The setting sun.
By: Translated by Donald Keene.
Series: A New Directions book
Publisher: J. Laughlin
Published: 1956
Place of publication: [Norfolk, Conn
Language: eng; jpn
Number of pages: 189
First sentence: Mother uttered a faint cry.
Description: This powerful novel of a nation in social and moral crisis was first published by New Directions in 1956. Set in the early postwar years, it probes the destructive effectives of war and the translation from a feudal Japan to an industrial society. Ozamu Dazzi died, a suicide, in 1948. But the influence of his book had 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.
Notes: Translation of Shayō.