The close connection between Dazai’s life and almost any of his works is immediately apparent, although as an artist he naturally did not confine himself to a mere recounting of autobiographical details. The Setting Sun is actually one of his more objective works, and yet we may find much in Naoji, in the novelist Uehara, his mentor, and even in the girl, Kazuko, who narrates most of the story, that clearly derives from Dazai’s own personality and experiences. Dazai, himself a member of a near-aristocratic family, chose to depict the decline of his own class. Again and again we find ourselves wondering to what degree Dazai shared the emotions of his characters. When Naoji expresses the pain it has cost him to stay alive, we seem to hear the voice of the author who considered suicide so often. However, what gives The Setting Sun a strength that most of Dazai’s other writings, however brilliant, generally lack is the character of Kazuko, who is determined to struggle rather than to die. Dazai himself, after his brief and not very animated participation in the Left-Wing movement, seemed to lose all desire to struggle, and his writings are almost invariably tinged with cynical despair.
Dazai’s indebtedness to European literature is obvious, but he is in fact more closely linked with the great classics of Japanese literature, with which he was intimately familiar. His style offers no particular problems for the Western reader, but he uses one literary device which, although not unknown in the West, is perhaps unusual. He sometimes gives the last or climactic remark in a conversation first and then goes back to relate the steps leading up to it. An effective device in his hands, it is part of his fondness for the flashback. Another feature of Dazai’s style which the reader will note is how he uses the description of minor happenings (such as, the burning of the snake eggs or the swelling in the mother’s hand) to suggest much larger situations. In this technique he betrays his debt to Japanese poetry, particularly the miniature, seventeen-syllable haiku, in which each word must be a vital part of the whole, and where the attempt of the author is to make the reader supply from these scant drops the world from which the poem has been distilled.
It is generally conceded that Dazai is one of the great chroniclers of contemporary Japanese life, and this major achievement was reached despite the shortness of his life and career. He creates for us with amazing evocativeness a great variety of places—an old-fashioned mansion in the city, a country house, a Tokyo hovel, a cheap bar—and fills them with the people and the atmosphere that belong to them. I am, in a way, tempted to urge the Western reader to turn to Dazai for an exact picture of what life is like in Japan today, although certainly there are other pictures of Japan which can and have been painted of this same period. Despite the specialized area of the subject matter and the deviant behavior of some of its characters, The Setting Sun, by the depth of its understanding of the Japanese of today, evokes and reveals aspects of the Japanese nation as a whole. This is why the novel was so successful and so moving to Japanese of all classes. But The Setting Sun is not to be considered as a sociological document of help to those who wish to learn more about an obscure or distant country. It is a powerful and beautiful novel by one of the most brilliant of recent Japanese writers and stands as such in the world of literature.
Cambridge-New York Donald Keene
THE SETTING SUN
This translation is dedicated to Kawabata Yasunari, the distinguished novelist and President of the Japanese P.E.N. Club, who has done so much to promote the understanding of Japanese literature abroad.
CHAPTER ONE / SNAKE
Mother uttered a faint cry. She was eating soup in the dining room.
I thought perhaps something disagreeable had got into the soup. “A hair?” I asked.
“No.” Mother poured another spoonful of soup into her mouth as if nothing had happened. This accomplished, she turned her head to one side, directed her gaze at the cherry tree in full bloom outside the kitchen window and, her head still averted, fluttered another spoonful of soup between her lips. Mother eats in a way so unlike the manner prescribed in women’s magazines that it is no mere figure of speech in her case to use the word “flutter.”
Naoji, my younger brother, once said to me when he had been drinking, “Just because a person has a title doesn’t make him an aristocrat. Some people are great aristocrats who have no other title than the one that nature has bestowed on them, and others like us, who have nothing but titles, are closer to being pariahs than aristocrats. Iwashima, for example (mentioning one of his school friends, a count), doesn’t he strike you as being more vulgar than any pimp you might meet in the streets? That damned fool wore a tuxedo to his cousin’s wedding. Even supposing there was some necessity for him to appear in that outfit, it made me want to puke just to hear the highfalutin language the idiot saw fit to use when making a table-speech. That kind of affectation is a cheap front which has nothing whatsoever to do with refinement. Just the way there used to be signs around the University saying ‘High-Class Lodgings,’ most of what passes for the aristocracy might actually better be called ‘High-Class Beggars.’ The real aristocrats don’t put on silly airs like that Iwashima. Mama is the only one in our family. She’s the genuine article. There’s something about her none of us
can match.”
