synopsis:

'the setting sun' is a tragic story of life in postwar Japan, dealing with the fall of an aristocratic family, and how traditions or 'proper etiquette' is destroyed by the war and the industrialization of japan.

The protagonist, Kazuko, a young woman, wears Western clothes, but her outlook is Japanese. She is evacuated from Tokyo during the war with her mother. They look hopefully to the return of the son from southeast Asia. He does return, but as a drug addict. At the end of the war, Kazuko loses her mother. Her brother Naoji is caught in the web of his own and society's failures, driving him eventually to suicide. Kazuko decides to have a child with the disillusioned intellectual Uehara, hoping that the child will be her moral revolution.

The death of the mother shows the passing of a generation, and the suicide of Naoji exemplifies the feelings of depression and hopelessness that float over Japan. Kazuko becomes the heroin of the story when she creates a positive experience in the middle of this chaotic time. She bears a child which acts as a symbol for a fresh start and new hope during a time when that is just what is needed.

on this book:

'the setting sun' is probably daza's best-known work. Close inspection of this novel allows one to see a particular family battle changing times that are affecting a whole nation of people. Paralleled in many ways by the author's own reality, we see how this deep message is more than just a fiction story. As a nation, Japan had just surrendered to the U.

S. ending their participation in WWII. With the end of this battle, a new one on the home front began. In a sense, the tradition of Japan died with the war; there is a definite passing of a generation/era of people. The country is now caught in a state of shock as they try to piece together new lives. This is by no means a simple task when tradition is pulling from one side and an influx of modern ways and ideas are pulling from the other. Through the analyzation of Mother, Kazuko, and Naoji, the notion of a nation struggling to grasp a new modern identity while coping with the decline of a social order that has stood strong for so many years is unfolded from beginning to end creating mixed feelings of hope and depression for the people of the setting sun.

The word 'shayo' (setting sun) gave rise to the word 'shayozoku' (impoverished aristocracy), covering those whose world died in the war.