My first Dazai, The Setting Sun, didn't leave much of an afterimage on my retina, but these three short stories, bound in a strangely appealing format intended to give off kids' storybook vibes, might have just made me see the light. The title story posits its ruined, alcoholic narrator, drifting in the firebombed ruins of Tokyo at the tail-end of the war, trying ineffectually to care for, or at least not further harm, his wife and children, as a microcosm of ruined, compulsively self-destructive Japan, seemingly unable to arrest its own moral and material downward spiral. The prose, in Ralph McCarthy's translation, is economical and the images are arresting. Then there's One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, a lighter piece that seems to poke fun at the totemic status of the mountain in Japanese art while expressing frustration at its (and its author's) own (perceived) inability to ascend to the same heights as Hokusai and Buncho. This piece contains a friendly dog called Hachi. And Villon's Wife, translated by the great Donald Keene with a touch more formality, is a quietly devastating look at the ravages of alcoholism from the perspective of the addict's/author's wife. ( )