#11 THE SETTING SUN (8/10)
by Osamu Dazai (太宰 治)
When I spotted an English translation of this book I bought it immediately because it had been so hard finding any second hand Japanese fiction in English in Japan. I only knew about Osamu Dazai (太宰 治) because NO LONGER HUMAN had been everywhere on special display in commercial bookshops in London (2024) because of BookTok. I read it on the plane home in the wake of meeting an impressive human in Kobe.
There is much merit to be found in the voice of this narrator. She bears the arrogance of a child who tells you what they like without the self-consciousness of it seeming either too “personal”, or “irrelevant”,
The real things are apt to be deviant.
She frames herself in absolutes—the only absolutes which matter, showcases of personal preference.
If you’ve seen Amélie hopefully you’ll know the scene when she goes through all the people in her neighbourhood and quantifies them by their likes and dislikes. It’s incredibly satisfying and manages to cover a lot of ground in terms of character work in a relatively short space of time. As children, we instinctively pick up on this and pretend to hate things we don’t mind (tomatoes,) because instantly it gives us character. And it’s still true, I find it so enlivening when a child tells me their favourite animal, or colour, because this is a realm which hasn’t been evolutionarily, habitually or socially determined yet (unlike liking tall men for example…)—but then comes adulthood—or at the very least, adolescence. And what happens then? We stop having favourite colours/animals/popstars/or even writers anymore. Have we grown up too much? Yes. I’m afraid we’ve lost the little child—we are so considered, we are… vague… that is, until we find something we really like again.
Enter: human.
Problem: strength of feeling coupled with possibility of reciprocation.
Reality: danger.
“I like you” doesn’t come anywhere close to how we feel when we really like someone. Recently, I made the mistake of laughing at “likes” staring at the repetition of my feelings and making the jump towards “love”. (It was a horrendous confession now I think of it. Extremely un-specific. I want you to touch me. The fact of your existence inspires me.)
The narrator of THE SETTING SUN is excellent at writing urgent and loving confessions.. The best pages in this novel are probably those in which she writes to a degenerate married novelist whom she’s decided to love, from afar. (They kissed once in a stairwell.)
It feels good to be in the hands of someone incredibly wise. Osamu Dazai is just that. It’s not about being in the company of someone cleverer than you, because that’s not a particularly nice feeling (cough Henry Miller, cough) but wisdom is generous through sheer existence
Wisdom knows
(You are my personal preference)
A certainty of feeling in an adult-world is a godsend. A return to innocence. And yet, to balance the adult and the child within you—to take the child seriously whilst squeezing the adult’s hand…
When the narrator of THE SETTING SUN goes to the house of her beloved to demand a reply to one of her many letters of loving confession he isn’t there… but his wife is. Who kindly fixes the Narrator’s broken 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 passage 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 slightly mad (slightly speaking,) so where possible you’ve got to bring the beloved in (either directly or indirectly) and for the sake of living it’s both fun and enlivening to take risks, to dare to (especially as a woman yo,) be on the woo-ing side. Because you could simply suck on your feelings in your dirty 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 destroy everything including your hair (—ok not really, but you will lose time in pine forests…)
If you send an emotional missile then, be sure to prepare yourself for a kick to the heart. Because you might not get back the response you want. Just like our poor Narrator in Dazai’s novel:
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.
If this happens, please don’t worry. Because whilst you may feel like you’ve torn down the curtain and taken off all your clothes to reveal the mom’s hippopotamus herself—relax, you look better than you think.
In fact the problem is, you could have looked even worse but you were unable to go there. You could, for example, have been spitting bile after an English person’s medley staggering up a hill finally able to see clearly again (a metaphor for the aftershock of performing your own disembowelment) but you haven’t the Latinate heart… you’re practically a twentieth century Japanese aristocrat yourself (weak link back to the novel) because your super strong feelings refuse to make themselves known in public and though you can nod and acknowledge very calmly, “I probably just feel very disappointed, and upset, right now”—what you don’t do, what you can certainly only do on the page now, is slap him with the fateful palm of your hand: why didn’t you save it, why didn’t you save those feelings, those clichés for me? At least by writing it down you can straddle two show-ponies at once (dear Destruction and Construction…)
The narrator of this novel describes passion/love/flame as “the rainbow of revolution in my breast”—how perfect is that? The strength of her feelings are a kind of super-power and it is her willingness to share them which makes them so beautiful, generous, expansive... generative too. Because if your love for one is not inadvertently fuelling another you’re lost—no worse, you’re losing.
Now, it’s time for me to get off my horses, smooth out my apron, and admit these two things:
The brute nature of my feelings strangled my ability to ask carefully about the nature of his. Meanwhile,
The so-called strength of my feelings didn’t manage to pierce my own polite countenance therefore I was forced to reside in a distinctly English (pseudo-Japanese) no-man’s land. The only constructive violence I could do was ask to be alone. But what I should have done was pretended to be a child, accepted this: your my hero, looked at our respective feelings like paint on canvas and asked very deliberate questions about why his was less red? Do you want to touch me? Do you get excited when I touch you? I mean how do we ever feel? Go on. How do we do it? Information shared about the present alongside future plans in a nutshellshell?
When I confessed how I felt I was Human
Had I dared to lose face I could have been a God.
Love
Tilly
Next.