The Setting Sun (New Directions Book)

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 effects of war and the transition from a feudal Japan to an industrial society. Ozamu Dazai died, a suicide, in 1948. But the influence of his book has 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.

• No Longer Human
• Kokoro
• Schoolgirl (Modern Japanese Classics)
• Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
• Snow Country
• Blue Bamboo: Tales by Dazai Osamu
• A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present
• A Personal Matter
• Spring Snow: The Sea of Fertility, 1
• Naomi