The Setting Sun

by Osamu Dazai

  It would be so good if we could meet. I no longer need an answer from you or anything else. I want to meet you. I suppose that the simplest thing would be for me to go to your house in Tokyo, but I am Mother’s nurse and servant in constant attendance, and I couldn’t possibly leave her. I beg you. Please come here. I want to meet you just once. Then you will understand everything. See the faint lines that have etched themselves on both sides of my mouth. Behold the wrinkles of the malheur du siècle. I am sure that my face will express my feeling to you more clearly than any words.

  In my first letter I wrote of a rainbow in my breast. That rainbow is not of the refined beauty of the light of fireflies or of the stars. If it were so faint and faraway, I would not be suffering this way, and I could probably forget you gradually. The rainbow in my breast is a bridge of flames. It is a sensation so strong that it chars my breast. Not even the craving of a narcotics addict when his drugs run out can be as painful as this. I am certain that I am not mistaken, that it is not wicked of me, but even when most persuaded, I sometimes shudder at the thought that I may be attempting to do an extraordinarily foolish thing. And I often wonder if I am not going mad. However, sometimes even I am capable of making plans with due self-possession. Please come here just this once. Any time at all will suit me. I will wait here for you and not go anywhere. Please believe me.

  Please see me again and then, if you dislike me, say so plainly. The flames in my breast were lighted by you; it is up to you to extinguish them. I can’t put them out by my unaided efforts. If we meet, if we can only meet, I know that I shall be saved. Were these the days of The Tale of Genji, what I am saying now would not be anything exceptional, but today—oh, my ambition is to become your mistress and the mother of your child.

  If there is anyone who would laugh at letters like these, he is a man who derides a woman’s efforts to go on living, he mocks at a woman’s life. I am choking in the suffocating foul air of the harbor. I want to hoist my sails in the open sea, even though a tempest may be blowing. Furled sails are always dirty. Those who would deride me are so many furled sails. They can do nothing.

  A nuisance of a woman. But in this matter, it is I who suffer the most. It is nonsensical for some outsider who has never suffered the least of what I have been going through to presume to make judgments while slackly drooping his ugly sails. I have no desire for others to take it on themselves to analyze my thoughts. I am without thoughts. I have never, not even once, acted on the basis of any doctrine or philosophy.

  I am convinced that those people whom the world considers good and respects are all liars and fakes. I do not trust the world. My only ally is the tagged dissolute. The tagged dissolute. That is the only cross on which I wish to be crucified. Though ten thousand people criticize me, I can throw in their teeth my challenge: Are you not all the more dangerous for being without tags?

  Do you understand?

  There is no reason in love, and I have gone rather too far in offering you these rational-seeming arguments. I feel as if I am merely parroting my brother. All I want to say is that I await your visit. I want to see you again. That is all.

  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?

  To M.C. (These are not the initials of My Chekhov.

  I am not in love with an author. My Child.)

  CHAPTER - FIVE / THE LADY

  This summer I sent three letters to him. But no reply came. It seemed at the time that there was nothing else I could possibly do, and I put into the three letters all that was in my heart. I posted them with the feeling of one who leaps from a promontory into the raging billows of the sea, but although I waited a very long time, no answer came.

  I casually inquired of my brother Naoji how that man was. Naoji replied that he was much the same as usual—that he spent every night in drunken carousals, that his literary productions consisted exclusively of works of an increasingly immoral nature, and that he was the object of the scorn and loathing of all decent citizens. Moreover, he had urged Naoji to start a publishing house, a suggestion which Naoji eagerly accepted. As a preliminary step, Naoji persuaded two or three novelists besides that person to appoint him as their agent, and the question now was whether or not they could unearth someone with capital to lend the project. As I listened to Naoji’s words, it became increasingly evident that not a particle of my odor had seeped into the atmosphere around the man I loved. It was not so much shame that I experienced as the feeling that the actual world was an unfamiliar organism utterly unlike the world of my imagination. I was assailed by a sensation of desolation more intense than anything I had previously known, as if I had been abandoned at dusk in an autumnal wasteland where no answering sound would ever come, however often I called. Is that, I wonder, what is meant by the pat phrase “disappointed love”? I asked myself if I were doomed to die, numbed by the night dews, alone in the wasteland as the sun dropped completely from sight. My shoulders and chest were fiercely shaken, and I was choked by a dry sobbing.

  There is nothing left for me now but to go up to Tokyo, cost what it may, and see Mr. Uehara. My sails have been lifted, and my ship has put forth from the harbor. I can not wait any longer. I must go where I am going. These were my thoughts as I began secretly to prepare for the journey to Tokyo, only to have Mother’s condition take an unexpected turn.

  One night she was racked by a terrible cough. When I took her temperature, it was already 102 degrees.

  “It must be because it was so chilly today,” Mother murmured in between spasms of coughing. “Tomorrow I’ll be better.” But somehow it didn’t seem just a cough, and to be on the safe side I decided to have the village doctor pay a call the following day.

