Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #201785 in Books
• Published on: 1968-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 1 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780811200325
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Review
Novel by Dazai Osamu, published in 1947 as Shayo. 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 she conceives a child in the hope that it will be the first step in a moral revolution. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature

Customer Reviews

Disturbing, yet Brilliant
Osamu Dazai's greatest sin was honesty, and an equal love of decadence mixed with self loathing. He was a genius, a rebel, a drug addict, a rebel of aristocratic means who disgraced his family often through seedy, sometimes politically verbotten company... a man deeply disturbed (his hobby seemed to be to be attempting suicide, often with his lovers, and until the last effort, in which he drowned himself, were only half succesful... literally.) His two great novels reflected his troubles and innermost thoughts... psychologically, they are dark, disturbing, yet enlightening. Culturally, the self indulgence of such dialogue was equally shocking, though some have suggested that Dazai's outer word reflects the inner most soul of the Japanese. - - I spent four years in Japan, often traveling through the urban landscape of Tokyo, often taking the train to work passing over the banks of the same river where his body washed up (shortly after the war on his 39th birthday), and though 50 years after the fact, in time began to gain an even deeper appreciation for his writings -- however, this is not a mere "Japanese" novel. Osamu Dazai, afterall, was the Japanese Albert Camus - - whimsical as well, and who painted pictures with words as greatly as Akira Kurasawa painted pictures on the screen. Though a tragic novel, it is absorbing, and so well refreshing, rather than leaving one feeling disgusted, one thinks hard, is angered, then finally may feel awakened.

Much less than the whole of life...
In the early twentieth century middle Europe hosted a spate of suicides, predominantly educated young men, who found the world tiresome by the judgement of their romantic ideals. Fin de siecle Vienna saw them dropping off like flies. This crazed romanticism informs Dazai's work and, apparently, his life, where he too fell victim to the lure of self destruction.
*
The surface objectivity gained by choosing a woman as narrator is an interesting technique. Dazai here installs a rather crude counter to his, and the character Naoji's, dissolution, namely Kazuko's desire to bear a child. It is simplistic to reduce the novel's core to the notion of renewal, but it does gather poignancy when considered against the backdrop of a Japan recently defeated, if not humiliated, in the World War. Perhaps the plea for a child is at once an admission that the then current generation has been left without a foundation from which to hope, and that only time, and a new generation, could begin a true reconstruction. The child, rather than being a true symbol of life, is almost mere procrastination - a resignation on the part of the parental generation that they are impotent in the face of bewildering problems. For Kazuko the child is equivalent to Naijo's opiates.
*
The influence of European literature is strong. Donald Keene, the translator, mentions Proust and Dostoevsky in his introduction, but the pervasive use of illness for more than literal purposes recalls Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain". There are several overt references to Nietzsche, with his diagnoses of society's ills, and the characters themselves read Marx and other socialist writings. The effect here, however, is culturally specific, and the attitudes to death embodied in the novel do instruct as to how Japanese culture contrasts with the West.
*
Dazai does create memorable characters. Keene offers that they all contain fragments of the author, and Dazai's biography reinforces this rather obvious point. The rather histrionic interpretation of love which all the characters espouse leads, inevitably, to an equally histrionic version of despair. All this means that as a reader one is asked to bear witness to the blackest of soap operas. Perhaps, while reading, one should have playing the last songs in Schubert's Die Schone Mullerin, or some of Hugo Wolf's more dirgelike lieder. And, on finishing the last page, it might be best to go for a long walk, talk to a friend, and share a good meal.

Dazai at His Best
The Setting Sun is no longer an unknown novel for the Western reader, but one should keep in mind that Shayou is, even today, one of the most popular Japanese novels. Basically a portrait of a society in an acute need for change, The Setting Sun is both a reflection of Dazai's period of Marxist activism and, probably, the most interesting illustration of the 'shishousetsu' (the I novel). Just like those in No Longer Human (Ningen shikkaku), the characters in The Setting Sun are Dazai's images of hiw own self. Kazuko, the revolted self, the one waiting for the revolution and for the violent change of the society, decided to defide the rules (she will choose to have a baby, even if not married - a perfectly normal thing nowadays, but not in the Japanese society, back in the 40's), Naoji, her brother, the defeated self, who will choose the suicide, exactly as Dazai himself will do and, of course, Uehara, the writer, the type of the Dazaisesque artist. A novel about a family (meant to represent the whole society, in the light of Lenin's idea about the family being 'the basic cell of the society' - after all, Dazai must have read some of Lenin's works while activ in the communist underground movement, in the 30's) which comes to its extinction. A masterpiece on Dazai's idea of revolte and revolution.