Set in the early postwar years, it probes the destructive effects of war
and the transition from a feudal Japan to an industrial society. Ozamu
Dazai died, a suicide, in 1948. But the influence of his book has made
"people of the setting sun" a permanent part of the Japanese language,
and his heroine, Kazuko, a young aristocrat who deliberately abandons
her class, a symbol of the anomie which pervades so much of the modern
world.