The Setting Sun by Osamu Dazai

Praying for the love of confession

I’m on the plane home and the woman next to me starts whispering. I don’t look but I assume she’s praying. She may as well be whispering into a tape deck tho. In many ways it’s the same. Everyone needs the semblance of an audience—it isn’t personal, it’s just a landing place. Writing is what atheists do when they want to pray.

The Setting Sun by Osamu Dazai

Score: 7/10

Published: 1947

Original language: Japanese

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I love the voice of this narrator.

It resembles the arrogance of a child who tells you what they like without the self-consciousness of it either being too personal or irrelevant.

I think there’s a generous arrogance to loving things strongly, openly, and vocally, and it permeates (terrible word) the voice of this narrator.

(It is no mistake since vague feelings don’t do well on the page.)

Consider Amélie (the film,) when she goes through all the people in her neighbourhood and quantifies them by their likes and dislikes. It’s incredibly satisfying because it manages to cover a lot of ground very quickly in terms of character work.

As children we socially pick up on this and pretend to hate things we don’t mind (tomatoes) because instantly it gives us character. I find it enlivening when children emphatically tell me their favourite animal or favourite colour. Enlivening because it’s the strength of their preference in a realm which isn’t evolutionarily or habitually determined (like, I like tall men or wine is). It’s a kind of ”useless” self-knowledge which lots of kids just seem to be really good at. One of the curses of growing up is to become more vague? Perhaps. Until we find something we really like again.

The best moments in this novel are the letters of urgent loving confession the narrator writes to a degenerate (married) novelist—who she’s decided to love, from afar. (They kissed once in a stairwell.)

There’s a connection here.

When you really like someone, there is, in some crazy sense, the feeling (could it to be a fact?) that it isn’t entirely ”personal”. And that’s why you should surmount (get over) your ego, and tell them once and for all. I close my novel.

Cheng.

Wise, unyielding, serenely soberly cheeky Cheng.

I’m back in Japan.

I’ve reached a new hostel and the owner welcomes me in by making an impeccable cup of coffee.

Eventually, he shows me upstairs to the place where I’ll be sleeping. I murmur impressions whilst he murmurs replies. When there’s only one more thing to point out he lingers on the landing,

“I live upstairs.”

“Ah? That’s good news.”

We’re looking at each other. There’s a glimmer in his eye which is probably reflecting a glimmer in mine and it is quite possibly too much already. [I didn’t have any plans for us at that point but he had pleasantly surprised me thus far. For one he was a writer, which is always enough (at first) to make me sit down. And then we spoke about his coffee entreprises and his books and his son and basically the good things kept mounting up and I wanted to climb to the top and lie in a pile of dirty socks with him. I hadn’t considered his age or actually climbing on top of him yet so I waited. And sure enough I got the signs. (I omit them here to maintain some privacy.) But it was after the third sign when the thing which made me weirdly swallow in my throat happened.]

Back to the novel.

I haven’t completely forgotten about it. It’s lying in my lap. But it’s true, I’m distracted—in fact, I’m all lit up. (Us poor readers on the plane, we’re singled out. And it feels very arrogant for us.) My novel is doubly bound. For one it’s Japanese. For two, it’s about Japanese aristocrats. So that’s two levels of constriction. And there’s something about planes. They bear a similar resonance to the library or the internet café—those seedy dwelling places where time moves slow like a clock underwater. Their sexiness is on account of their stillness. Group activities where the bodies are moving like sports = unsexy. It’s surprising how unsexy sports actually are. That’s on account of the feelings of camaraderie and competition. I think they’re so strong as to stamp out all the ambiguities of desire. Which is why you won’t find me on the apps—they’re way too straight-forward. And yet I still want to put myself “out there”—which is partly what this is about (partly speaking…)

Some evenings later I took Cheng up on his offer to drink.

We were on the ground floor, at the bar. He was pouring some whiskey into his beautiful coffee (his own blend of beans from China) and he asked if I’d ever tried it, coffee and whiskey?

I shook my head.

I expected him to pour me a glass but instead he just handed me his so I had to check, it’s ok if I sip?

He nodded whilst looking down so I said thank you and sapt. (It was amazing. The kind of flavour combination which simultaneously blends and delivers in slow succession—)

Can I have some more?

He nodded and poured me a glass of my own but it was tiny. (I thought he was being stingy but I can understand it now as a kind of respectable reticence because I’m his guest and these were spirits and I am sort-of young?) But not then. I looked down at my glass disappointedly then at his,

Can I have some of yours?

He nodded and lifted his glass to pour some into mine—at which point we looked up at each other and smiled—back down after a moments pass,

Oh shit I laughed, now I have too much—so I took the glass and returned some to his—

Wait, he laughed. This is perfect, let’s mix.

So he took both of our glasses and held them in the air.

Then he poured them slowly back and forth into each other whilst I watched. (My head was bent low so I could be better in touch with the meniscus.) That’s when I weirdly swallowed. I think we both felt it. We were sharing liquids, at last.

I love to be in the hands of someone incredibly wise.

And I believe Osamu Dazai is just that.

It’s not about being in the company of someone cleverer than you (that’s not a particularly nice feeling—cough Henry Miller, cough) but wisdom is generous through sheer existence.

See this moment here when the narrator goes to the house of the beloved to demand a reply to one of her many letters of confession. Her beloved isn’t there but his wife is and she kindly fixes her sandal in the hall,

“I’m most grateful to you,” I said, and making a preposterously polite bow, fled outside. The wind lacerated me. Outbreak of hostilities. I love him, I long for him. I really love him, yes, I really want him. I love him so much I can’t help it. Yes. I am quite aware that his wife is an unusually sweet person and his little girl is lovely, but I have been stood on God’s platform of judgement, and I haven’t a trace of guilty conscience. There is no reason for God to punish me. I am not in the least wicked. I really love him and there’s nothing I won’t do to be with him. I’ll spend two, three nights sleeping in the fields if necessary. Yes, I will.

To read this with too much empathy would miss the mark.

It’s very possible, in loving, in letters of loving confession, to lose touch of respectable degrees. To love out of touch is both self-centred and mad (slightly-speaking). But for the sake of living it doesn’t matter, because it’s so fun and enlivening to take risks, to dare to, (as a woman yo) be on the woo-ing side. You can suck on your feelings in your bedroom but to do so would be to take them too seriously. Your feelings are a missile and you’re betting off launching them into the air otherwise they’ll turn into a grenade and destroy your hair. You may of course not get a reply:

I was assailed by a sensation of desolation more intense than anything I had previously known, as if i had been abandoned at dusk in an autumnal wasteland where no answering sound would ever come, however often I called.

But there are ways to mitigate this silence into something ontologically negotiable (more on that soon). The narrator of this novel describes passion—love—flame as, “the rainbow of revolution in my breast”—how perfect is that? The strength of a woman’s feelings are a kind of super-power and it is her willingness to share them which makes them so beautiful, generous, expansive. Compare this with the brooding man baby poet who writes poetry in isolation or simply seeks the beloved’s “company”. It is one of the many paradoxes of life that to make ourselves more vulnerable by articulating what we feel—to God, to blog, to beloved—actually brings us closer to being one (yes a god, a Greek one now.)