  The next morning Mother’s temperature dropped to normal and her cough had much abated. All the same, I went to the doctor and asked him to examine Mother, describing her sudden weakening of late, her fever of the previous night, and my belief that there was more to her cough than a mere cold.

  “I shall be calling presently,” the doctor said, adding, “and here is a gift for you.” He took three pears from a shelf in the corner of his reception room and offered them to me. He appeared a little after noon in his formal clothes. As usual he spent an interminable time in ausculation and percussion, at last turning to me with the words, “There is nothing to excite alarm. If your mother takes the medicine which I shall prescribe, she will recover.”

  I found him curiously comic but controlled my smiles to ask, “How about injections?”

  He answered gravely, “They will probably not be necessary. We have here to do with a cold, and if your mother remains quiet, I think we can get rid of it shortly.”

  But even after a week had passed Mother’s temperature did not disappear. Her cough was better, but her temperature fluctuated between 99 in the morning and 102 degrees at night. Just at this juncture the doctor took to bed with an upset stomach. I went to his house for some medicine and took the occasion to describe Mother’s discouraging condition to the nurse, who transmitted my words to the doctor. “It’s an ordinary cold and should cause no anxiety,” was his reply. I was given a liquid medicine and a powder.

  Naoji as usual was off in Tokyo. It had already been more than ten days since he left. Alone and in an excess of depression, I wrote a postcard to my Uncle Wada informing him of the change in Mother’s health.

  Some days later the village doctor ca
lled with the news that his stomach indisposition had at length passed.

  He examined Mother’s chest with an expression of rapt concentration. Suddenly he cried, “Ah, I know what it is! I know what it is!” Again turning toward me, he intoned, “I have understood the cause of the fever. A seepage has developed in the left lung. Nevertheless, there is no need for anxiety. The fever will probably continue for the time being, but if your mother remains quiet, there is no cause for alarm.”

  “I wonder,” I thought, but like a drowning man clutching at a straw, I took whatever comfort I could from his diagnosis.

  After the doctor had made his departure, I exclaimed, “Isn’t that a relief, Mother? Just a little seepage—why, most people have that. As long as you can just keep your spirits up, you’ll be better in no time. The weather this summer has been so unseasonal. That’s where the trouble lies. I hate the summer. I hate summer flowers too.”

  Mother, her eyes shut, smiled. “They say that people who like summer flowers die in the summer, and I was expecting to die this summer, perhaps, but now that Naoji has come home I have held on until autumn.”

  It was painful for me to realize that Naoji, even such as he was, had become the mainstay of Mother’s pleasure in life.

  “Well, then, since summer has passed, that means we’re over the hump of your danger period, doesn’t it? Mother, the bush clover is in bloom in the garden. And valerian, burnet, bellflowers, timothy—the whole garden reeks of autumn. I am sure that once it’s October your temperature will go down.”

  I am praying that it will. What a relief it will be when the sticky, lingering September heat has passed! Then, when the chrysanthemums are in bloom and one day of bright Indian summer succeeds another, Mother’s fever will surely disappear. She will grow strong, and I will be able to see him. Perhaps my plans will come to magnificent flowering like some gigantic chrysanthemum. Oh, if only it were already October, and Mother’s fever were gone!

  About a week after I wrote my uncle, he arranged for an old doctor named Miyake, who had once served as a court physician, to come from Tokyo to examine Mother.

  Dr. Miyake had been an acquaintance of my father’s, and Mother looked delighted to see him. His rough manners and coarse speech, for which he had long been famous, also apparently endeared him to Mother. They had not got around to a formal examination, and the two of them were diverting themselves instead with an uninihibited bout of gossip. I went to the kitchen to make some pudding, and by the time it was ready to be served the examination had already been concluded. The doctor, his ausculator dangling from his shoulders like a necklace, slouched in a wicker chair.

  “Fellows like myself go into some roadside joint to take a stand-up lunch of noodles. You never get anything good or—for that matter—really bad,” he was saying as I entered, and this, I suppose, was typical of their conversation. Mother was following his words with an unconstrained expression.

  “It wasn’t anything after all!” I exclaimed to myself with a sigh of relief. Suddenly courage welled up in me and I asked, “How is she? The village doctor said there was a seepage in her left lung. Do you think so too?”

  The doctor replied offhandedly, “What’s all that? She’s perfectly all right!”

  “Oh, I’m so relieved, aren’t you, Mother?” I spoke to her, smiling from my heart. “He says you’re all right.”

  Dr. Miyake at this point rose from his chair and walked into the Chinese room. He obviously had something to disclose to me. I tiptoed out of the room behind him.

  He stopped when he reached the wall hanging and said, “I hear a funny sound.”

  “It isn’t a seepage?”

  “No.”

  “Bronchitis?” I was already in tears as I asked.

  “No.”

  T.B. I didn’t want to think of it. I was sure that with my strength I could cure pneumonia or a seepage or bronchitis. But tuberculosis—perhaps it was already too late. I felt as if my legs were crumbling under me.

  “Is the sound very bad, that funny sound you hear?” I was sobbing helplessly.

