Jubilee) wrote of Dazai's earlier novel, "Such is the power of art to transfigure what is objectively ignoble or depraved that The Setting Sun is actually deeply moving and even inspiriting.... To know the nature of despair and to triumph over it in the ways that are possible to oneself—imagination was Dazai's only weapon—is surely a sort of grace." Donald Keene 1.
The literal translation of the original title Ningen Shikkaku is "Disqualified as a Human Being." I have elsewhere referred to this same novel as "The Disqualified."
PROLOGUE
I have seen three pictures of the man. The first, a childhood photograph you might call it, shows him about the age of ten, a small boy surrounded by a great many women (his sisters and cousins, no doubt). He stands in brightly checked trousers by the edge of a garden pond. His head is tilted at an angle thirty degrees to the left, and his teeth are bared in an ugly smirk. Ugly? You may well question the word, for insensitive people (that is to say, those indifferent to matters of beauty and ugliness) would mechanically comment with a bland, vacuous expression, "What an adorable little boy!" It is quite true that what commonly passes for "adorable" is sufficiently present in this child's face to give a modicum of meaning to the compliment. But I think that anyone who had ever been subjected to the least exposure to what makes for beauty would most likely toss the photograph to one side with the gesture employed in brushing away
