Donald Keene

Osamu Dazai

No Longer Human ... Translated ... by Donald Keene

人間失格

太宰治

“Mine has been a life of much shame.
I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.”

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 a powerful exploration of an individual's alienation from society.

No Longer Human

rhea ⸆⸉

if only he hadn't drunk —no, even though he did drink— he was a good boy, an angel.

“No. I didn't cry ...I just kept thinking that when human beings get that way, they're no good for anything."

And now I had become a madman. Even if released, I would be forever branded on the forehead with the word “madman," or perhaps, “reject." 

I had now ceased utterly to be a human being.

God, I ask you, is non-resistance a sin? 

My unhappiness was the unhappiness of a person who could not say no.

wheew that was a strong one 😅 (quite a stab in the gut i must admit)

I want to die. I must die. Living itself is the source of sin.

I had intended to take one shot a day, but it became two, then three; when it reached four I could no longer work unless I had my shots.

Am I what they call an egoist? Or am I the opposite, a man of excessively weak spirit?

I suppose it would be no exaggeration to say that the world is composed entirely of unhappy people.

I came to feel that everything was my fault. Far from becoming enraged, I could not utter a word of complaint; it was on account of that rare virtue she possessed that my wife was vio-lated, a virtue I long had prized, the unbearably pitiful one called immaculate trustfulness.

Is immaculate trustfulness after all a source of sin?

It was less the fact of Yoshiko's defilement than the defilement of her trust in people which became so persistent a source of grief as almost to render my life insupportable.

You didn’t know enough to distrust others

Crime and punishment —absolutely incompatible ideas, irreconcilable as oil and water.

If we knew the antonym of crime, I think we would know its true nature. God… salvation... love... light. But for God there is the antonym Satan, for salvation there is perdition, for love there is hate, for light there is darkness, for good, evil. Crime and prayer? Crime and repentance? Crime and confession? Crime and ...  no, they're all synonymous.

Virtue and vice are concepts invented by human beings, words for a morality which human beings arbitrarily devised.

Horiki at heart did not treat me like a full human being. He could only consider me as the living corpse of a would-be suicide, a person dead to shame, an idiot ghost.

The thought of dying has never bothered me, but getting hurt, losing blood, becoming crippled and the like —no thanks. 

craved desperately some great savage joy, no matter how immense the suffering that might ensue

I felt pity and contempt for the self which until yesterday had accepted such hypothetical situations as eminently factual scientific truths and was terrified by them.

The incomprehensibility of society is the incomprehensibility of the individual. 

It is the struggle between one individual and another, a then-and-there struggle, in which the immediate triumph is everything. 

Human beings never submit to human beings. 

Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human, this leading postwar Japanese writer's second novel, tells the poignant and fascinating story of a young man who is caught between the breakup of the traditions of a northern Japanese aristocratic family and the impact of Western ideas. In consequence, he feels himself "disqualified from being human" (a literal translation of the Japanese title).

Donald Keene, who translated this and Dazai's first novel, The Setting Sun, has said of the author's work: "His world … suggests Chekhov or possibly postwar France, … but there is a Japanese sensibility in the choice and presentation of the material. A Dazai novel is at once immediately intelligible in Western terms and quite unlike any Western book." His writing is in some ways reminiscent of Rimbaud, while he himself has often been called a forerunner of Yukio Mishima.

Charlize

yozo’s psyche is fascinating to say the least. was he a victim of circumstance? i believe so. but does that absolve him from the awful things he had done? not at all. the theme of alienation is well-captured that it leaves you contemplating.

sani

“Mine has been a life of much shame. I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being”

i hate to say this but this book absolutely did not do it for me! i love Osamu Dazai’s writings but this one was just too tedious? i swear i could have dozed off reading it. and this is coming from someone who utterly utterly loves his other work. 

i agree that No Longer Human is completely my kind of book. but it didn't just reach my expectations. the misogyny was too much for me to handle as well. i unequivocally loathed the way the narrator talked about women. 

the prologue and the first and the second notebook built up a really hooked story idea but it went really downhill by the third notebook. i like depressed men but i despise depressed misogynistic men to the hilt. 

considering how this was his last work before suicide, i should be a little nicer and that's why i am giving it two stars.

yuck…but also relatable…but also yuck.

iris 

abby

how to say it...
in so many words, I can relate to No Longer Human. but I felt so upset reading this, it made me uncomfortable in a way I never imagined.

☆☆☆,5.

