Since Dazai had turned his back on both the Marxist and the American versions of radical change, it was entirely in character that the “revolutionary” vision he did offer in The Setting Sun was highly idiosyncratic. In the final analysis, his heroine Kazuko declares in her rambling way, revolution is nothing more than a defiant love that repudiates the “old morality,” a passion beyond understanding, or even the sorrow that comes from such passion. Revolution and love are the same thing. In Kazuko’s case, to be a revolutionary meant to bear and raise the illegitimate child of her disreputable
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