A review by b0r3d_2710_
No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai

dark reflective medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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.
 
Whenever I see someone talking about this book online, I always find them either saying that this is one of the best and most influential novels that they have ever read or they complain about how insufferable and misogynistic the character and well, technically, the author was. I, on the other hand, find myself puzzled as to where I belong in this spectrum so, after days of reflecting on my mixed opinions on this novel, I'm now ready to write about my thoughts.
 
This novel is about Oba Yozo as we follow the journey from his childhood to adulthood where we get to witness his detachment from humanity, his beliefs and the choices he made that led to his downfall. The novel opens with no explanation of who's speaking or who he's speaking about but as we read on, we get to know that this was actually written by a person who got these three notebooks and three photographs from a lady at the bar and he found it so intriguing that he decided to publish it without any editing while adding a prologue and an epilogue from his point of view. Those three notebooks were journals of Oba Yozo who had a unique yet familiar mindset to a lot of readers. He had an alien outlook on life. He was the typical social-outcast or should I say humanity-outcast but it's ironic how this book felt so human which explained why a mass of audience felt him to be similar to their unspoken thoughts and belief.
 
Yozo considered a lot of things humanity does as either boring or terrifying. He called humanity dull and boring and considered emotions and desires as scary virtues. He found it terrifying that any person can do whatever they want in order to quench their desires, for instance, the male and maid-servants 'corrupting' him during his childhood and that eventually led to him having a fear of connection and understanding with people. He struggled with understanding humans or to know why they do the things they do. He's intrigued that even if humans are going through problems or they hold grudges, they always put on a façade and turn into someone else, however the situation requires them to be.
 
The change in him was so extraordinary as to inspire me with thoughts of how contemptible—or rather, how comic—human beings are who can metamorphize themselves as simply and effortlessly as they turn over their hands. 
 
His greatest fear was anyone seeing him for what he really was and seeing the 'mask' he put on in front of people. When Takeichi called him out for missing the bar on purpose, Yozo was horrified. When the District attorney saw through his mask and asked if his cough was real, Yozo considered spending ten years in jail as more favourable than to live that moment. In order to protect himself when someone tried to get close to him, he resorted to what he called 'clowning' which was just making fun of people and being someone like a class-clown so that others would think of himself as a nobody, or in his words, a clown.
 
Whenever I was asked what I wanted my first impulse was to answer "Nothing." The thought went through my mind that it didn't make any difference, that nothing was going to make me happy. At the same time I was congenitally unable to refuse anything offered to me by another person, no matter how little it might suit my tastes.
 
He was a people-pleaser and would do things to reach others' expectations. He was scared of letting people down, not because he cared for them but because he was terrified of what would happen if he did otherwise and someone didn't get their way. He carried on to make others laugh no matter how much it exhausted him. He showed that he wanted the lion-mask because that's what his father wanted for him. He ran errands for the Communist rebellions. He did not reveal that the blood that was on the napkin was because of the pimple behind his ear, not because he wanted to get away with it but because that was what the man expected and assumed.
Yozo thought that what the people joining the Communist Party did was stupid but he continued to attend the meetings religiously just because he liked the idea of something being outside of society's accepted parameters. He started running errands (as mentioned before, just to let people have their way) and quit school altogether since he stopped attending his lessons.
When Yozo was in debt and became an alcoholic, he stumbled upon Tsuneko who was depressed, just like him and for the first time in his life, he felt comfort in someone's presence because that someone was just as miserable as him. He found shelter in people with the same self-destructing behaviour as himself. She also lived a life of poverty which pulled him closer to her. He began having suicidal thoughts but the last straw was when he faced the humiliation of not having enough money to feed the woman with him. That small but impactful moment made him despise the idea of living even more and the pair decided to throw themselves into the river. She died but he was saved. She was probably the only person he ever loved but this love was toxic. We tend to bond with people having same backgrounds, situations, problems or interests as ourselves but this thing can also prove to be devastating in certain situations. When two people with self-destructing behaviour come together, they destroy each other and can't necessarily uplift each other no matter how connected and 'understood' they felt with each other. And in Yozo's case, he had a lot of love affairs but he treated all those women equally cruelly. The news was featured wildly due to him being the son of a politician but it was this event that made his father completely cut him off.
From then, he became even more of an alcoholic, a drug addict and was moving on for a slow suicide by consuming such substances on a regular basis. He met more women, which was intriguing to me as to how all these women managed to fall for someone like him, and by the end of the story, he ended up with a fate which to me seemed worse than death.
 
Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness. Everything passes. That is the one and only thing I have thought resembled a truth in the society of human beings where I have dwelled up to now as in a burning Hell.
 
While speaking about this novel, you can’t stop yourself from saying anything about the author himself as somehow you'll feel an ominous aura surrounding this book due to all that happened in real life. Dazai Osamu was born in 1909 to a politician.  In 1929, he attempted his first suicide but failed. The following year, he joined a college, became used to drinking in bars and going to brothels until he was eventually expelled from college for poor attendance and was disowned by his family. He attempted suicide by jumping in an ocean with a woman he met at a bar. She died, he survived, he got married and attempted suicide again for the third time by sleeping pills. He survived, became a morphine addict and survived sometime at a psych ward. At least in parts, if not whole, No Longer Human is the life story of Dazai Osamu, as mentioned at the back of the cover that this was a semi-autobiographical story which is something to think about. Where the story differs is the ending. While we don't really know if Yozo was still alive by the time those notebooks reached the author, Dazai Osamu in 1948, and his mistress tied themselves together and attempted suicide by jumping in the waters which resulted in both of them dying. After a series of failed attempts, he succeeded in the end as his body was found on the day of his birthday when he would have turned 39 otherwise.
 
This novel is immensely popular and with popularity comes a vast majority of different opinions. The readers of this novel are broadly divided into two sections. The first section includes those readers who find this book absurd and think Yozo as a person who is extremely opposite from them because of his deeds and decisions. The other group of people found it rather relatable and comforting at points because it spoke what they had hidden deep inside their heart as they are the people who can't seem to be able to conform with the norms of society. They sympathize with Yozo. Personally, I lie somewhere in the middle of this divide. Yozo was a truly unlikable enigmatic, alienated, pessimistic, nihilistic, self-centered and a good-for-nothing contemptible miserable person who was haunted by the society, but he made a whole lot of readers feel sympathy for him. Personally, I'm not one of those readers. At some points, I felt truly seen while reading this novel.
 
For someone like myself in whom the ability to trust others is so cracked and broken that I am wretchedly timid and am forever trying to read the expression on people's faces….
 
I wonder if I have actually been happy. People have told me, really more times than I can remember, ever since I was a small boy, how lucky I was, but I have always felt as if I were suffering in hell. It has seemed to me in fact that those who called me lucky were incomparably more fortunate than I.
 
But at other times, I was perplexed by the differences between me and him. If this novel leans a lot more on the relatable side for you then you need help. The thoughts he had, resonated with me but the place where he and I differs is the series of choices. I would not react to things like he did and would never treat everybody with absolute insincerity because he actually was a morally reprehensible human being which explained why a lot of people hate him so much but I also understand partially why he was the way he was.
 
I thought that I for one would like to make such a prayer: Oh, vouchsafe unto me a will of ice. Acquaint me with the true natures of "human beings." Is it not a sin for a man to push aside his fellow? Vouchsafe unto me a mask of anger.
 
Whenever we think of our place and purpose in the universe, we fall into a spiral. I don't think that we can ever understand universe to its full extent. Yozo tried to accomplish the same and not only lost himself but also plummeted into despair. He felt so separated from his humanity that he could never stop or speak against the sexual assaults done to himself and his wife Yoshiko. His only reaction was the bleak thought that it was only natural, that humans are made that way and it's their natural behaviour. 
 
I could believe in hell, but it was impossible for me to believe in the existence of heaven.
 