Omar 

** spoiler alert **
           Protagonist was loathsome but definitely not in the way I expected. I walked in expecting him to be some sort of freak but turns out he’s decently adjusted and attractive and so on, and it really threw me off

On some level his fundamental flaw (and the crux of this books thought pattern) is that the inability to connect with and understand people can skew a person into being excluded from humanity.

There’s a lot to dissect in terms of the books central thesis. I’m quite rusty, so I don’t think the texts central theme jumps out as quickly to me as it used to. Nevertheless, it deserves much more thought.

geri chan 

dian

man this was pretty absurd AND concerning

amari

No Longer Human is not so much a miserable story as it is frustrating. So much of what the protagonist does, thinks and feels are marked by a deep self-pity and what I can only describe as an inertia. 

I didn't quite pick up on the themes of post-war depression and formless anxiety that reviews ascribe to this book, at least not at first. The scenery around Yōzō reflects a placid Japan; the tension of war is faint undercurrent to Yōzō's insipid love trials. The later chapters fail to energise this background, and instead simply prop up the screen as we watch Yōzō tumble like a ragdoll down a barren slope. 

After finishing the book and ruminating on it somewhat, the sense behind the imagery has become clearer to me under this interpretation: that Yōzō's disqualification from the security of belonging is a metaphor for Japan's completed descent into total social anomie; though my reading of this is vague. 

Before reading this book I had already read up a little on Dazai's life and was prepared to read it whilst looking for the autobiographical fragments. It is here, I think, that my reading of Ningen Shikkaku has been unwittingly biased and my distate for Yōzō prompted. Luckily there is a manga by Junji Itō I can read.

Junji Ito

Nothing can surpass the terror of the human psyche. Mine has been a life of much shame. I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being. Plagued by a maddening anxiety, the terrible disconnect between his own concept of happiness and the joy of the rest of the world, Yozo Oba plays the clown in his dissolute life, holding up a mask for those around him as he spirals ever downward, locked arm-in-arm with death. Osamu Dazai’s immortal—and supposedly autobiographical—work of Japanese literature, is perfectly adapted here into a manga by Junji Ito. The imagery wrenches open the text of the novel one line at a time to sublimate Yozo’s mental landscape into something even more delicate and grotesque. This is the ultimate in art by Ito, proof that nothing can surpass the terror of the human psyche.

Djasri.

This was something that goes beyond the original novel. Junji Ito explored No Longer Human into its deepest, darkest form. Consequently, in the most divine way possible, this book terrified me as a human being.

Claudia Beneyto

i wanted to write something funny and light-hearted but i suppose it doesn’t really go with the themes treated in the book. This was incredible, really. It made me remember those somber days of depression, how comfortable it feels. It’s hard to get out, extremely hard and scary. But, well, everything passes.

The tragic life and end of a people pleaser. That’s it, that’s the plot 

D D D 

Difficult to finish. I found Yozo and his life completely uninteresting. I felt I would have enjoyed the Junji Ito version better 

20th century japanese author loves: incest, suicide, misogyny

In Yozo’s feeling of alienation from humans, I too felt a distance between me and him, struggling to find some relatability in the text. Was it the writing? Was it that were are just in way different emotional states? I may have to read the book again to find the answer.

Though I didn’t find his character relatable, I did pity him, and it opened my eyes further to human depression.

In the end, Yozo has come to a realization that I share when to comes to these curveballs life throws at you-

Lettuce Wrapped Cabbage Cat

Everything passes.

In Yozo’s feeling of alienation from humans, I too felt a distance between me and him, struggling to find some relatability in the text. Was it the writing? Was it that were are just in way different emotional states? I may have to read the book again to find the answer.

Though I didn’t find his character relatable, I did pity him, and it opened my eyes further to human depression.

In the end, Yozo has come to a realization that I share when to comes to these curveballs life throws at you-

Everything passes.

I remembered before picking up this book everyone mentioned how this was “the darkest book ever”.

But after reading it I wouldn’t say it was the darkest book ever, but Instead a depressing and tragic story about a terrible man’s life.

From the beginning of the book you feel sad for Yozo who was raised a strict and abusive lifestyle at a young age that sorta brings a light to why the he turned out the way he was by the end of the book. However, when he starts affecting those around him (more specifically women) you slowly lose that sympathy towards him. All the women he hurt and even caused to die were all left behind while he was picked up and moved to be foolish once again. Especially with the treatment and conclusion of Yoshiko…

But that’s the crucial and tragic part of this story. There’s people like Yozo everywhere! Those who were not only failed by those around them but society and its rules. Something that many of us go through and sadly many of which don’t make it out. Yozo created a facade of his true self (clowning) because he so desperately wanted to be left alone because of his experiences which eventually led him to his depression and eventually becoming an addict. Causing him to become “no longer human”.

