Hegemonic Collapse and the Crisis of Identity in Post-War Japan

This paper argues that Osamu Dazai’s The Setting Sun is a masterpiece of social critique of hegemonic transformation and cultural crisis in post-war Japan, where the decline of the Uesugi family is presented as a microcosm of the fall of feudal hegemony and the rise of imperialist violence of American capitalism. The paper goes beyond the conventional reading of the novel as a psychological or biographical piece of writing and asks three critical questions about The Setting Sun. First, how does The Setting Sun present the ways in which the collapse of aristocratic hegemony predetermines the ambiguous transformation of the identities of the declining elite? Second, in what sense does the novel depict the cultural crisis as a set of contradictions reflecting the false consciousness generated by the ideological vacuum of post-war Japan? Third, why does The Setting Sun depict the aristocratic subject as a fractured entity incapable of finding true existence in the capitalist-modernist society that has rejected its traditional values?