The Setting Sun by Osamu Dazai

First published:Shayo, 1947 (English translation, 1956)

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: Shortly after World War II

Locale: Tokyo and a country house in Izu

Principal Characters:

• Kazuko, the narrator, a young girl living with her mother
• Naoji, her brother, a frustrated writer
• The Mother of Kazuko and Naoji, an aristocratic lady
• Uehara, a debauched novelist who becomes Kazuko’s lover

The Novel

The Setting Sun details the difficulty of a formerly aristocratic family in coming to terms with the new morality and economic reality of postwar Japan. Each member of the family copes with the problems of integrating past and present in a different way; only Kazuko, the narrator, is able to survive. The novel presents in diary fashion her reaction to events as they occur and her reflections on the family’s past: The plot consists more of impressions and flashbacks than of connected events. The narrator also includes part of her brother’s journal and his long, meditative suicide note, in which he despairs over his artistic and romantic failure.

The novel opens with an evocative description of Kazuko’s mother eating soup in a ladylike way; aristocratic behavior, the narrator reflects, does not mean exaggerated manners but an effortless grace—even the mother’s urinating in the family garden suggests to Kazuko a genteel innocence that has been replaced by a more formal and rigid code of behavior. Shortly after the end of the war, Kazuko’s Uncle Wada tells her and her mother that they can no longer afford to live in Tokyo and must move to a more rustic house in Izu. The mother and daughter attempt to reconcile themselves to the less elegant surroundings, but both are disappointed, and the mother becomes ill with a high fever. Eventually she recovers, and the pair begin to accustom themselves to the simple rural life-style.

One day Kazuko burns some snake eggs, thinking them to be from a viper. When she learns that the snakes would not have been harmful, she feels remorse for the needless destruction, and her mother, witnessing the burning, also suffers from Kazuko’s action. Ten days later, Kazuko through carelessness sets fire to the woodpile, and the fire almost sets the entire village ablaze. Greatly ashamed of her carelessness, Kazuko goes from house to house begging forgiveness. Shortly afterward, the mother receives word that her son Naoji will return from military service and that he has become an opium addict. The harshness of her life makes Kazuko think of leaving and living with a man whom she had loved when she was married—Naoji’s patron, the novelist Uehara. Still, the situation of the mother and daughter is calm and happy until Naoji returns.

Naoji is taciturn and bitter, and he ridicules the new family home. Upset with their fallen status, he turns to drugs and alcohol. Kazuko discovers her brother’s “Moonflower Journal,” written six years earlier, in which he detailed his addiction, his suicidal despair, and his difficulty in both writing and finding self-esteem. Kazuko remembers how at that time her efforts to pay for her brother’s addiction had led to her divorce: One day she took money to Naoji’s friend Uehara, and he kissed her; she later fell in love with him, and her secret led her husband to doubt her faithfulness.

She decides to write a declaration of her continuing love to Uehara, proposing indirectly to be his mistress. After no response, she writes a second letter telling him that she has received a proposal but that she wants to bear his child; still Uehara does not answer, and she writes a third unsuccessful letter. Finally she decides to visit Uehara, but her mother becomes ill again, and her disease is diagnosed as incurable tuberculosis. Her mother’s condition worsens and she dies in the autumn twilight.

Naoji returns from Tokyo with a girl, and Kazuko uses the opportunity to visit Uehara. She meets Uehara’s wife at his home and goes in search of him, eventually finding him at a disreputable bar. Uehara takes her to an inn and leaves her there, and when Kazuko wakes up, Uehara is lying beside her. That same morning Naoji commits suicide. His testament tells that he began taking drugs to be strong like other boys, to be coarse and abandon his aristocratic background; now, Naoji laments, he is still not accepted by the people, and he cannot return to his aristocratic world—even if he could return, he would not fit in. Naoji also tells of a painter (apparently Uehara) whose wife he loves. The painter is coarse and commercializes on a vulgar, modern style, while the painter’s wife is a refined and traditional Japanese woman. Like his attempt to recapture his aristocratic past, Naoji’s love is doomed from the beginning. To overcome his sense of failure, he turns to dissolution, but his consciousness continues to torment him.