Yozo’s story opens your eyes to those who think and act like Him. How they themselves once promising humans were shunned and failed by society making them shut down and eventually leading to their own demise. It helps you sympathize with them, and yes as terrible as Yozo was as a person it’s a sad reality of how their lives play out due to those life altering experiences. 

The last few words of the epilogue is what made me cry. It’s when the madame at the cafe says “”it’s his father’s fault”. She says unemotionally. “The Yozo we knew was so easy-going and amusing, and if only he hadn’t drunk-no, even though he did drink-he was a good boy, an angel”.

Mildred

I remembered before picking up this book everyone mentioned how this was “the darkest book ever”.

But after reading it I wouldn’t say it was the darkest book ever, but Instead a depressing and tragic story about a terrible man’s life.

From the beginning of the book you feel sad for Yozo who was raised a strict and abusive lifestyle at a young age that sorta brings a light to why the he turned out the way he was by the end of the book. However, when he starts affecting those around him (more specifically women) you slowly lose that sympathy towards him. All the women he hurt and even caused to die were all left behind while he was picked up and moved to be foolish once again. Especially with the treatment and conclusion of Yoshiko…

But that’s the crucial and tragic part of this story. There’s people like Yozo everywhere! Those who were not only failed by those around them but society and its rules. Something that many of us go through and sadly many of which don’t make it out. Yozo created a facade of his true self (clowning) because he so desperately wanted to be left alone because of his experiences which eventually led him to his depression and eventually becoming an addict. Causing him to become “no longer human”.

Yozo’s story opens your eyes to those who think and act like Him. How they themselves once promising humans were shunned and failed by society making them shut down and eventually leading to their own demise. It helps you sympathize with them, and yes as terrible as Yozo was as a person it’s a sad reality of how their lives play out due to those life altering experiences. 

The last few words of the epilogue is what made me cry. It’s when the madame at the cafe says “”it’s his father’s fault”. She says unemotionally. “The Yozo we knew was so easy-going and amusing, and if only he hadn’t drunk-no, even though he did drink-he was a good boy, an angel”.



gabby jusoy

eris valeria

Natalie

An eye-opening portrayal of the totality and consequences of feeling alienated from others, but its lack of sentimentality ultimately results in an unsympathetic protagonist. The translation by Keene feels like it could use an update as well.

asmooth

I have to read it twice to make sure I haven't missed a word and FINALLY I get the reasons why this book is my cup of a tea even it's dark.


  "I kept my solitary agonies locked in my breast. I kept my melancholy and my agitation hidden, careful lest any trace should be left exposed. I feigned an innocent optimism; I gradually perfected myself in the role of the farcical eccentric."


I understand why some people—especially women, didn't recommend and hate this book. Beside this is quite triggering, Yozo gives a misogynistic impression. He is loser. He is the entire circus. But I think this is kind of a human thing, especially for mentally ill people like him.


  "I've always shook with fright before human beings. Unable as I was to feel the least particle of confidence in my ability to speak and act like them."


As a person who thinks a lot, struggling with so many thoughts and society, I think this book is darkly funny. It describes thought of depression and oddly comforting, poking fun at those with their fake smuggery and feeling quite understood about anxieties or distates for society.

I felt rather uncomfortable while reading. I hate Yozo Oba and cursed him so many times because he is one of the most heartbreakingly human characters I've ever connected with. I began to relate my personal experiences to him and it turns brought me comfort. He made me think about humanity and the purpose life itself.

Man is so mad and dumb. A man doesn't know to be a person so fakes it. I do think some people will relate to Yozo Oba, but this book is definitely NOT for everyone.

Such a haunting read, it was truly fascinating to see the rise and fall of a man, and his spiral into depression. Originally, I assumed this book was more about his superiority against humanity, but it is quite surprising to find it was the opposite! 

azliana aziz

oh man .
1940's and all but if only the women were not written with such useless, ignorant pontification over and over it would have been been extremely my shit™ 
maybe there's a point of it being the way women = collateral damage for men's tormented soul. 

bleak stuff

read this book 3 years ago but it still somehow haunts me and my definition of living

cheska

It's hard to get through the first part but after it ends it is a total page turner. bro makes me want to kill myself too. DAMN!!!

No Longer Human ... Translated ... by Donald Keene

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