The Setting Sun

by Osamu Dazai

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.

Last year nothing happened The year before nothing happened And the year before that nothing happened.

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.

This was the first time in my life that I had become aware of the existence of the wall of despair built of all the many things in the world before which human strength is helpless.

There was something wrong about these people. But perhaps, just as it is true of my love, they could not go on living except in the way they do. If it is true that man, once born into the world, must somehow live out his life, perhaps the appearance that people make in order to go through with it, even if it is as ugly as their appearance, should not be despised. To be alive. To be alive. An intolerably immense undertaking before which one can only gasp in apprehension.

In the last analysis my death is a natural one—man cannot live exclusively for principles.

Victims. Victims of a transitional period of morality. That is what we both certainly are.