Take the matter of eating soup. We are trained to lean slightly over the plate, to take up a little soup with the spoon held sideways, and then to bring it to our mouth, still holding the spoon sideways. Mother, on the other hand, lightly rests the fingers of her left hand on the edge of the table and sits perfectly erect, with her head held high and scarcely so much as a glance at the plate. She darts the spoon into the soup and like a swallow—so gracefully and cleanly one can really use the simile—brings the spoon to her mouth at a right angle, and pours the soup between her lips from the point. Then, with innocent glances around her, she flutters the spoon exactly like a little wing, never spilling a drop of soup or making the least sound of sipping or clinking the plate. This may not be the way of eating soup that etiquette dictates, but to me it is most appealing and somehow really genuine. As a matter of fact, it is amazing how much better soup tastes when you eat it as Mother does, sitting serenely erect, than when you look down into it. But being, in Naoji’s words, a high-class beggar and unable to eat with Mother’s effortless ease, I bend over the plate in the gloomy fashion prescribed by proper etiquette.
Mother’s way of eating, not only soup but everything else, is quite a thing apart from normal table manners. When the meat appears she at once cuts it up into little pieces with her knife and fork, then transfers the fork to her right hand and happily skewers one piece after another. Again, while we are struggling to free the meat from a chicken bone without rattling the plate, Mother unconcernedly picks up the bone in her fingers and chews the meat off. Even such uncivilized actions seem not only charming but strangely erotic when Mother performs them. The real things are apt to be deviant.
I have sometimes myself thought things would taste better if we ate with our fingers, but I refrain from doing so, for fear that if a high-class beggar like myself imitates Mother badly, it might make me look a beggar plain and simple.
My brother Naoji says that we are no match for Mother, and I have at times felt something akin to despair at the difficulty of imitating her. Once, in the back garden of our house in Nishikata Street—it was a beautiful moonlight evening in the beginning of autumn—Mother and I were sitting in the summer-house by the edge of the pond admiring the moon, when she got up and went into a nearby clump of flowering shrubs. She called to me from among the white blossoms with a little laugh, “Kazuko, guess what Mother is doing now.”
“Picking flowers.”
She raised her little voice in a laugh. “Wee-wee!”
I felt there was something truly adorable in her which I could not possibly have imitated.
This has been quite a digression from this morning’s soup, but I recently learned from a book I was reading how in the days of the French monarchy the court ladies thought nothing of relieving themselves in the palace gardens or in a corner of the corridors. Such innocence really charms me, and I wondered if Mother might not be one of the last of that kind of lady.
At any rate, this morning she let out a little cry—ah—as she sipped the soup, and I asked if it were a hair, only to be informed that it was not.
“Perhaps it was too salty.”
The soup this morning was green pea, from an American can I got on the ration and made into a kind of potage. I haven’t any confidence in my abilities as a cook, though it is one of the few confidences a girl should have, and couldn’t help worrying about the soup, even after Mother said that nothing was wrong.
“You made it very well,” Mother said in a serious tone. After she had finished the soup, she ate some rice-balls wrapped in seaweed.
I have never liked breakfast and am not hungry before ten o’clock. This morning I managed to get through the soup, but it was an effort to eat anything. I put some rice-balls on a plate and poked at them with my chopsticks, mashing them down. I picked up a piece with my chopsticks, which I held at right angles to my mouth, the way Mother holds a spoon while eating soup, and pushed it into my mouth, as if I were feeding a little bird. While I dawdled over my food, Mother, who had already finished her meal, quietly rose and stood with her back against a wall warmed by the morning sun. She watched me eating for a while in silence.
“Kazuko, you mustn’t eat that way. You should try to make breakfast the meal you enjoy most.”
“Do you enjoy it, Mother?”
“It doesn’t matter about me—I’m not sick anymore.”
“But I’m the one who’s not sick.”
“No, no.” Mother, with a sad smile, shook her head.