The Setting Sun

by Osamu Dazai

  I want now to make an open declaration to my mother and to Naoji. I want to state with absolute clarity that I have been in love for some time with a certain man, and that I intend in the future to live as his mistress. I am quite sure you know who it is. His initials are M.C. Whenever anything painful comes up, I am seized with the desire to rush to his house and die of love with him.

  M.C., like yourself, has a wife and child. He also seems to have women friends more beautiful and younger than I. But I feel that I cannot go on living except by going to him. I have never met M.C.’s wife, but I hear that she is a very sweet and good person. Whenever I think of her, I seem in my own eyes a dreadful woman. I feel, though, that my present life is even more dreadful, and no consideration can make me refrain from appealing to M.C. I would like to fulfill my love “wise as the serpent and harmless as the dove,” but I am sure that no one, not my mother or Naoji or the rest of the world, will approve of me. I wonder about you. In short, I have no choice but to think things out myself and act however it seems best to me. The thought brings tears. This is the first thing I have ever had, and I wonder if there is a way to carry it through to the congratulations of those around me. I have strained my mental powers as if I were trying to think of the answer to some terribly complicated problem in algebra, until at last I have come to feel that there is a single point where the whole thing may be unraveled, and suddenly I have become cheerful.

  But what does my precious M.C. think of me? That’s a disheartening question. You might call me a self-styled—what shall I say, I can’t say self-styled wife—perhaps a “self-styled lover.” With that the situation, if M.C. says he really can’t endure me, I have nothing more to say. I have a favor to ask of you. Could you please ask him? One day six years ago a faint pale rainbow formed in my breast. It was not love or passion, but the colors of the rainbow have deepened and intensified as time has gone by. Never once have I lost it from sight. The rainbow that spans the sky when it clears after a shower soon fades away, but the rainbow in a person’s heart does not seem to disappear that way. Please ask him. I wonder what he really thinks of me. I wonder if he has thought of me as of a rainbow in the sky after a shower. And has it already faded away?

  If it has, I must erase my own rainbow. But unless I first erase my life, the rainbow in my breast will not fade away.

  I pray for an answer.

  To Mr. Uehara Jirō . (My Chekhov. M.C.)

  P.S. I have recently been putting on a little weight. I think it is less that I am turning into a brute creature than that I have at last become human. This summer I read a novel (just one) by D. H. Lawrence.

  No answer has come from you, and I am writing again. The letter I sent the other day was underhanded and full of snares. I suppose that you saw through every one of them. Yes, it’s true. I tried to insert a maximum of cunning into every line of the letter. I imagine that you thought that my purpose was merely to elicit money from you to save my life. I don’t deny this. However, I would like you to know, if you’ll excuse me for saying so, that if my only wish was for a patron I should not have chosen you especially. I have the impression that quite a few rich old men would be willing to care for me. As a matter of fact, not long ago I had something like a proposal. You may even know the gentleman’s name—he is a widower over sixty, a member of the Academy of Arts, I believe; this great artist came here to the mountains in order to ask my hand. He used to be a neighbor of ours when we lived in Nishikata Street, and we met him occasionally at neighborhood meetings. Once, it was an evening in autumn as I recall, when Mother and I passed in our car in front of this artist’s house, he was standing absent-mindedly by his gate. Mother nodded slightly to him from the car window, at which his peevish, sallow face suddenly turned a brilliant red.

  “I wonder if it can be love,” I said playfully. “He’s in love with you, Mother!”

  “No,” Mother calmly answered, as if to herself. “He’s a great man.”

  It seems to be our family’s custom to honor artists.

  The artist sent a proposal for my hand to Mother, by way of a certain prince, one of Uncle Wada’s cronies, explaining that he had lost his wife some years ago. Mother suggested that I make a direct reply to the artist in whatever way I saw fit. Without giving it very much thought, I dashed off a note to the effect that I had at present no intention of remarrying.

  “You don’t mind if I refuse?” I asked Mother.

  “I didn’t myself think it was a likely match.”

  I sent my letter of refusal to the artist at his villa in the Japan Alps. Two days later he turned up without warning, having no knowledge of my answer because he had left before my letter reached him. He sent word that he was on his way to a hot spring in Izu and asked to pay a brief call. Artists, whatever their age, seem to indulge in the most childish, irresponsible pranks.

  Mother was not feeling well, and I myself received him in the Chinese room. I said while pouring tea, “I imagine that my letter of refusal must have reached your house by now. I carefully considered your offer, but it somehow didn’t seem possible.”

  “Indeed?” he said with some impatience. He wiped away the perspiration. “I hope that you will reconsider. Perhaps I can’t—how shall I say it—give you what might be called spiritual happiness, but I can on the other hand make you very happy in a material way. That at least I can assure you. I hope I don’t speak too bluntly….”

  “I don’t understand that happiness you speak of. It may seem very impertinent, but I can only answer, ‘No, thank you.’ I am what Nietzche described as ‘a woman who wants to give birth to a child.’ I want a child. Happiness does not interest me. I do want money too, but just enough to be able to bring up my child.”

