Osamu Dazai's The Setting Sun: The Manga Edition

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Kazuko, a strong-willed young woman from a once-aristocratic family, watches her world collapse in the aftermath of World War II. Her family has lost everything — wealth, status, purpose. Her brother Naoji returns from the war addicted and nihilistic. Their mother, the last embodiment of a vanished elegance, is dying. Kazuko alone refuses to accept that the old world's death means her own. This first manga adaptation in English of Dazai's classic brings visual immediacy to a novel about the destruction of an entire social class. The contrast between the family's remembered grandeur and their present poverty is rendered with an emotional directness that manga does exceptionally well. A visual retelling of the novel that gave postwar Japan its vocabulary for loss — and a woman who insisted on surviving what was meant to destroy her.