TEHRAN – The fourth Persian edition of Japanese author Osamu Dazai’s novel “Shayo” has recently been released by Fanus Publications in Tehran.

The book has been translated into Persian by Morteza Sanne.

The author is considered one of the foremost fiction writers of the 20th-century in Japan, whose novel “Shayo” (“The Setting Sun”), published in 1947, turned him into a popular novelist.

Set in the early postwar years, it probes the destructive effects of war and the transition from a feudal Japan to an industrial society.

Dazai died 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.

Photo: Front cover of the Persian version of Japanese author Osamu Dazai’s “Shayo”.

RM/MMS/YAW