To give you an example of how pessimistic Yozo was, a lot of people somehow tried to help him throughout his alcoholism, addiction and suicidal choices, but he put great efforts to show how 'evil' or 'bad' those people are. He hated the idea of them helping him by indirectly getting closer to him, and he hated himself to an even more extent. That man had a negative outlook on everyone and everything around him, including himself and he was not interested in reforming his life for the better. If you call that man a loser, that man would agree with you.
His views about women were misogynistic which were reflective of time and society during the post war Japan. He said that he didn’t consider prostitutes as people, however, if we look at it from his point of view, it wasn't necessarily an insult. It's true that this was demeaning but to Yozo, humans are horrifying creature who he didn’t want to get close to and as for prostitution, he could explore about the women form without having to form connections with them. The misogynistic and lack of empathy from Yozo probably reveals more about his own nature and lack of ability to understand and connect with others than any actual quality about the others. I’m typically strongly put off by the endless examples of Japanese male writers treating females in the most disgusting and pathetic ways. But in this case it really felt like a self-critique of these attitudes rather than a promotion of them. Yozo was a miserable man in the 1900s and he was self-aware of his misery.
I believe that the sexual assault that Yozo experienced from the servants in his childhood and untreated trauma was somehow always the root of all his lifelong isolation and feelings of hopelessness. Although these tragic incidents don't excuse some of the worst decisions he made all throughout the story, but they do serve as the breeding ground for all of his self-destructive, self-alienation thoughts. The distrust and inability to understand others, the feeling of being unable to control his own life, the crippling fear of refusing what is given to him and letting others down by not standing up to their 'non-imposing' expectations….a lot of survivors experience the same thing. It’s so sad that he never got help. Even if he had tried to seek help from someone, no one would have taken him seriously and he would have been 'expected' to stay silent. In his words, 'to perpetrate such a thing on a small child is the ugliest, vilest, crudest crime a human being can commit'.
 
What is society but an individual?
 
It was also interesting to see that even though Yozo always seemed to be confused about the thought process and behaviors of humanity, he was well aware about a lot of societal things and even acted upon a few, thus technically making him a part of that same society as well. He knew the toxicity of addiction and alcoholism. He knew that when Horiki was telling him that the society would judge him, in actuality, it was Horiki as an individual who would be judging him. 
Despite Yozo's nature, there were still instances in his life where he had a sliver of hope for actually finding happiness but these were however shut down rather quickly. It wasn't until he was admitted to the sanatorium that his transformation was finally completed stating that that was the moment he was completely disqualified as a human or that he was no longer human.
 
"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."
 
The ending was, well how to say this. It was heartbreaking. No, I didn’t cry while reading the story, nor did my chest felt heavy. It wasn't as "disturbing" or "dark", at least in my opinion, as the people hyped it to be but the ending was the only part which made me feel some type of way. It was upsetting how different the others' interpretation of Yozo and his own depiction of himself was. He loathed himself to a point of delusion. I, in no way, mean that he was a good human. He surely did some messed up things and he was definitely a good for nothing but reading that line made me wonder if he actually was as bad as he considered himself to be, if he truly was disqualified as a human. The ending can mean two things---- Either even at the end of the story, no one was able to understand him truly which was technically a good thing in his opinion or he was so delusional to an extent to exaggerate all the 'bad' things he did to keep on fueling his hatred towards himself. In the translator's words, "In the way that most men fail to see their own cruelty, Yozo had not noticed his gentleness and his capacity for love."
 
This book was heavy and I had a lot to say. What I find great about this novel is that Yozo was not trying to please anyone in his journals, unlike his personality. He was honest and self-aware but it was frustrating that he did not do anything about it. How can someone be so awfully aware of how terrible they are but at the same time have no inclination to do anything about it? 
The book mirrors the deepest thoughts we have on a daily basis and presents them to us in a manner that can make one lose hopes if the one reading it is depressed or going through something in his life. It didn't leave a lasting impression on me. I was ticked off by the problematic statements against women due to being one myself no matter how much I understood the justification that you could provide in that matter.
 
If you are somebody who's dealing with a sense of alienation, disillusionment, depression and self-loathing, this book can provide you the 'what-if' of inculcating such mindset in your daily life. This novel can either trigger your traumas and anxiety and make you fall down a rabbit-hole of nihilism by forcing you to probe into the darkest corners of humanity just like the main character Oba Yozo or it can encourage you to overcome them in order not to repeat the same mistakes as that of him. If you're having similar thoughts as him, it can be harder to see where he was 'wrong' in his thought process.