The Setting Sun by Osamu Dazai

Pronunciation of Names + Translator's Introduction

The people whose lives are described in The Setting Sun are in many ways exceptional, but they arealso typical of modern Japan. Kazuko, the girl who relates the story, seems more accustomed to wearingWestern clothes than kimonos, is reminded as often of Chekhov or Balzac as of The Tale of Genji, and, ifnot fluent in any Western language, uses a variety of French and English phrases with certainty that shewill be understood by everyone. At the same time, she remains unmistakably Japanese in her relationswith the people around her and in her quick emotional responses to the moments of intensity in her life.Because family confidences are almost impossible (except on the rare occasions when the repressions ofJapanese life are overcome by the force of intolerable emotions), Kazuko, her mother, and her brotherlive almost without overt communication with one another. The author, Dazai Osamu, must thereforeresort to various types of flashback techniques (including a diary, letters, and a will) to create for usthree-dimensional figures. And although he succeeded in lending extraordinary vividness to hischaracters, there is much necessarily left unsaid in this Japanese world. The Setting Sun owes much toEuropean culture, but it is as Japanese a novel as can be written today, in this period when the surface andinner manifestations of Japanese life are being Westernized at very different speeds and when (to aWestern reader) the Japanese literature which reflects these changes is surprising, alternately, for itscloseness and remoteness to our own lives.

 "Victims of a transitional period in morality" is how Kazuko styles herself and her lover, and we feelthat she is right. A modus vivendi with Western things has nearly been achieved, but the full effect ofWestern ideas has yet to be felt. The Setting Sun derives much of its power from its portrayal of the waysin which the new ideas have destroyed the Japanese aristocracy. The novel created an immediatesensation when it first appeared in 1947. The phrase "people of the setting sun," which came to beapplied, as a result of the novel, to the whole of the declining aristocracy, has now passed into commonusage and even into dictionaries. Kazuko, her mother, and her brother Naoji are typical not only of thearistocracy but of the large class of Japanese who were impoverished by the war and the succeedinginflation and land reforms.

In reading the novel one cannot escape the feeling that the author, Dazai Osamu, himself waspersonally involved — that he was not only the story-teller but a participant. An examination of hisbiography tends to confirm this impression. Dazai was born in 1909 of a rich and powerful family of thenorth of Japan. He was brilliant in his studies at school and early showed promise of his literary talent, aswell as signs of the erratic habits which were subsequently to darken his career. Before he was twenty, hetwice attempted suicide. In 1930 he entered the Department of French Literature at Tokyo University.Dazai knew no French when he elected this course (and apparently, through complete neglect of hisstudies, never learned more than a few words), but at the time French literature was the chosen field ofmany young Japanese. This was partially because they found French Symbolism or Surrealism morecongenial than the more matter-of-fact English literature, and far more so than the philological problemsof the classical Japanese literature, and partially because of the universal credence given in Japan tolegends surrounding the magical vie de Bohème of Paris.

 Dazai withdrew from the University in 1935 without obtaining a degree. This was not surprising whenone considers that he boasted of not having attended a single lecture in five years. Instead, he spent histime in literary and Left-Wing political activity. His stories had begun to attract attention when in 1935 heagain attempted suicide, leaving in an envelope a collection of fourteen of his stories with the title,Declining Years, which was intended for posthumous publication. Dazai had, in the meantime, becomeaddicted to morphine and was forced to spend almost two years in and out of hospitals before he could becured. In 1936 there was another suicide attempt, this time with the woman with whom he had been livingfor the previous six years. He was married in the following year to another woman, who still surviveshim today

Dazai's life of wild dissipation gave him much notoriety and caused even some unpopularity. This wasespecially true during the austere years which preceded the war with the United States. He was exemptedfrom military service because of a chronic chest ailment. During the war he continued to publish, althoughhe was forced by the bombings to move from one part of the country to another.

 His most important literary activity came after the end of the war. Early in 1947 he published hisbrilliant short story "Villon's Wife" (which has been included in New Directions 15) and, later in thesame year, The Setting Sun, the present volume. His second novel, The Disqualified, appeared in 1948and was acclaimed by some critics as being even superior to The Setting Sun. He also began the serialpublication of another novel with the English title of Good-bye. The cumulative effects of dissipation,overwork, and insomnia gave him an appearance of such utter exhaustion as to alarm his friends. Thetuberculosis from which he had suffered before the war and which he claimed to have cured by drinkingagain manifested itself. The symptoms were unmistakable. In June of 1948 he finally succeeded incommitting suicide, by throwing himself into the swollen waters of the Tamagawa Reservoir in Tokyo.Ironically enough, his body was discovered on his thirty-ninth birthday, the nineteenth of June.

The close connection between Dazai's life and almost any, of his works is immediately apparent,although as an artist he naturally did not confine himself to a mere recounting of autobiographical details.The Setting Sun is actually one of his more objective works, and yet we may find much in Naoji, in thenovelist Uehara, his mentor, and even in the girl, Kazuko, who narrates most of the story, that clearlyderives from Dazai's own personality and experiences. Dazai, himself a member of a near-aristocraticfamily, chose to depict the decline of his own class. Again and again we find ourselves wondering towhat degree Dazai shared the emotions of his characters. When Naoji expresses the pain it has cost him tostay alive, we seem to hear the voice of the author who considered suicide so often. However, what givesThe Setting Sun a strength that most of Dazai's other writings, however brilliant, generally lack is thecharacter of Kazuko, who is determined to struggle rather than to die. Dazai himself, after his brief andnot very animated participation in the Left-Wing movement, seemed to lose all desire to struggle, and hiswritings are almost invariably tinged with cynical despair.

 Dazai's indebtedness to European literature is obvious, but he is in fact more closely linked with thegreat classics of Japanese literature, with which he was intimately familiar. His style offers no particularproblems for the Western reader, but he uses one literary device which, although not unknown in the West,is perhaps unusual. He sometimes gives the last or climactic remark in a conversation first and then goesback to relate the steps leading up to it. An effective device in his hands, it is part of his fondness for theflashback. Another feature of Dazai's style which the reader will note is how he uses the description ofminor happenings (such as, the burning of the snake eggs or the swelling in the mother's hand) to suggestmuch larger situations. In this technique he betrays his debt to Japanese poetry, particularly the miniature,seventeen-syllable haiku, in which each word must be a vital part of the whole, and where the attempt ofthe author is to make the reader supply from these scant drops the world from which the poem has beendistilled.

It is generally conceded that Dazai is one of the great chroniclers of contemporary Japanese life, andthis major achievement was reached despite the shortness of his life and career. He creates for us withamazing evocativeness a great variety of places — an old-fashioned mansion in the city, a country house,a Tokyo hovel, a cheap bar — and fills them with the people and the atmosphere that belong to them. I am,in a way, tempted to urge the Western reader to turn to Dazai for an exact picture of what life is like inJapan today, although certainly there are other pictures of Japan which can and have been painted of thissame period. Despite the specialized area of the subject matter and the deviant behavior of some of itscharacters, The Setting Sun, by the depth of its understanding of the Japanese of today, evokes and revealsaspects of the Japanese nation as a whole. This is why the novel was so successful and so moving toJapanese of all classes. But The Setting Sun is not to be considered as a sociological document of help tothose who wish to learn more about an obscure or distant country. It is a powerful and beautiful novel byone of the most brilliant of recent Japanese writers and stands as such in the world of literature.

Cambridge — New YorkDonald Keene