After spending a month by herself in the country, Kazuko writes a letter to Uehara, acknowledging that he will forget her, that they are both “victims of a transitional period of morality.” Still, she has been able to push back the old morality and will fight to do so with her child by Uehara, the child of the man she loves. This child and her love for it will be her moral revolution and will ensure her survival, a survival that none of the other characters manages to find.

The Characters

The three major characters, Kazuko, Naoji, and their mother, are vividly and sympathetically drawn. To some extent each represents an aspect of the novelist’s personality. Like Naoji, Osamu Dazai struggled bitterly with the problem of artistic expression and also eventually committed suicide. Like Kazuko, he managed to give his anguish a form by writing the novel—his equivalent of Kazuko’s child. Like the mother, he found himself drawn to the old world but unable to live in it.

Kazuko is the most complex of the three characters. While she conceals much of her motivation and emotions with a narrative reticence, she is also forthright and honest in her portrayal of shame and suffering. She understands and admires her mother’s gentility and is disappointed that she does not embody such aristocratic virtues. At the same time, Kazuko is aware that moral standards as well as class distinctions are changing, and she faces the need to adjust to the world, however painful this change may be. Throughout her crises, Kazuko never loses her essential compassion for her mother and brother. This understanding and sympathy show that her affair with Uehara is not simply expedient or self-serving.

Naoji does not lack such compassion, as his diaries and his clumsy attempt to help his sick mother reveal, but ultimately he finds no outlet for such emotions except the outpourings of his journal and the impossible love for a married woman. Uncomfortable in either the dying aristocratic world or the coarser postwar world, he represents the difficulty that any artist must face when confronting change, especially cataclysmic social revolution. His suicide, then, reflects the dead end of the artist, or any individual, who cannot break with the past.

Naoji’s mother also cannot survive in the modern world. She lives, however, with a graceful accommodation to her situation and refuses to impose her own suffering on others, concentrating her love on Naoji.

The novelist Uehara represents one final alternative for the modern writer. Uehara profits from his abandonment of traditional values and his frank handling of dissolution. In this rebellion, Kazuko finds strength. Yet while Uehara is generous with his fellow drunkards, his lack of essential compassion makes his alternative less appealing than that of Kazuko; Uehara’s writing, while realistic, does not seem to capture the suffering that Naoji’s journal, or the novel itself, does.

Critical Context

The Setting Sun is typical of Osamu Dazai’s later works in both form and theme, employing a fragmentary structure and conveying a strong sense of disillusionment. His last important novel, Ningen shikkaku (1948; No Longer Human, 1958), is even bleaker than The Setting Sun. Most of Dazai’s work is in the tradition of the Japanese “I novel,” focusing on the first-person narrator’s subjective perceptions and often blurring the distinction between author and narrator. More recent Japanese novels use the first-person narrator but rarely in so profound a manner. The subject matter of Dazai’s novel marks it as a key postwar Japanese novel, dealing frankly with the nation’s sense of loss and confusion. (Indeed, so great was the impact of Dazai’s novel that the term “Setting Sun people” was widely used to refer to the dying class whose epitaph Dazai wrote.) Because of the novel’s preoccupation with and sympathy for the declining aristocracy, it has been compared to Anton Chekhov’s Vishnyovy sad (1904; The Cherry Orchard, 1908), but The Setting Sun is also a very modern work in its structural fragmentation and emphasis on the individual consciousness.

Bibliography

Lyons, Phyllis I. “‘Art Is Me’: Dazai Osamu’s Narrative Voice as a Permeable Self,” in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. XLI (June, 1981), pp. 93-110.

Lyons, Phyllis I. The Saga of Dazai Osamu: A Critical Study with Translations, 1985.

Miyoshi, Masao. “Till Death Do Us Part: Dazai Osamu—The Setting Sun,” in Accomplices of Silence: The Modern Japanese Novel, 1974.

Rimer, J. Thomas. “Dazai Osamu: The Death of the Past—The Setting Sun,” in Modern Japanese Fiction and Its Traditions: An Introduction, 1978.