The Setting Sun by Osamu Dazai

There was something wrong about these people. But perhaps, just as it is true of my love, they could not go on living except in the way that they do. If it is true that man, once born into the world, must somehow live out his life, perhaps the appearance that people make in order to go through with it, even if it is as ugly as their appearance, should not be despised. To be alive. To be alive. An intolerably immense undertaking before which one can only gasp in apprehension.

Japan, just after the end of the second World War. Kazuko is a young aristocrat in a world where the aristocracy has lost all meaning and prestige. Her father has recently collapsed and died, and her mother is increasingly ill. They are forced to move from Tokyo to the countryside, as if disappearing into the  wilderness. Her mother, though she retains in Kazuko's eyes the qualities of bearing and gentility that once marked the upper classes, seems to belong to yesterday's world, and her illness is a token of that world's vanishing. Meanwhile, her brother Naoji--their mother's favorite--reacts to the diminishment of the family's prestige by getting into alcohol and drugs. It's not that they are ashamed, really, only that each of them--Kazuko, mother, Naoji--feels increasingly ancillary in this Japan, which is already itself so transformed and diminished from what it had been.

Kazuko clings to her mother, desperate to keep the family intact as well as she can. At the same time, she has become obsessed with a dissolute artist and friend of her brother's named Uehara. Uehara is from another class entirely, and her relation to him is not so different from Naoji's; both attach themselves to the world that Uehara represents because they want to flee their own. More accurately, perhaps, Kazuko wishes to betray her class; by choosing Uehara, she turns her back on a life that only promises for her further vanishing and death. Her letters to Uehara go mostly unanswered until she hunts him down and spends a wholly unsatisfying, even repulsive, night with him. In her letters, she calls him "M. C."--my child, my comedian, even my Chekhov. Interestingly, Kazuko's cultural references all seem to be quite Western. She loves Chekhov and Shakespeare; she knows her Bible inside and out. Is it a sign of outwardness, of the noble class searching outside the world that has given it power and prestige for an intact culture? Or is it a sign of a cultural exchange that belongs to an older period, and was obliterated by the rise of Japanese nationalism and the war?

When--spoiler alert--Kazuko's mother dies of tuberculosis, everything falls apart. Naoji commits suicide, writing to Kazuko that his love for his mother was the only thing keeping him from doing it before. (His love for Kazuko, we understand, is not quite strong enough--or, rather, Naoji correctly intuits that Kazuko is strong enough, if only by bare inches, not to follow him into the grave.) Interestingly, this reflects something that Kazuko's mother had said after the death of her father and the retreat into the countryside: if not for Kazuko and Naoji, she simply would have stayed put, and died. It's easy to imagine the fragile family as a house of cards, where the removal of one sends the whole edifice tumbling. The title, The Setting Sun, is clearly in ironic contrast to Japan's identity as the "Land of the  Rising Sun," and it captures quite painfully an entire generation and class who feel at the very end of existence, for whom there is no tomorrow. Kazuko finds a small bit of hope in reading the writings of Rosa Luxemburg--again, looking to the West--whose fervor for revolution get mixed up with her attempt to ingratiate herself with Uehara. We get the sense that revolution and renewal are not to be found there--but neither, I think, does the book close the door on them completely. Whatever hope there is in the novel didn't keep Dazai from committing suicide a few years after the book's publication.