The Setting Sun

Osamu Dazai, Donald Keene (Translated by)

$14.95

Publish Date: January 17, 1968

Publisher:

New Directions

ISBN:

9780811200325

Pages:

174

Language:

English

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Description

This powerful novel of a nation in social and moral crisis was first published by New Directions in 1956.

Set in the early postwar years, it probes the destructive effects of war and the transition from a feudal Japan to an industrial society. Ozamu Dazai died, a suicide, in 1948. But the influence of his book has made "people of the setting sun" a permanent part of the Japanese language, and his heroine, Kazuko, a young aristocrat who deliberately abandons her class, a symbol of the anomie which pervades so much of the modern world.

About the Author

The author of the global bestseller No Longer Human and The Setting Sun, Osamu Dazai (1909-1948) was famous for confronting head-on the social and moral crises of postwar Japan. He committed suicide by drowning in Tokyo’s Tamagawa Aqueduct.

Donald Keene, the author of dozens of books in both English and

Japanese as well as the famed translator of Dazai, Kawabata, and Mishima, was the

first non-Japanese to receive the Yomiuri Prize for Literature.

Praise for The Setting Sun

Written with beauty, refinement, and force: a work of unmistakable distinction…
— Atlantic Monthly

All his work is worthy. Dazai was an aristocratic tramp, a self described delinquent, yet he wrote with the forbearance of a fasting scribe.
— Patti Smith