  The artist gave an odd smile. “You are a very unusual woman. You can put into words what everyone has thought. To live with you might cause fresh inspiration to come into my work.”

  He said this rather affected thing in a manner quite unlike an old man. The thought occurred to me that if through my strength the work of so great an artist could really be rejuvenated, this too would certainly be a reason to go on living. But no stretch of the imagination enabled me to visualize myself in the artist’s arms.

  I asked with a little smile, “Doesn’t it make any difference to you that I don’t love you?”

  He answered seriously, “It doesn’t matter for a woman. A woman can be vague.”

  “But a woman like myself cannot think of marriage without love. I am fully grown. Next year I will be thirty.” I was taken aback at my own words.

  Thirty. “Something of the maiden’s fragrance lingers with a woman until she is twenty-nine, but nothing is left about the body of the woman of thirty years.” At the sudden recollection of these words from a French novel I had read long ago, I was assailed by a melancholy I could not drive away. I looked outside. The sea, bathed in the noon glare, glittered with the dazzling intensity of bits of broken glass. I remembered that when I had read those words in the novel, I had lightly assented, thinking them probably true. I felt a sharp nostalgia for those days when I could think with equanimity that a woman’s life was over at thirty. I wondered if the maiden fragrance of my body was fading away with each bracelet, necklace, and dress that I sold. A wretched, middle-aged woman. And yet, even a middle-aged woman’s life contains a woman’s life, doesn’t it? That is what I have come of late to understand. I remember what my teacher, an Englishwoman, said to me, then aged nineteen, when she was about to return to her country.

  “You should never fall in love. Love will bring you unhappiness. If you must love, let it be when you are older, after you are thirty.”

  Her words could only arouse in me a dumb incredulity. It was quite impossible for me at the time even to imagine life after thirty.

  The artist suddenly spoke, his voice edged with spite, “I’ve heard a rumor that you are selling the house. I wonder if it’s true.”

  I laughed. “Excuse me, but I just remembered The Cherry
Orchard. I suppose you would like to buy it?”

  He twisted his mouth in an angry scowl and did not answer. Artist that he was, he was quick to guess my meaning.

  It was true that there had been talk of selling the house to a prince, but it had never come to anything, and I was surprised that the artist had even heard the rumor. But that we should have been thinking of him in terms of Lopákhin in The Cherry Orchard was so distasteful that he quite lost his good humor, and after a few minutes more of small talk, he left.

  What I ask of you now is not that you be a Lopákhin. That much I can warrant you. But please listen to the presumption of a middle-aged woman.

  It is already six years since we met. At the time I knew nothing about you except that you were my brother’s teacher, and at that a rather peculiar teacher. We drank sake together from glasses, and you were a little bold. That didn’t bother me. It only gave me the most curious sensation of buoyancy. I didn’t like or dislike you—I had no feeling at all. Later, in order to please my brother, I borrowed some of your novels from him and read them. Sometimes I found them interesting, sometimes not. I confess I was not a very passionate reader. But during the past six years, from just when I can’t say, the remembrance of you has soaked into me like some all-pervasive fog, and what we did that night on the stairs from the basement has returned to me with absolute vividness. I feel somehow as if that moment was vital enough to decide my fate. I miss you. Perhaps, I think, it may be love, and at this possibility I have felt so utterly forlorn that I have sometimes yielded to uncontrolled weeping. You are completely unlike other men. I am not in love with an author, like Nina in The Sea Gull. I am not fascinated by novelists. If you think me a “literary lady” or anything of the kind, you are off the track. I want a child from you.

  Perhaps if I had met you long, long ago, when you and I were both still single, we might have married, and I should have been spared my present sufferings, but I have resigned myself to the fact that I shall never be able to marry you. For me to attempt to push aside your wife would be like an act of brute force, and I should hate myself for it. I am willing to become your mistress. (I really can’t bear the word, but when I was on the point of writing “lover,” I realized that I meant what people generally do by the word “mistress,” and I decided to be blunt.) I gather that the usual mistress has a hard lot. They say that she is abandoned as soon as she ceases to be of use, and that a man, whatever sort of man he may be, will always return to his wife when he approaches sixty. I remember hearing my nurse and the old man of Nishikata Street discussing this matter and concluding that a mistress was one thing a woman should never become. But they were talking about an ordinary mistress, and I feel that our case is different.

  I believe that your work is the most precious thing in the world to you, and that if you like me, becoming intimate with me may actually help your work. And your wife would then also be willing to accept our relationship. I know this may seem an odd kind of sophistry, but I am convinced that there is nothing amiss with my reasoning.

  The only problem is your answer. Do you like me or dislike me? Or have you no feelings on the subject? I am terrified at what you may reply, but I must ask anyway. In my last letter, I wrote that I was a “self-styled lover,” and in this letter, I have written about the “presumption of a middle-aged woman.” It now occurs to me that unless you answer I shall have no grounds whatsoever even for presumption and shall probably be doomed to waste away the rest of my life alone. I am lost unless I hear from you.

