The Setting Sun Read online

  THE SETTING SUN

  BY OSAMU DAZAI

  TRANSLATED BY DONALD KEENE

  A NEW DIRECTIONS BOOK

  CONTENTS

  1. Snake

  2. Fire

  3. Moonflowers

  4. Letters

  5. The Lady

  6. Outbreak of Hostilities

  7. The Testament

  8. Victims

  Note on Pronunciation

  of Names

  Japanese in transcription is pronounced with the consonants as in English and the vowels as in Italian. Thus, the name Naoji is pronounced nah-oh-jee. There is no marked stress accent, and one is safe in giving equal weight to all syllables.

  In this novel most of the characters (such as Naoji, Kazuko, and Osaki) are referred to by their personal names only. Where both personal and family names are given, the family name comes first. Thus, in the name Uehara Jirō, Uehara is the family name and Jirō the personal name.

  Translator’s Introduction

  The foreign visitor to Japan today is apt to be at once delighted and dismayed by what he observes. The delight will probably stem from what is old in the country—the temples set in their clean-swept grounds and gardens, the brilliant spectacle of the theatres, the cordiality and charm of one’s reception in any Japanese home. Most travelers indeed are so captivated by this aspect of Japan as to become excessively critical of what the past sixty or seventy years have brought from the West. They bewail the fact that many Japanese women have given up their beautiful kimonos in favor of mass-produced dresses, that the Japanese house is all too frequently marred by a “foreign-style” room with lumpish furniture obscurely derived from European prototypes, and that the streets are filled with the din of clanging trams and squawking loud-speakers. Those who complain in these terms are quite justified in their aesthetic indignation, although not in the arrogant impatience with which it is too often accompanied.

  Japan today, alone of the nations of Asia, is closely connected to the West, not only in its industrial and political developments, but in its active cultural life. The bookshops are full of European (especially French) works of literature in translation, including all the latest and most difficult ones. There are numerous coffee-shops where students gather to listen to records of Beethoven and Brahms, if not of Debussy and Stravinsky. Even the banks send out calendars all over the country with excellent reproductions of Renoir, Van Gogh, or Matisse. It may be debated how deeply this interest in modern Western literature and art penetrates, whether the farmer in his village has any better understanding of Goethe or Manet than his grandfather did. The fact remains that almost everywhere in Japan education has brought with it a profound respect for Western culture, and sometimes a genuine love.

  This feeling has often been indiscriminate and led to a defacement of the Japanese landscape which we may find all but unpardonable, but it has not been only adulation for the West which has led to many of the changes so deplored by the foreign visitor. The Japanese woman who abandons the traditional kimono in favor of a dress is not merely imitating some Hollywood star; she is liberating herself from the nuisance of the elaborate series of robes and underrobes, unbearably hot in summer and impractical at any time of the year in the offices and busses she must cope with today. Even if she would like nothing better than to wear a kimono every day, the cost of the expensive silks makes the traditional costume a luxury which few can afford unless they have inherited them.

  The face of Japan is changing every day as taste, convenience, and economic necessity dictate. Underneath the surface, at an undeniably slower pace, the moral and spiritual life of the country is undergoing similar change. The family system is breaking up, especially in the larger cities, and the traditional values associated with the family are losing ground. Divorce, for example, is now accepted (at least in Tokyo) as the alternative a woman has to an odious marriage, although until very recently she was expected to accept the flagrant infidelity of her husband and any other indignity he might choose to inflict on her in the interest of preserving the family. It will take years for such new ideas to spread throughout the country, but even today few of the younger people share their parents’ belief in the traditional views.

  As far as religion goes, one would have to look very hard to find in Japan even as much fervor as exists in this country, let alone India. Although most Japanese are nominally Buddhists and are buried, for form’s sake, in accordance with Buddhist ritual, real interest in the religion is comparatively unusual. If, for example, the Prime Minister of Japan were to adopt the practice of important political figures in the United States and England (and elsewhere, of course) of invoking the blessings of the Deity—any deity—on the heads of the Japanese people, he would be greeted with astonishment and possibly derision. It may seem strange that Japan, which has borrowed so much from the West, has never taken more to Christianity. There has in fact been a decline of interest in Christianity since its high point at the turn of the century when many of the intellectual leaders were devout believers in a “churchless” Protestantism. This form of Christianity has not proved satisfying to most of their descendants who, even if they remember the Bible lessons of their childhood, find in them no adequate solution to their present problems.

