The Setting Sun

Dazai offers something permanent and beautiful. --"The New York Times Book Review"

From the point of view of wholesome common sense, Dazai's writings may be regarded as the soliloquies of a deviant. --Yasunari Kawabata

What I despise about Dazai is that he exposes precisely those things in myself that I most want to hide. --Yukio Mishima

OSAMU DAZAI was born in 1909 into a powerful landowning family of Northern Japan. A brilliant student, he entered the French Department of Tokyo University in 1930, but later boasted that in the five years before he left without a degree he had never attended a lecture. Dazai was famous for confronting head-on the social and moral crises of postwar Japan when he committed suicide by throwing himself into Tokyo’s Tamagawa Reservoir. His body was found on what would have been his 39th birthday.

DONALD KEENE, the author of dozens of books in both English and Japanese as well as the famed translator of Dazai, Kawabata, and Mishima, was the first non-Japanese to receive the Yomiuri Prize for Literature