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p2rdik 's review for:
The Setting Sun
by Osamu Dazai
We will live in perpetual struggle with the old mortality, like the sun.
*
I can see the way this book carries the notion of the setting sun as a metaphor for the whole society after the war. The Japanese didn’t bear the thought of having lost, it messed up the whole vision they had of themselves or what was fed to them from the emperor of the Japanese as the ultimate nation. They had to give out food as rations like a lot of other nations in these difficult times and the aristocrats lost their power. So this is what the novel is about mainly.
Told by the eyes of Kazuko it could be read as a story of emancipation. Hell, it probably even is one. A young woman in the early postwar years, on her way to abandon her class and morals what other people have placed on her (and the society as a whole). BUT reading it is still such a drag sometimes.
Having read and enjoyed Dazai Osamu’s No Longer Human, I had high hopes for this one as well. It was pretty decent in painting a picture of the Japanese society at the time, but had more of the qualities which annoyed me in No Longer Human.
Having almost no personal life of her own, she takes up imagining desire for her brother’s friend, a drunkard writer to whom she writes letters exclaiming her love. Sigh. And even after meeting the man after many years she cannot bear the thought that she was wrong and he was not the prince to save her from her miserable life after all. Sigh. So she still sleeps with the man in hopes of carrying his child. Sigh.
I might have grown out of love with the Japanese novels of the 20th Century. Sigh.
*
I can see the way this book carries the notion of the setting sun as a metaphor for the whole society after the war. The Japanese didn’t bear the thought of having lost, it messed up the whole vision they had of themselves or what was fed to them from the emperor of the Japanese as the ultimate nation. They had to give out food as rations like a lot of other nations in these difficult times and the aristocrats lost their power. So this is what the novel is about mainly.
Told by the eyes of Kazuko it could be read as a story of emancipation. Hell, it probably even is one. A young woman in the early postwar years, on her way to abandon her class and morals what other people have placed on her (and the society as a whole). BUT reading it is still such a drag sometimes.
Having read and enjoyed Dazai Osamu’s No Longer Human, I had high hopes for this one as well. It was pretty decent in painting a picture of the Japanese society at the time, but had more of the qualities which annoyed me in No Longer Human.
Having almost no personal life of her own, she takes up imagining desire for her brother’s friend, a drunkard writer to whom she writes letters exclaiming her love. Sigh. And even after meeting the man after many years she cannot bear the thought that she was wrong and he was not the prince to save her from her miserable life after all. Sigh. So she still sleeps with the man in hopes of carrying his child. Sigh.
I might have grown out of love with the Japanese novels of the 20th Century. Sigh.