The Setting Sun by Osamu Dazai

CHAPTER SEVEN / THE TESTAMENT

Naoji's testament:

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Kazuko.

It's no use.

I'm going.

I cannot think of the slightest reason why I should have to go on living.

Only those who wish to go on living should.

Just as a man has the right to live, he ought also to have the right to die.

There is nothing new in what I am thinking: it is simply that people have the most inexplicableaversion to this obvious - not to say primitive - idea and refuse to come out with it plainly

Those who wish to go on living can always manage to survive whatever obstacles there may be.That is splendid of them, and I daresay that what people call the glory of mankind is comprised of justsuch a thing. But I am convinced that dying is not a sin.

It is painful for the plant which is myself to live in the atmosphere and light of this world.Somewhere an element is lacking which would permit me to continue. I am wanting. It has been all Icould do to stay alive up to now.

When I entered high school and first came in contact with friends of an aggressively sturdy stock,boys who had grown up in a class entirely different from my own, their energy put me on the defensive,and in the effort not to give in to them, I had re-course to drugs. Half in a frenzy I resisted them. Later,when I became a soldier, it was as a last resort for staying alive that I took to opium. You can'tunderstand what I was going through, can you?

I wanted to become coarse, to be strong - no, brutal. I thought that was the only way I couldqualify myself as a "friend of the people." Liquor was not enough. I was perpetually prey to a terribledizziness. That was why I had no choice but to take to drugs. I had to forget my family. I had to opposemy father's blood. I had to reject my mother's gentleness. I had to be cold to my sister. I thought thatotherwise I would not be able to secure an admission ticket for the rooms of the people.

I became coarse. I learned to use coarse language. But it was half - no, sixty per cent - awretched imposture, an odd form of petty trickery. As far as the "people" were concerned, I was astuck-up prig who put them all on edge with my affected airs. They would never really unbend andrelax with me. On the other hand, it is now impossible for me to return to those salons I gave up. Evensupposing that my coarseness is sixty per cent artifice, the remaining forty per cent is genuine now.The intolerable gentility of the upper-class salon turns my stomach, and I could not endure it for aninstant. And those distinguished gentlemen, those eminent citizens, as they are called, would berevolted by my atrocious manners and soon ostracize me. I can't return to the world I abandoned, andall the "people" give me (with a fulsome politeness that is filled with malice) is a seat in the visitor'sgallery

It may be true that in any society defective types with low vitality like myself are doomed to perish,not because of what they think or anything else, but because of themselves. I have, however, someslight excuse to offer. I feel the overwhelming pressure of circumstances which make it extremelydifficult for me to live.

All men are alike

I wonder if that might be a philosophy. I don't believe that the person who first thought up thisextraordinary expression was a religious man or a philosopher or an artist. The expression assuredlyoozed forth from some public bar like a grub, without anyone's having pronounced it, an expressionfated to overturn the whole world and render it repulsive.

This astonishing assertion has absolutely no connection with democracy, or with Marxism for thatmatter. Without question it was the remark at a bar hurled by an ugly man at a handsome one. It wassimple irritation, or, if you will, jealousy and had nothing to do with ideology or anything of the kind