The Setting Sun

by Osamu Dazai

For the first time in my life I realized what a horrible, miserable, salvationless hell it is to be without money.

Even as I write these words the thought strikes me that, just as she said, we have already died, only to come back to life as different people.

A sensation of helplessness, as if it were utterly impossible to go on living. Painful waves beat relentlessly on my heart, as after a thunderstorm the white clouds frantically scud across the sky.

To wait. In our lives we know joy, anger, sorrow, and a hundred other emotions, but these emotions all together occupy a bare one per cent of our time. The remaining ninety-nine per cent is just living in waiting. I wait in momentary expectation, feeling as though my breasts are being crushed, for the sound in the corridor of the footsteps of happiness. Empty. Oh, life is too painful, the reality that confirms the universal belief that it is best not to be born.

Thus every day, from morning to night, I wait in despair for something. I wish I could be glad that I was born, that I am alive, that there are people and a world. Won’t you shove aside the morality that blocks you?

Those who wish to go on living can always manage to survive whatever obstacles there may be. That is splendid of them, and I daresay that what people call the glory of mankind is comprised of just such a thing. But I am convinced that dying is not a sin.