The Setting Sun (New Directions Book)

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When the room became faintly light, I stared at the face of the man sleeping beside me. It was the face of a man soon to die. It was an exhausted face. The face of a victim Osamu Dazai published this book in 1947 Japan and it was translated to English in 1956. By the early postwar years Dazai had gained fame as a writer, the novel propelling him to even greater popularity. From an aristocratic family with ten siblings his father died from tuberculosis in 1923 when he was fourteen. He was excused from wartime service after he contracted TB himself. This is a story of the end of the nobility in Japan after WWII. It uses elements drawn from his own life, and a diary of the writer Shizuko Ota who bore him a child in 1947. Told in spare modernist prose it is a classic of mid-20th century Japanese novels and his best known work. He ended his life in a tragic 1948 suicide at the age of thirty eight. urn:lcp:settingsun0000osam:lcpdf:e4efd38a-3623-43d0-bf4b-9a66c3430a40 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier settingsun0000osam Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s2812qtnk6d Invoice 1652 Metasource_catalog openlibrary Ocr tesseract 5.3.0-3-g9920 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9593 Ocr_module_version 0.0.21 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-NS-1300621 Openlibrary_edition Gazetede imparatorun resmini gördüm. Tekrar görmek isterdim. “ Gazete sayfasını annenin yüzüne doğru açtım. Reading The Setting Sun was a grounding experience to see a more realistic and dramatic representation of japanese society as Dazai deviates from the stereotypical cultural aspects associated with Japan that we have here in the west, and presents an humane discussion on social classes and the decadence of the modern human life. This intimacy in his writing makes the reader feel under the character’s skin in an relatable and immersive industrial modern drama — set, ironically, in interior Japan — that sometimes made me wonder if he was writing about real people.

A man of divided beliefs, Naoji loves literature and other mindful pastimes but feels alienated from a society he regards as hypocritical and shallow. When he was younger, Naoji was addicted to opium; upon returning home, he relapsed into his old ways, living a dissolute lifestyle, drinking and taking drugs, and spending money irresponsibly. Osamu Dazai is one of the great modern japanese writers of the 20th century. His works reverb with old and new generations even seventy years after his death. Under the marvelous translation by Donald Keene published by New Directions, Dazai’s work gained a new public in the West through the releases of No Longer Human and the topic of this article, The Setting Sun — a sour confession of Dazai’s shame towards his origins in the japanese aristocracy and it’s fall after the end of the World War II and the impact it had in japanese society and individuals in the new modern age. In Dazai's view, modernization stays at the basis of the changes that took place in the traditional Japanese family. Although he sees modernization as corrupting, he is hopeful that these changes could bring progress and prosperity.Japon edebiyatı yolculuğum son hızla olmasa da ağır aksak ilerlemeye devam ediyor ve her okuduğum kitap, her tanıştığım yazarla sevgim ve ilgim bir kat daha artıyor. Yolculuğumun bu bölümünde Osama Dazai ve Batan Güneş’e dair bol spoilerli bir yorumla karşınızdayım ancak esere geçmeden önce, eseri okurken düşündüğüm bu topraklara dair bir hissi kısaca paylaşmak istiyorum. Kazuko, the narrator, is a twenty-nine-year-old woman from a once-aristocratic Japanese family. She and her younger brother, Naoji, agree that class titles are not earned and that aristocrats are no more than “high-class beggars.” Their mother, however, is an exception; although she often departs from formal etiquette, her manners have the ease and elegance that mark her as a true aristocrat. When Kazuko accepts that her mother will soon die, she reflects on the differences between the two of them: Despite her diminished circumstances, Kazuko reveals herself as a well-educated, highly cultured, and thoughtful woman. She reads widely, and her conversation is full of references to European culture. So I can't even imagine what it must have been like for not just the Japanese but for everyone to go from a pre-nukes world to witnessing the near annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Y ya digo que Osamu Dazai escribe como los dioses, parece que hace sencillo lo más difícil. Esa generación casi “perdida” que se tiene que levantar tras una guerra, aquí está perfectamente reflejada en los personajes de Kazuo y de su hermano Naoji. Todos esos conflictos morales que estaba viviendo Japón en aquella época están aquí reflejados en ellos dos. Es una novela para saborear y disfrutar sin prisas. Una joya. Words, words of every kind went flitting through my head. “Know thy particular fearsomeness, thy knavery, cunning and witchcraft!” What I said, however, as I wiped the perspiration from my face with a handkerchief was merely, “You’ve put me in a cold sweat!” I smiled.The hardest burden for Japanese families is the impoverishment of war in economical terms, due to inflation and land reforms. Financial difficulties were a general issue for every Japanese family, not only for aristocratic families, and Dazai captures in his novel this aspect of postwar Japanese transformation. Cuando subimos al tren, creí que me iba a morir. Al llegar aquí me animé un poco, pero cuando anocheció noté que el pecho me ardía de añoranza y me sentí desfallecer. Es como si Dios me hubiera matado y no me hubiera devuelto la vida hasta después de haberme convertido en una persona diferente”. To me, it occurs, as one of those books which leave you emotionally exhausted after you finish them, all your feelings get drained off our conscience, and you actually feel nothing and become oblivious to the emotions which otherwise might have been surged due to surroundings. In fact, I’ve been so attached with book that even after 3-4 days of finishing it I’m quite struggling to start a new one. Perhaps this verbose outburst may help me in coming to terms with my reading choices :) Overall, it was a marvelous experience, quite vivid and full of human sensibilities which has got power to bring out your most deep rooted emotions, as you expect Dazai (or Japanese authors as a whole) to be, and something peculiar which I’ve experienced a few times.

