The Setting Sun

This powerful novel of a nation in social and moral crisis in the early postwar years probes the transition from a feudal Japan to an industrial society. The influence of this book, often considered Dazai's masterpiece, made the term "people of the setting sun" - the declining aristocracy - a permanent part of the Japanese language. Dazai's heroine, Kazuko, the strong-willed young aristocrat who deliberately abandons her class, stands as a symbol of the anomie that pervades so much of the modern world. The distinguished translator Donald Keene has said of the author's work: "His world ... suggest Chekhov or possibly postwar France ...but there is a Japanese sensibility in the choice and presentation of the material. A Dazai novel is at once immediately intelligible in Western terms and quite unlike any Western book." About the Author Osamu Dazai was a Japanese author who is considered one of the foremost fiction writers of 20th-century Japan. A number of his most popular works, such as The Setting Sun and No Longer Human, are considered modern-day classics in Japan.