  The people whose lives are described in The Setting Sun are in many ways exceptional, but they are also typical of modern Japan. Kazuko, the girl who relates the story, seems more accustomed to wearing Western clothes than kimonos, is reminded as often of Chekhov or Balzac as of The Tale of Genji, and, if not fluent in any Western language, uses a variety of French and English phrases with certainty that she will be understood by everyone. At the same time, she remains unmistakably Japanese in her relations with the people around her and in her quick emotional responses to the moments of intensity in her life. Because family confidences are almost impossible (except on the rare occasions when the repressions of Japanese life are overcome by the force of intolerable emotions), Kazuko, her mother, and her brother live almost without overt communication with one another. The author, Dazai Osamu, must therefore resort to various types of flashback techniques (including a diary, letters, and a will) to create for us three-dimensional figures. And although he succeeded in lending extraordinary vividness to his characters, there is much necessarily left unsaid in this Japanese world. The Setting Sun owes much to European culture, but it is as Japanese a novel as can be written today, in this period when the surface and inner manifestations of Japanese life are being Westernized at very different speeds and when (to a Western reader) the Japanese literature which reflects these changes is surprising, alternately, for its closeness and remoteness to our own lives.

  “Victims of a transitional period in morality” is how Kazuko styles herself and her lover, and we feel that she is right. A modus vivendi with Western things has nearly been achieved, but the full effect of Western ideas has yet to be felt. The Setting Sun derives much of its power from its portrayal of the ways in which the new ideas have destroyed the Japanese aristocracy. The novel created an immediate sensation when it first appeared in 1947. The phrase “people of the setting sun,” which came to be applied, as a result of the novel, to the whole of the declining aristocracy, has now passed into common usage and even into dictionaries. Kazuko, her mother, and her brother Naoji are typical not only of the aristocracy but of the large class of Japanese who were impoverished by the war and the succeeding inflation and land reforms.

  In reading the novel one cannot escape the feeling that the author, Dazai Osamu, himself was personally involved—that he was not only the story-teller but a participant. An examination of his biography tends to confirm this impression. Dazai was born in 1909 of a rich and powerful family of the north of Japan. He was brilli
ant in his studies at school and early showed promise of his literary talent, as well as signs of the erratic habits which were subsequently to darken his career. Before he was twenty, he twice attempted suicide. In 1930 he entered the Department of French Literature at Tokyo University. Dazai knew no French when he elected this course (and apparently, through complete neglect of his studies, never learned more than a few words), but at the time French literature was the chosen field of many young Japanese. This was partially because they found French Symbolism or Surrealism more congenial than the more matter-of-fact English literature, and far more so than the philological problems of the classical Japanese literature, and partially because of the universal credence given in Japan to legends surrounding the magical vie de Bohème of Paris.

  Dazai withdrew from the University in 1935 without obtaining a degree. This was not surprising when one considers that he boasted of not having attended a single lecture in five years. Instead, he spent his time in literary and Left-Wing political activity. His stories had begun to attract attention when in 1935 he again attempted suicide, leaving in an envelope a collection of fourteen of his stories with the title, Declining Years, which was intended for posthumous publication. Dazai had, in the meantime, become addicted to morphine and was forced to spend almost two years in and out of hospitals before he could be cured. In 1936 there was another suicide attempt, this time with the woman with whom he had been living for the previous six years. He was married in the following year to another woman, who still survives him today.

  Dazai’s life of wild dissipation gave him much notoriety and caused even some unpopularity. This was especially true during the austere years which preceded the war with the United States. He was exempted from military service because of a chronic chest ailment. During the war he continued to publish, although he was forced by the bombings to move from one part of the country to another.

  His most important literary activity came after the end of the war. Early in 1947 he published his brilliant short story “Villon’s Wife” (which has been included in New Directions 15) and, later in the same year, The Setting Sun, the present volume. His second novel, The Disqualified, appeared in 1948 and was acclaimed by some critics as being even superior to The Setting Sun. He also began the serial publication of another novel with the English title of Good-bye. The cumulative effects of dissipation, overwork, and insomnia gave him an appearance of such utter exhaustion as to alarm his friends. The tuberculosis from which he had suffered before the war and which he claimed to have cured by drinking again manifested itself. The symptoms were unmistakable. In June of 1948 he finally succeeded in committing suicide, by throwing himself into the swollen waters of the Tamagawa Reservoir in Tokyo. Ironically enough, his body was discovered on his thirty-ninth birthday, the nineteenth of June.

  The close connection between Dazai’s life and almost any of his works is immediately apparent, although as an artist he naturally did not confine himself to a mere recounting of autobiographical details. The Setting Sun is actually one of his more objective works, and yet we may find much in Naoji, in the novelist Uehara, his mentor, and even in the girl, Kazuko, who narrates most of the story, that clearly derives from Dazai’s own personality and experiences. Dazai, himself a member of a near-aristocratic family, chose to depict the decline of his own class. Again and again we find ourselves wondering to what degree Dazai shared the emotions of his characters. When Naoji expresses the pain it has cost him to stay alive, we seem to hear the voice of the author who considered suicide so often. However, what gives The Setting Sun a strength that most of Dazai’s other writings, however brilliant, generally lack is the character of Kazuko, who is determined to struggle rather than to die. Dazai himself, after his brief and not very animated participation in the Left-Wing movement, seemed to lose all desire to struggle, and his writings are almost invariably tinged with cynical despair.

