The Setting Sun

the long version

Novel by Dazai Osamu, published in 1947 as Shayo. It is a tragic, vividly painted story of life in postwar Japan. The narrator is Kazuko, a young woman born to gentility but now impoverished. Though she wears Western clothes, her outlook is Japanese; her life is static, and she recognizes that she is spiritually empty. In the course of the novel she survives the deaths of her aristocratic mother and her sensitive, drug-addicted brother Naoji, an intellectual ravaged by his own and by society's s