No longer human.


I came to know of this story through an anime called Aoi bungaku. As usual, my attraction towards the darker elements of life made me desperately want to read the original.


No Longer Human  is considered Dazai's masterpiece and ranks as the second-best selling novel in Japan, behind Natsume Sōseki's Kokoro. Mike Lew has praised the book for expressing male sexual trauma.

No Longer Human tells the story of a young man who has felt since childhood utterly alien from others around him. Since that time he has learned to put on a face to hide his alienation. He feels incapable of belonging to the human society, especially so by society's refusal to take him seriously. He then follows a descent into alcohol, drugs, and suicide.

It is an extremely dark and tragic story. But it also contains one of the most honest and stark monologues I have ever read. 

"I could never think of prostitutes as human beings or even as women. They seemed more like imbeciles or lunatics. But in their arms I felt absolute serenity. I could sleep normally. It was pathetic how utterly devoid of greed they really were. And perhaps because they felt for one something like an affinity for their kind, these prostitutes always showed me a natural friendliness which never became oppressive. Friendliness with no ulterior motive, friendliness stripped of high-pressure salesmanship, for someone who might never come again. Some nights I saw these imbecile, lunatic prostitutes with the halo of Mary."

The story is divided into three notebooks written by the protagonist Oba Yozo. The main character, is gray. At time one could easily identify with, sometimes you felt pity for him, sometimes you genuinely hope that he can find happiness and some other times you hate him and wish he could be less passive and weak. The character suffers from  complex post-traumatic disorder, making him feel he is a failure as a human being. But is he to blame? Or is it the society? His family who failed to help as he faltered? Is it the fault of his friend who introduced him to the pleasures of alcoholic stupor? The character honestly records in the story not only his own failure but also the society's, which condemns him as a failure.

"I am convinced that human life is filled with many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity, truly splendid of their kind"

From his childhood itself, he faces intense alienation. He has an overbearingly dominating father, suffers abuse at the hands of the servants, and learns to wear a mask of buffoonery to hide the battle that raged inside him. He perfects his mask to such an extent that even when he expresses his need for help by reciting from the Rubiyat:

"And that inverted Bowl we call The Sky

Where under crawling coop'd we live and die

Lift not your hands to It for help- for It 

As impotently rolls as you or I"

he is never taken seriously.  He joins underground Marxist movements because he felt "An attraction for its odor for irrationality" and he "felt so much more relaxed in this irrational world than in the world of rational gentlemen that I was able to do what was expected of me in a "sound manner"

Over time he experiences several tragic incidents and turns to self destruction.

The story  is believed to be semi-autobiographical in nature. Dazai took his own life shortly after publishing the last part of the book.

The author keeps asking the reader, what is it that makes us human? But instead than being depressing I would say that the book reflects life, most of the time too clearly for comfort.