Kazuko and Naoji’s mother goes unnamed; she is a gracious lady with perfect taste. Her elegance and consideration for others often lead her to ruin. Indeed, Kazuko regards her mother as too beautiful and sensitive to survive in the coarse atmosphere of the modern world. As such, Kazuko is grieved but not surprised by her death. Her mother is arguably unconventional in her table manners and conduct, but Kazuko and Naoji both see her as the only true aristocrat in their family. Even as she dies, her face is “so full of animation that it seemed almost to shine.” Uncle WadaOsamu Dazai's The Setting Sun gave me a foriegn sort of feeling inside, like I felt different, not in a something is about to happen way, exactly. Different when you're yourself playing at being someone else? I wish I could match my heartbeat with its pulse and my impulses as I lapsed into its rhythm. I was creeped out. I was in awe. The best I can do is that it was the kind of foriegness that Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy had. I mean, it isn't a fantasy in the genre sense of the word. But it kinda is in my emotions. The images firing up in my mind's eyes are exactly that: a fantasy. A fantasy of victims, love, suicide, of living as dreaming in nightmares and hopes (childish hopes? I'll be able to tell the difference when I grow up). Throwing yourself on the fires fantasy. What else is there to do? Start a revolution. Emotional fantasy! Can't you just say that, Mariel? I know all about talking myself into shit too, same as Kazuko and her brother Naoji. (Is it any wonder that I kept thinking about Gormenghast? Decay, figurehead costume jewelry stage lights artistocracy, smoke and mirrors depression and love... What's real? Suicide as acting out... Perpetual teenagers... Ellipsis thoughts...) El ocaso/El declive (1947) de Osamu Dazai (1909-1948) nos muestra un tema recurrente en la literatura japonesa del siglo XX: la difícil transición de la tradición a la modernidad en ese país. The Setting Sun’ is told through the eyes of Kazuko, the daughter of a widowed mother whose brother Naoji has disappeared in the war. She is divorced after a stillborn birth. The money has run out and they are supported by her uncle. He is forced to sell their old house in Tokyo and move them to the country. Kazuko had destroyed snake eggs on the old property and has a sense of guilt and fear. Since then ill-fated events happened, from their forced relocation to her mother’s illness and a dangerous fire in the new house. She learns that Naoji hasn’t died in the war and is coming home, now an opiate addict, as Dazai was in real life. She pays the bills and enables his habit as he lies and breaks his promises to quit using drugs. La trama es simple, pero lo importante es que refleja magníficamente esa dicotomía de tradición y modernidad al explicarnos los tradicionales pensamientos y acciones de la madre, las nuevas ideas revolucionarias y amorosas de la hija y el imperioso deseo del hijo por pertenecer a la clase popular que le arrastra a un torbellino de experiencias poco saludables. Later that day, Kazuko sees a female snake in the garden; her mother comments that the snake must be searching for her eggs. This sense of loss makes Kazuko think of her mother’s anguish when they were forced to move from their luxurious home in Tokyo to their current residence in Izu. Her mother said that if she did not have Kazuko, she would rather die than move out of her home, explaining: “I wish I could die in this house where your father died.”