The Setting Sun [Paperback]

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.Written with beauty, refinement, and force: a work of unmistakable distinction&This powerful novel of a nation in social and moral crisis was first published by New Directions in 1956.