# The Setting Sun

- Author: Osamu Dazai
- Translator: Donald Keene
- Original title (Japanese): 斜陽
- First published: 1947
- Publisher: New Directions
- This edition: 1968
- ISBN: 9780811200325
- Shelf: Tonight's Classic (one a night, from this pool); Japanese Literature in Translation

## Card

After the war, a once-noble mother and daughter leave Tokyo for a small house in the country.  
Written as the daughter's own account, it moves between elegy and a stubborn, growing resolve.  
For a night at the very end of summer.  

## About this book

In the years after the war, Kazuko and her mother, members of a declining aristocratic family, sell their Tokyo home and move to a cottage on the Izu coast. Kazuko's younger brother, Naoji, comes back from the war still carrying an old addiction and a deep despair. Kazuko, older and sharper than she first seems, begins to imagine a very different life for herself. What remains is a portrait of an old world ending and a woman choosing how to meet the new one.

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