The Setting Sun
Douban
Setting Sun
斜陽
Osamu Dazai translator: Keene, Professor Donald
overview
This powerful and tragic novel vividly paints life in a nation in social and moral crisis. Set in the early postwar years, it probes the destructive effects of war and the transition from a feudal Japan to an industrial society. Ozumu 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 ayoung aristocrat who deliberately abandons her class, a symbol of the anomie that pervades so much of the modern world.
contents
1. Snake
2. Fire
3. Moonflowers
4. Letters
5. The Lady
6. Outbreak of Hostilities
7. The Testament
8. Victims