  Dazai’s indebtedness to European literature is obvious, but he is in fact more closely linked with the great classics of Japanese literature, with which he was intimately familiar. His style offers no particular problems for the Western reader, but he uses one literary device which, although not unknown in the West, is perhaps unusual. He sometimes gives the last or climactic remark in a conversation first and then goes back to relate the steps leading up to it. An effective device in his hands, it is part of his fondness for the flashback. Another feature of Dazai’s style which the reader will note is how he uses the description of minor happenings (such as, the burning of the snake eggs or the swelling in the mother’s hand) to suggest much larger situations. In this technique he betrays his debt to Japanese poetry, particularly the miniature, seventeen-syllable haiku, in which each word must be a vital part of the whole, and where the attempt of the author is to make the reader supply from these scant drops the world from which the poem has been distilled.

  It is generally conceded that Dazai is one of the great chroniclers of contemporary Japanese life, and this major achievement was reached despite the shortness of his life and career. He creates for us with amazing evocativeness a great variety of places—an old-fashioned mansion in the city, a country house, a Tokyo hovel, a cheap bar—and fills them with the people and the atmosphere that belong to them. I am, in a way, tempted to urge the Western reader to turn to Dazai for an exact picture of what life is like in Japan today, although certainly there are other pictures of Japan which can and have been painted of this same period. Despite the specialized area of the subject matter and the deviant behavior of some of its characters, The Setting Sun, by the depth of its understanding of the Japanese of today, evokes and reveals aspects of the Japanese nation as a whole. This is why the novel was so successful and so moving to Japanese of all classes. But The Setting Sun is not to be considered as a sociological document of help to those who wish to learn more about an obscure or distant country. It is a powerful and beautiful novel by one of the most brilliant of recent Japanese writers and stands as such in the world of literature.

  Cambridge-New York Donald Keene

  THE SETTING SUN

  This translation is dedicated to Kawabata Yasunari, the distinguished novelist and President of the Japanese P.E.N. Club, who has done so much to promote the understanding of Japanese literature abroad.

  CHAPTER ONE / SNAKE

  Mother uttered a faint cry. She was eating soup in the dining room.

  I thought perhaps something disagreeable had got into the soup. “A hair?” I asked.

  “No.” Mother poured another spoonful of soup into her mouth as if nothing had happened. This accomplished, she turned her head to one side, directed her gaze at the cherry tree in full bloom outside the kitchen window and, her head still averted, fluttered another spoonful of soup between her lips. Mother eats in a way so unlike the manner prescribed in women’s magazines that it is no mere figure of speech in her case to use the word “flutter.”

  Naoji, my younger brother, once said to me when he had been drinking, “Just because a person has a title doesn’t make him an aristocrat. Some people are great aristocrats who have no other title than the one that nature has bestowed on them, and others like us, who have nothing but titles, are closer to being pariahs than aristocrats. Iwashima, for example (mentioning one of his school friends, a count), doesn’t he strike you as being more vulgar than any pimp you might meet in the streets? That damned fool wore a tuxedo to his cousin’s wedding. Even supposing there was some necessity for him to appear in that outfit, it made me want to puke just to hear the highfalutin language the idiot saw fit to use when making a table-speech. That kind of affectation is a cheap front which has nothing whatsoever to do with refinement. Just the way there used to be signs around the University saying ‘High-Class Lodgings,’ most of what passes for the aristocracy might actually better be called ‘High-Class Beggars.’ The real aristocrats don’t put on silly airs like that Iwashima. Mama is the only one in our family. She’s the genuine article. There’s something about her none of us
can match.”

  Take the matter of eating soup. We are trained to lean slightly over the plate, to take up a little soup with the spoon held sideways, and then to bring it to our mouth, still holding the spoon sideways. Mother, on the other hand, lightly rests the fingers of her left hand on the edge of the table and sits perfectly erect, with her head held high and scarcely so much as a glance at the plate. She darts the spoon into the soup and like a swallow—so gracefully and cleanly one can really use the simile—brings the spoon to her mouth at a right angle, and pours the soup between her lips from the point. Then, with innocent glances around her, she flutters the spoon exactly like a little wing, never spilling a drop of soup or making the least sound of sipping or clinking the plate. This may not be the way of eating soup that etiquette dictates, but to me it is most appealing and somehow really genuine. As a matter of fact, it is amazing how much better soup tastes when you eat it as Mother does, sitting serenely erect, than when you look down into it. But being, in Naoji’s words, a high-class beggar and unable to eat with Mother’s effortless ease, I bend over the plate in the gloomy fashion prescribed by proper etiquette.

  Mother’s way of eating, not only soup but everything else, is quite a thing apart from normal table manners. When the meat appears she at once cuts it up into little pieces with her knife and fork, then transfers the fork to her right hand and happily skewers one piece after another. Again, while we are struggling to free the meat from a chicken bone without rattling the plate, Mother unconcernedly picks up the bone in her fingers and chews the meat off. Even such uncivilized actions seem not only charming but strangely erotic when Mother performs them. The real things are apt to be deviant.