  In your novels you often describe love adventures, and people gossip about you as if you were an absolute monster, but it has suddenly dawned on me that you probably are actually an advocate of common sense. I do not myself understand common sense. I believe that the good life consists in being able to do what I like. I want to give birth to your child. I don’t want to bear anyone else’s child, no matter what happens. I ask your advice. If you know the answer, please tell me. Please say clearly what your feelings are.

  The rain has stopped and a wind has sprung up. It is now three o’clock in the afternoon. I shall go out now to get our ration of the best quality saké. I shall put two empty rum bottles in a bag and this letter in my pocket, and in ten minutes I shall be on my way to the village down the hill. I shall not let my brother get this sake. I myself intend to drink it. Every night I drink a little from a glass. You know, sake really should be drunk from a glass.

  Won’t you come here?

  To Mr. M.C.

  It rained again today. An invisible, nasty mixture of fog and rain is falling. Every day I have waited for your answer without even leaving the house, but nothing has come. What are you thinking about? I wonder if I did the wrong thing in my last letter in writing about that artist. Perhaps you thought I mentioned his proposal in order to arouse your competitive spirit. But nothing more has come of it. Just a little while ago, as a matter of fact, Mother and I were laughing over it. Mother has recently been complaining about pain in her tongue, but thanks to the “aesthetic treatment” which Naoji prescribed, the pain has been much alleviated, and she has seemed rather better of late.

  A few minutes ago I was standing on the porch, and as I looked at the rain being blown and swirled about, I was trying to picture what your feelings are. Just then Mother’s voice called from the dining-room, “I have finished boiling the milk. Please come here.”

  “It’s so cold today I’ve made the milk very hot,” she said.

  As we drank the steaming milk, we talked about the artist. I said, “He and I are not the least suited, are we?”

  Mother answered tranquilly, “No, you aren’t.”

  “Considering the wayward type I am, that I don’t dislike artists and, what’s more, that he seems to have a large income, it certainly looked like a good match. But it’s quite impossible.”

  Mother smiled. “Kazuko, you’re a naughty child. If you were so sure that it was impossible, why in the world did you lead him on that way by chattering with such relish when he was here? I can’t imagine your motive.”

  “Oh, but it was interesting. There’s a lot more I would like to have talked about. I have no discretion, you know.”

  “No, you never let anybody go in a conversation. Kazuko, you’re tenacious!”

  Mother was in very good spirits today. Then, noticing that I had put my hair up yesterday for the first time, she commented, “That style is made for women with thin hair. Your up-sweep looks much too grand. All that is missing is a little golden tiara. I’m afraid it’s a failure.”

  “I’m disappointed. Didn’t you once tell me that my neckline was so pretty that I should try not to hide it? Didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I seem to remember something of the sort.”

  “I never forget a syllable of praise addressed to me. I’m so glad you remembered.”

  “That gentleman who came the other day must have praised you.”

  “Yes, he did. That’s why I wouldn’t let him out of my clutches. He said that being with me made his inspiration—no, I can’t go on. It isn’t that I dislike artists, but I can’t stand anyone who puts on those ponderous airs of a man of character.”

  “What kind of man is Naoji’s teacher?”

  I felt a chill go through me. “I don’t really know, but what can you expect from a teacher of Naoji’s. He seems to be tagged as a dissolute character.”

  “Tagged?” murmured Mother with a pleased look in her eyes. “That’s an interesting expression. If he wears a tag, doesn’t that make him harmless? It sounds rather sweet, like a kitten with a bell around its neck. A dissolute character without a tag is what frightens me.”

  “I wonder.”

  I felt happy, so happy; it was as though my body had dissolved into smoke and was being drawn up into the sky. Do you understand? Why I was so happy? If you don’t, I’ll hit you!

  Won’t you come here sometime? I would ask Naoji to bring you back with him, but there’s something unnatural and peculiar about askin
g him. It would be best if you suddenly dropped in, as if acting on some whim of yours. It wouldn’t matter much if you came with Naoji, but still, it would be best if it were by yourself, when Naoji is away in Tokyo. If Naoji is here, he is sure to monopolize you, and you will be taken off to Osaki’s place to drink, and that will be that.

  My family for generations has always been fond of artists. Kōrin himself lived for years in our old family house in Kyoto and painted beautiful pictures there. So I am sure Mother will be very pleased to have you come. You will probably stay in the foreign-style room on the second floor. Please do not forget to turn off the light. I will climb the dark stairs with a little candle in my hand. You don’t approve? Too fast, I suppose!

  I like dissolute people, especially those who wear their tags. I would like to become dissolute myself. I feel as if there is no other way for me to live. You are the most notorious example in Japan of a tagged dissolute, I suppose. Naoji has told me that many people say you are dirty and repulsive, and that you are hated and often attacked. Such stories only make me love you all the more. I am sure, considering who you are, that you must have all kinds of amies, but now you will gradually come to love only me. I can’t help thinking that. When you are living with me, you will be happy in your work. Ever since I was small, people have often told me that to be with me is to forget one’s troubles. I have never had the experience of being disliked. Everyone has called me a “nice girl.” That’s why I am so sure that you could never dislike me.