No Longer Human

by Osamu Dazai

eBook, 198 pages

English language

Published by New Directions.

ISBN:: 978-0-8112-2007-1

Translated from the Japanese by Donald Keene

Portraying himself as a failure, the protagonist of Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human narrates a seemingly normal life even while he feels himself incapable of understanding human beings. Oba Yozo’s attempts to reconcile himself to the world around him begin in early childhood, continue through high school, where he becomes a ’clown” to mask his alienation, and eventually lead to a failed suicide attempt as an adult. Without sentimentality, he records the casual cruelties of life and its fleeting moments of human connection and tenderness. Semi-autobiographical, No Longer Human is the final completed work of one of Japan’s most important writers, Osamu Dazai (1909-1948). The novel has come to “echo the sentiments of youth” (Hiroshi Ando, The Mainichi Daily News) from post-war Japan to the postmodern society of technology. Still one of the ten bestselling books in Japan, No Longer Human is …

Translated from the Japanese by Donald Keene

5 editions

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.