brenticus reviewed No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai
None
4 stars
That was fucked up. Which, for Junji Ito, is pretty much expected, but was a special kind of fucked up.
The protagonist is not a good person. He carries all his sins with him, real and imagined, and they constantly weigh on his existence. Whenever he finds a brief moment of respite, his past reminds him of the terrors of his own mind. He suffers because of people, and so many people suffer because of him. He has no idea, for much of the manga, whether he is really experiencing his life or whether some massive hallucination has come over him. He is unwell, and his feeble attempts to claw his way to a normal life only drag others down with him.
But throughout, right up until the well-deserved ending, he was as monstrous as any human.
That was fucked up. Which, for Junji Ito, is pretty much expected, but was a special kind of fucked up.
The protagonist is not a good person. He carries all his sins with him, real and imagined, and they constantly weigh on his existence. Whenever he finds a brief moment of respite, his past reminds him of the terrors of his own mind. He suffers because of people, and so many people suffer because of him. He has no idea, for much of the manga, whether he is really experiencing his life or whether some massive hallucination has come over him. He is unwell, and his feeble attempts to claw his way to a normal life only drag others down with him.
But throughout, right up until the well-deserved ending, he was as monstrous as any human.
The protagonist is not a good person. He carries all his sins with him, real and imagined, and they constantly weigh on his existence. Whenever he finds a brief moment of respite, his past reminds him of the terrors of his own mind. He suffers because of people, and so many people suffer because of him. He has no idea, for much of the manga, whether he is really experiencing his life or whether some massive hallucination has come over him. He is unwell, and his feeble attempts to claw his way to a normal life only drag others down with him.
But throughout, right up until the well-deserved ending, he was as monstrous as any human.
