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The Setting Sun, novel by Dazai Osamu, published in 1947 as Shayō. It is a tragic, vividly painted story of life in postwar Japan. The narrator is Kazuko, a young woman born to gentility but now impoverished. Though she wears Western clothes, her outlook is Japanese; her life is static, and she recognizes that she is spiritually empty. In the course of the novel she survives the deaths of her aristocratic mother and her sensitive...