No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai

SPOILERS

Summary:

The First Notebook: The main character, Oba Yozo, feels extrmeely seperate from the rest of his peers, and as such, very isolated. He begins "clowning," essentially putting on a facade of foolishness in order to play with others. He's sexually abused in his childhood but does nothing.
The Second Notebook: He befriends a suspicious boy named Takeichi, not wanting his facade to be exposed, and paints a self-portrait that causes Takeichi to see him as a future great painter. Oba goes to college and enters a life of debauchery and sin, later attempting suicide with a married woman whom he had an affair with. He survives, she doesn't.
The Third Notebook: Part One: Oba is expelled from school and begins different relationships with women, none working out.
The Third Notebook: Part Two: A friend from. Oba's days of debauchery returns and after his wife is sexually assaulted, Oba attempts suicide again. Oba is later released and now a full-on drug addict, lives isolated, once again, neither happy nor unhappy.

Noteable quotes:

The red text were the notes I had written on the page, transcribed under the quote they were in reference to.

"for insensitive people (that is to say, those indifferent to matters of beauty and ugliness)" (pg. 13).
"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" (pg. 21).
"I have sometimes thought that I have been burdened with a pack of ten misfortunes, any one of which borne by my neighbor would be enough to make a murderer of him" (pg. 25).
"People normally seem to be hiding this true nature, but an occasion will arise (as when an ox sedately ensconced in a grassy meadow suddenly lashes out with its tail to kill the horsefly on its flank) when anger makes them revel in a flash human nature in all its horror" (pg. 28).
"This, I was to learn in later years, was a kind of demoniacal prophecy, more horrible than Takeichi could have realized. ‘To fall for,’ ‘to be fallen for’ - I feel in these words something unspeakably vulgar, farcical, and at the same time extraordinarily complacent. Once these expressions put in an appearance, no matter how solemn the place, the silent cathedrals of melancholy crumble, leaving nothing but an impression of fatuousness. It is curious, but the cathedrals of melancholy are not necessarily demolished if one can replace the vulgar ‘What a messy business it is to be fallen for’ by the more literary ‘What uneasiness lies in being loved’” (pg. 47).
"Everything he said seemed exceedingly obvious, and undoubtedly true, but I felt sure that something more obscure, more frightening lurked in the hearts of human beings. Greed did not cover it, nor did vanity. Nor was it simply a combination of lust and greed. I wasn't sure what it was, but I felt that there was something inexplicable at the bottom of human society which was not reducible to economics" (pg. 66).

I have often looked at economics both as a social science and a mathematical science. It is where the two intersect perfectly. I am starting to think that because human beings are organic creatures, any sort of reduction to a mathematically based system would fail, and at worst destroys both the system and humanity. But I don’t think human beings are %100 organic. We naturally crave order and stability. It depends on the culture etc. but there is a perfect point, I believe, where math and humanity can meet.

"The agonies I have suffered night after night have made for a hell, composed of an infinite diversity of tortures, but - though this is a very strange way to put it - the wound has gradually become dearer to me than my own flesh and blood, and I have thought its pain to be the emotion of the wound as it lived or even its murmur of affection" (pg. 68).
“Her joy was indecent enough to chill all feeling for her” (pg. 75).

Sometimes, a lot of the time, people are so much less attractive when they’re happy.

“She died. I was saved” (ppg. 87).
“I yearned with such desperation for ‘freedom’ that I became weak and tearful” (pg. 101).
“Flatfish’s manner of speech – no, not only his, but the manner of speech everybody in the world – held stranger, elusive complexities, intricately presented with overtones of vagueness: I have always been baffled by these precautions so strict as to be useless, and by the intensely irritating little maneuvers surrounding them” (ppg. 101-102).

I find it all so disgusting and sad the way that some people feel the need to put on a façade of wanting to help someone when they are entirely unwilling to. Like when someone says: “Call me anytime” it sounds like they are being supportive, but really they are putting all the responsibility on the one struggling to make the connection. I wonder where else this phenomenon is analyzed.