  “Right and left both—the whole works!”

  “But Mother’s still healthy! She enjoys her meals so!”

  “It can’t be helped.”

  “That’s not true. It can’t be. If she eats lots of butter, eggs, and milk, she’ll recover, won’t she? As long as she keeps up her resistance, the fever will go down, won’t it?”

  “She should eat a lot of whatever she likes.”

  “Isn’t that what I said? Every day she eats five tomatoes alone.”

  “Tomatoes are good.”

  “Then it’s all right? She’ll get better?”

  “This sickness may prove fatal. It’s best that you should know it.”

  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.

  “Two years? Three years?” I whispered, trembling.

  “I can’t say. In any case, nothing can be done about it.”

  Dr. Miyake departed, mumbling something about reservations for that day at Nagaoka Hot Spring. I saw him as far as the gate. Dazedly I walked back to Mother’s bed. I forced a smile, as much as to say that nothing was wrong, but Mother asked, “What did the doctor tell you?”

  “He says that everything will be all right if your temperature only goes down.”

  “What about my chest?”

  “Apparently it’s nothing serious. It’s like when you were sick before. I’m sure of that. Just as soon as the weather turns a bit cooler, you’ll quickly get back your strength.”

  I tried to believe my own lies. I tried to forget the terrifying word “fatal.” I couldn’t believe it was the truth. I had the feeling that were Mother to die, my own flesh would melt away with her. From now on, I thought, I will forget everything else except preparing all kinds of delicious things for Mother. Fish, soup, liver, broth, tomatoes, eggs, milk, salad—I will sell everything I own to buy food for Mother.

  I went to the Chinese room and dragged the reclining chair out to a spot on the veranda from where I could see Mother. She did not look the least like a sick person. Her eyes were beautifully clear and her complexion fresh. Her fever only comes in the afternoon.

  “How well Mother looks!” I thought. “I am sure she must be all right.” In my heart I had blotted out Dr. Miyake’s diagnosis.

  My mind faded off into a reverie on how much better it would be when it was October and the chrysanthemums were in bloom. Before I knew it I had dozed off and was standing in a landscape which occasionally comes to me in dreams, although I have never actually seen it. I was beside a lake in the forest so long familiar to me, and the sight of that landscape came with a thrill of recognition. I was walking next to a boy in Japanese clothes, silently, with no sound of footsteps. The whole landscape seemed veiled in a kind of green fog. A delicate white bridge lay submerged at the bottom of the lake.

  The boy spoke. “The bridge has sunk! We can’t go anywhere today. Let’s stop at the hotel here. I’m sure there must be an empty room.”

  There was a hotel on the edge of the lake. Its stone walls dripped with the green fog. On a stone gate the words “Hotel Switzerland” were carved in gilt letters. As I read the letters SWI, I suddenly thought of Mother. I wondered uneasily how she was, whether she, too, were staying at this hotel. I passed with the young man through the gate into the front garden. Huge red flowers like hydrangeas were blooming with a burning intensity in the foggy garden. When I was a child, the bedcovers had a pattern of crimson hydrangeas which had always made me feel peculiarly unhappy. But, I thought now, there really are such things as red hydrangeas.

  “You aren’t cold?”

  “No. Just a little. My ears are wet with the fog, and the insides are cold.” I laughed and asked him, “I wonder what has happened to Mother?”

  The boy answered with a smile at once heart-breakingly sad and
full of compassion, “She is in her grave.”

  A cry escaped my lips. That was it. Mother was no longer with us. And hadn’t a funeral already taken place? At this realization of Mother’s death, my body shook with an indescribable loneliness and my eyes opened.

  It was already dusk on the veranda. It was raining. A green-colored desolation lingered over everything, just as in the dream.

  “Mother?” I called.

  She answered in a calm voice. “What are you doing there?”

  I leaped up with joy and rushed to her side. “I was sleeping.”

  “I wondered what you were doing. That was a long nap, wasn’t it?” She seemed amused with me.

  I was so overjoyed at Mother’s charm, at her being alive, that my eyes filled with tears of gratitude.

  “And what are my lady’s commands for dinner this evening?” I asked rather archly.

  “Please don’t bother. I don’t need anything. Today my temperature went up to 103 degrees.”

  From happiness I was suddenly plunged into blank despair. At a loss what to do, I let my glance wander vacantly around the dimly lit room. I wanted to die.

  “Why should that be, I wonder. 103 degrees!”

  “It’s nothing. It is only just the moments before the fever breaks out that I don’t like. My head hurts a little, I feel a chill, and then the fever comes.”

  Outside it was dark now. The rain had stopped, but a wind was blowing. I switched on the lights and was about to go to the dining room when Mother called out, “The light hurts my eyes. Please leave it off.”

  “But you won’t like lying in the dark that way, will you?” I asked, still hesitating by the switch.

  “It doesn’t matter. When I sleep my eyes are shut. I don’t feel the least bit lonely in the dark. It’s the glare that I dislike so. Let’s not put the lights on in this room from now on.”