I read this book last year when I had made the decision to stop re-training but still had to work my notice period. I.e. I was miserable because I was in a job I both hated and had objectively failed at. I found it to be, like a lot of similar literature, company in misery. I especially liked the parts that you actually point out where he finds himself alienated from mundane human realities, completely misunderstanding them or not experiencing them at all. For anyone that struggles with connection I think seeing those feelings articulated in an admittedly extreme way can be cathartic. It was the extremism of misery that I liked least, though. The piling on of shocking and depressing events surpassed even Michael Wellbeck’s worst excesses. I think you’re right to point out the lack of a question here, whilst some of the other pessimistic writers seem to be writing to attack or question aspects of society they find absurd, I got the impression that Dazai accepted the fundamental validity of societal standards but was simply describing a failure to meet them. The protagonist’s happiest times are when he’s managing to live a normal life. Isn’t the misogyny explained by the main character being sexually assaulted by a woman in early life? I may have misremembered that. At any rate, hatefulness is unsurprising in misanthropes and failures so I wasn’t too bothered by it. Depression certainly doesn’t necessitate hate but is on the other hand a possible outcome, and I would defend things like this book and American Psycho, or something like the Joker movie, on the earlier ground of catharsis. It’s not the most noble or sublime artistic technique but I think it provides a certain frisson or frenzy to those who might otherwise look for it in their real life.
Enjoyed this review James. I had very similar feelings when I started reading this book, after about 50 pages I had to put it down. Being inside a mind like that filled me with so much disgust, sickness and numbness. I liked your critique of his lack of outwardly focus and absence of cosmic nature-he’s not despaired about the state/condition of the world he’s despaired about his own lack of power & self-control. The protagonist is so inwardly directed, it becomes an incredibly self-serving form of nihilism. His misanthropy is similar to Charles Bukowski in that he uses it to fuel his own degeneracy and rage against women. He uses others as objects and drags them down with him and feeds off their grief. It’s repulsive to read because it’s like a precursor to 4-chan incel shitposts, except there’s no hidden humour/sarcasm it’s sterile, devoid of all human emotions.
I guess I'd say this review falls into one of two typical reactions to No Longer Human: one of disgust while the other is one of empathy. Ironically both reactions stem from taking the comments of either Yozo (in the notebooks) or the characters around him (from the epilogue) at face value (which is understandable given how matter of fact and sincere Dazai presents his prose). Those who sympathize with Yozo usually refer to the epilogue where one of the women involved with Yozo calls him an “angel” and more so believes the father is at fault (p. 177). One would do well to also remember that she states: “I just kept thinking that when human beings get that way, they’re no good for anything.” (p. 176). This perspective shows at least to some degree that Dazai wasn't completely lacking in self-awareness (more on this at the end of the comment). Addressing Yozo's misogyny I believe one can equally observe a sense of solidarity between Yozo and the prostitutes (and the women in the novel) that cannot be reduced to mere hatefulness. It is true that Yozo displays cruel misogynistic behavior throughout novel (predominantly points of view), and I would say that the episode with the violation of his wife where he just idly observes the crime is especially grueling (bearing in mind he just passively put up with the abuse of the maids and manservants as a child, it is hardly a profound observation that Yozo from an early age learned to cope with traumatic events by dissociation). But regarding the solidarity I mentioned, Yozo apart from calling the prostitutes “imbeciles or lunatics”, he also observes that “[i]t was pathetic how utterly devoid of greed they really were. And perhaps because they felt for me 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.” (p. 63). Again and again Yozo is constantly looked out for by women of low social standing. I guess it would be mostly correct to say that this has little to do with any inherent sympathetic qualities of Yozo, but just a combination of his good looks and a helpless dejected demeanor that people with high levels of empathy can't help but try to mitigate, be it the prostitutes, the impoverished Tsuneko or the single mother, Shizuko. Yozo is not a sympathetic person at all, I don't want to suggest that he was justified in his outlook on the world or the way he mistreated people. But I would at least acknowledge that Yozo at times displays a certain degree of self-awareness in his relationship to these women. In the initial encounter with Tsuneko, we can once again observe the misogynistic attitude of Yozo. Thinking to himself, while Tsuneko relates her tragic situation with her imprisoned husband, he remarks cruelly and indifferently: “She rambled on, but I have never been able to get interested when women talk about themselves. It may be because women are so inept at telling a story (that is, because they place the emphasis in the wrong places), or for some other reason. In any case, I have always turned them a deaf ear.” (p. 80). When we take this comment in isolation there can be no doubt that Yozo comes off as a terrible person. But this scene with Tsuneko also marks perhaps the only moment of what could be described as genuine connection between him and another person: “[…] something like a silent current of misery an inch wide flowed over the surface of her body. When I lay next to her my body was enveloped in her current, which mingled with my own harsher current of gloom like a “withered leaf settling to rest on the stones at the bottom of a pool.” I had freed myself from fear and uneasiness. It was entirely different from the feeling of being able to sleep soundly which I had experienced in the arms of those idiot-prostitutes (for one thing, the prostitutes were cheerful); the night I spent with that criminal’s wife was for me a night of liberation and happiness. (The use of so bold a word, affirmatively, without hesitation, will not, I imagine, recur in these notebooks.)” (Ibid.). I quote this passage at length to include both his dismal mindset and these brief moments of connection. His fearfulness of course