The Setting Sun

Author: Dazai, Osamu

Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)

Published on 1 February 1968 by New Directions Publishing Corporation in the United States.

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.