“What is society but an individual?” (pg. 120).
“In my heart I bounded foolishly from hoy to sorrow at her responses, but on the surface I never ceased my immoderate clowning. Afterwards I would inflict on Yoshiko an abominable, hellish caressing before I dropped into a dead sleep” (pg. 153).
“Living itself is the source of sin’” (pg. 164).
“Disqualified as a human being. I had now ceased utterly to be a human being” (pg. 167).

Review and notes:

5 stars - devastating and sickening, an extreme comfort to the disturbed.

Dazai (1948)

There's a quote I like from Banksy or perhaps a thinker or writer who came before him, it goes, "Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable." I think this applies very well to this book, as it is such a cruelly honest depiction of human failure. The disturbed, who already see themselves as failures, will be comforted immensely by the character of Oba Yozo, a failure in his own right. Thinking about the societal reaction to a book like this I’m reminded of the joke about a bunch of jews in synagogue talking about what failures they are, a Rabbi, an upper-class businessman, the gentile; and a lower class poorish man ventures forth in agreement that he too, is a failure, and the rest of the group sneer and scoff at him “Look at this guy, he thinks he can be a failure like us?” But of course, in the opposite way. Ignore me.

Basically, to say one is misunderstood by society, is a failure of a human being, can in some way be looked at as a badge of honor. If society is understood to be full of fabrication, corruption, and greed, to fail at being a member of it may be a mark of some moral, or something like that, high ground. But I ask the reader to forget any of that pretention and simply look at “being a failure of human society” as exactly what it is. Now, on with the review.

First, the writing. Dazai’s language is as discomforting and unsettling as the character he’s expressing. It is one tactic to use mismatching adjectives among each other to create a sense of unease but a tactic that Dazai has mastered incredibly. To describe the beautiful with ugly words and the ugly with beautiful words is easy, any writer could do so, but it’s the jagged sense with which Dazai writes that makes his descriptions stand out so. When choosing the quotes to display above I mostly went for what were my favorite pieces of prose, and less the philosophical statements I hoped to touch on, so I suggest reading them looking specifically at the sentence structure and diction, though the meaning too is attractive. But the prose is hardly the aspect I want to focus on the most in this review.

Oba Yozo never is really a true participant of human society, sort of an imposter, dressed up as a mangled version of himself. The authentic self is a subject examined very well in this book. As a philosophical subject, the self is very demanding in what its definition is, how it should be expressed, what the self’s significance to a society and to the individual, the subject Dazai goes into more detail on. If any one person is born with a self that holds any sort of significance to the individual, there will forever be a war inside the individual to who they are and who they appear to be. The absolute anguish that exists for anyone who knows who they are and also knows that, therefore, no one else will know them, at least not properly, is so perfectly written here. We dress up as fools, clowns, and dance around because it’s no use being ourselves, no one will understand me better than I do already. These musings by the narrator, Oba, go along great with the hatred and isolation that coats his life already. Hatred for human beings is the most obvious kind. Though, I’m not sure Oba really ever hated anything. I don’t think he had the will to do so.

What Dazai has done with No Longer Human is so precious and torturous I could hardly begin to explain the impact it had on me. I’m hesitant to say exactly how much this book resonated with me and how important it has become to me. I will admit this, though, I know myself extremely well, which may sound boring but really this fact is of more significance than it seems. I know myself very well and I would be doing a violence unto myself by explaining my personality, let alone my self. To butcher myself with the English language does not appeal to me, but Dazai expressed himself and he did so in a way that was not a butchering, not a violence, not even anything positive either, for that would be the same amount of destruction as the negative, and I can only look at him with reverence for it. No Longer Human is understood to be an autobiographical work of fiction, and here, the character of Oba is so perfectly articulated that I can only believe him to be Dazai himself. To have the courage and guts to begin writing such words about the self is something I may never have, and to anyone else that fears the way other people see them and obsesses over their sense of identity in relation to articulation of said identity, this book may hug and hold you in just the way you need.

I hope to add to this review when I know better how to write what I want to say.

Affiliates:

There is a manga adaptation by Junji Ito, but as I am not a manga fan and will not be putting myself through this story a second time, I highly recommend Wendigoon's video on the subject.

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