted that in the five years before he left without a degree, he had never attended a lecture. Dazai was famous for confronting head-on the social and moral crises of postwar Japan before he committed suicide by throwing himself into Tokyo’s Tamagawa Aqueduct. His body was found on what would have been his 39th birthday.

Donald Keene, the author of dozens of books in both English and Japanese as well as the famed translator of Dazai, Kawabata, and Mishima, was the first non-Japanese to receive the Yomiuri Prize for Literature.