The Setting Sun
New Directions · first published 1947 · 1 pages
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.