Book Review - No Longer Human

The story

Told through three notebooks left behind by a man named Ōba Yōzō, the novel traces a life lived at a strange distance from everyone else, drifting through art, women, drink and despair. Osamu Dazai finished it not long before his own death, and it reads like a confession.

A book that had been waiting for me

For a while I had wanted to step away from the desolate, post-apocalyptic worlds I usually get lost in, and read something more human, more grounded. No Longer Human, by Osamu Dazai, is a title that kept appearing every time I looked into the classics of Japanese literature, always surrounded by the same kind of comments: that it was sad, honest, and impossible to forget. With that reputation, and the curiosity to understand a culture I deeply admire, I finally decided to give it a go.

It pulled me in more quickly than I expected, and it made me uncomfortable in the best possible way.

A simple voice that pulls you in

The first thing that surprised me was how easy it was to read. Dazai does not hide behind complicated words or long, decorated descriptions. His prose is plain, almost as if someone were talking to you quietly in an empty room, and the whole force of the book comes from that plainness.

Because the language is so direct, there is nothing standing between you and his thoughts, and before you even realise it, you are no longer reading a novel; you are reading the private diary of someone who decided to tell you everything. I think that is the biggest achievement of the book: it manages to feel enormous while saying it all in the most modest way possible.

The night at Kamakura

Of everything in these notebooks, it is Tsuneko I have thought about most. Yōzō drinks in a bar with no money to pay for it, and the woman serving him lets him drink anyway. She takes him back to her apartment, and they spend the night telling each other how tired they are: her husband is in prison for swindling someone, she has almost nothing, and for once Yōzō does not seem to be performing. He calls it a night of liberation.

They meet again only once. On that second night she says she cannot go on living, he agrees without arguing, and the two of them walk into the sea at Kamakura. She dies. He is pulled out alive, charged as an accomplice to her suicide, expelled from his university and cut off by his family.

Two nights. That is all they had together, and it was enough for both of them to agree that neither wanted to continue. What I find hardest is not the attempt itself but the part he cannot undo: she got what they had decided on together, and he did not.

How much of it he lived

What makes No Longer Human hit even harder is knowing how much of it Dazai lived. Yōzō’s life runs alongside his own: the alienation, the addictions, the repeated attempts to end his life. Dazai drowned himself weeks after finishing it.

The part I cannot shake is the way Yōzō talks about his childhood. From a very young age, he already feels that he does not understand other people, that he is somehow separated from the rest of humanity, and that the only way to survive among others is to wear a mask, to play the clown so that nobody looks too closely. And he describes all of this, the deep fear and loneliness of a child, with an honesty and an ease that are almost unsettling, as if confessing the darkest feelings of his early years cost him nothing at all. There is no drama in the way he says it, and that is precisely what makes it so heavy.

The longer I sat with that part, the less his clowning looked to me like a weakness. It is what keeps him alive, the only way he finds of staying among people he does not understand. It is also what guarantees that nobody will ever reach him, because whoever comes close is meeting the performance and not the person. He cannot drop it without being seen, and he cannot keep it without being alone. By the time he can see that clearly, he has no other way left of standing in front of another person.

Final thoughts

It would be easy to call this a depressing book and leave it there, but for me it was something else. No Longer Human made me think about the masks that all of us wear, in smaller doses, every single day, and about how little we truly know of what the people around us carry behind their own.

I did not close it feeling sad. I closed it feeling more aware, more attentive to the quiet struggles that people rarely show. It is not a book that hands you answers, but one that changes the questions you ask yourself. Read it if you are willing to sit with something honest and uncomfortable, and to recognise a part of yourself in places you would rather not look. If you are not, it will only be a sad book.