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.

I had never suspected that the important thing was to consider the match a costume makes with the color of the sky. What a beautiful, wonderful thing color harmony is, I thought to myself, rather surprised.

Money and women. Logic, intimidated, scampers off precipitously.

When I pretended to be precocious, people started the rumor that I was precocious. When I acted like an idler, rumor had it I was an idler. When I pretended I couldn’t write a novel, people said I couldn’t write. When I acted like a liar, they called me a liar. When I acted like a rich man, they started the rumor I was rich. When I feigned indifference, they classed me as the indifferent type. But when I inadvertently groaned because I was really in pain, they started the rumor that I was faking suffering. The world is out of joint.

Addiction is perhaps a sickness of the spirit.

“I wonder if there is anyone who is not depraved,” Naoji wrote in his notebook. Those words made me feel depraved myself, and my uncle and even Mother somehow then seemed depraved. Perhaps by depravity he actually meant tenderness.

Didnt understand.

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.

Oh, life is too painful, the reality that confirms the universal belief that it is best not to be born.

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.

Man was born for love and revolution.

I suddenly wondered whether Mother might not actually be happy now, whether the sensation of happiness might not be something like faintly glittering gold sunken at the bottom of the river of sorrow. The feeling of that strange pale light when once one has exceeded all the bounds of unhappiness—if that can be called a sensation of happiness, the Emperor, my mother, and even I myself may be said to be happy now.

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.

man cannot live exclusively for principles.

Victims. Victims of a transitional period of morality. That is what we both certainly are. The revolution must be taking place somewhere, but the old morality persists unchanged in the world around us and lies athwart our way. However much the waves on the surface of the sea may rage, the water at the bottom, far from experiencing a revolution, lies motionless, awake but feigning sleep.