This powerful and tragic novel vividly paints life in a nation in social and moral crisis. Set in the early postwar years, it probes the destructive effects of war and the transition from a feudal Japan to an industrial society. Ozumu 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 ayoung aristocrat who deliberately abandons her class, a symbol of the anomie that pervades so much of the modern world.


Osamu Dazai (太宰 治, Dazai Osamu, June 19, 1909 – June 13, 1948) 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 (Shayō) and No Longer Human (Ningen Shikkaku), are considered modern-day classics in Japan. With a semi-autobiographical style and transparency into his perso...