The Setting Sun

novel by Dazai Osamu

Also known as: “Shayō”

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Article History

The Setting Sun, novel by Dazai Osamu, published in 1947 as Shayō. It is a tragic, vividly painted story of life in postwar Japan.

The narrator is Kazuko, a young woman born to gentility but now impoverished. Though she wears Western clothes, her outlook is Japanese; her life is static, and she recognizes that she is spiritually empty. In the course of the novel she survives the deaths of her aristocratic mother and her sensitive drug-addicted brother Naoji, an intellectual ravaged by his own and by society’s spiritual failures. She also spends a sad, sordid night with the dissipated writer Uehara, and with him she conceives a child in the hope that it will be the first step in a moral revolution.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Kathleen Kuiper.