leads him to distance himself Tsuneko (“The weak fear happiness itself. […] I was impatient to leave her while things still stood the same, before I got wounded, and I spread my usual smokescreen of farce.” p. 81) before their attempted double suicide after they meet up again under embarrassing circumstances. Not at any moment are Yozo’s considerations directed outside of himself (but at p. 88, confronted with prospect of being disowned after his attempted suicide with Tsuneko, “[s]uch matters did not concern me; I thought instead of the dead Tsuneko, and, longing for her, I wept. Of all the people I had ever known, that miserable Tsuneko really was the only one I loved.”). I think the comment of this video is correct that there isn’t a relationship for Yozo (I’m not sure that we can conclude the same about Dazai, especially if we look at The Setting Sun that presents a critical view of a character like Yozo through the character of Uehara); notably because he doesn’t allow a relationship to materialize. Despite his iconoclastic remarks about not relating to eating or any other of these absurd statements, Yozo very much shares the human trait of rejection-sensitivity, an unyielding need to please other people no matter what it costs, and therefore everything always comes off as an imposition from the outside. An imposition from the outside, but also a view of himself as an imposition on other people, a fear of ruining others. The last scene with Shizuko is especially heart-wrenching in this regard where he looks through the door crack to see a happy mother and her child: “I saw a small white rabbit bounding around the room. The two of them were chasing it. (They were happy, the two of them. I’d been a fool to come between them. I might destroy them both if I were not careful. A humble happiness. A good mother and child. God, I thought, if you listen to the prayers of people like myself, grant me happiness once, only once in my whole lifetime will be enough! Hear my prayer!) I felt like getting down on my knees to pray then and there. I shut the door softly, went to the Ginza, and did not return to the apartment.” (p. 124). There are plenty more examples to draw from the novel, but this comment is already too long. None of the examples I’ve given directly contradict the statement that this is hateful novel that rails against the fact that you have to do things in the world and the human condition that life itself demands the answers to your troubles, not the other way around. We rarely get any insight into the psychology of the people around Yozo, but I truly believe that he was never really seen for who he was. You can gauge a tacit critique of traditional familial roles in Japan. Yozo had a hard time coming to terms with the way his life was planned out from the start by his father and the way certain forms of desires was imposed on him (look at the way he is rushed through the school system (p. 56-57), at the scene with the lion mask (p. 30-31) where act of gift-giving is purely transactional and cut off from any genuine curiosity towards Yozo’s internal world). I think there is something to explore here about how conservative familial ties and paternalistic authority figures such as those that can be found in Japanese society can generate deep-seated emotional alienation in a person. It's unsure to what degree the prologue and epilogue manages to distance Dazai from Yozo. Dazai's subsequent suicide made it indeed hard not to conclude that this novel is just an indulgence of this mindset. I didn't necessarily get that impression when taken together with the examples I've given above and the perspective of The Setting Sun that at times is equally as depressing, but still manages to tell a story about overcoming despair. What about the epilogue? To go back to the other type of reading, the sympathetic one, Donald Keene quotes the “epilogue [where] the only objective witness testifies, “He was an angel,” and we are suddenly made to realize the incompleteness of Yozo’s portrait of himself. In the way that most men fail to see their own cruelty, Yozo had not noticed his gentleness and his capacity for love.” (p. 9). Is it just a desperate attempt to convince people that he wasn't completely broken? It could also be argued this epilogue tries to convey that one’s feeling of alienation isn't an unchangeable deficiency that cancels out any act of kindness that is inherent to one’s character. Yozo is also a character that *could* harbor great kindness in him, but only if he allowed other people to enter and influence his mindset. His lack of trust in people is also a lack of trust in himself which consequently ends up with him not committing to anyone or anything.
Just a follow-up in relation to the ethical implications of Dazai's novel: whether or not one can observe a self-awareness in a piece of literature, the age-old problem persists with literary or film-characters with questionable ethical qualities. Bret Easton Ellis hardly intended to idolize a character like Patrick Bateman who is now being fetishized to a concerning degree by young men in the so called "sigma" community. Patrick Bateman is a warning about a life based on empty status symbols and consumerism, and Yozo is as well a warning about which kind images you mirror yourself through. Junji Ito's rendition of the novel cleverly visualizes how Yozo's ghost pictures become a premonition, a self-fulfilling prophecy of his fate that he couldn't turn away from mentally. In that sense, there is a legitimate concern about the popularity of the novel turning into a justification of a dismal way of life instead of mere appreciation of a piece of literature. With the proliferation of social media and the consequent access to different cultural products that it previously would be difficult to learn about, decontextualization is abound. This is as much a problem of media accessibility and curation as one of the content of the media itself. Just to add if there is a widespread fascination with No Longer Human that praises a character like Yozo as an ideal to replicate (which isn't equivalent to relating to a character), that is indeed disturbing.
I've read almost everything by Dazai that has been translated, both in English and Spanish (my mother tongue). While many people regard "No Longer Human" as Dazai's magnum opus, I think "The Setting Sun" is much better. There's also an earlier novel that deals with one of the events of "No Longer Human" (the double suicide attempt with some girl Dazai just met);. It's called "The Flowers of Buffonery" and, as the title implies, is full of humour. I'm not encouraging you to read them since Dazai's whole project was rejoicing in his hopelessness, always inserting alter egos that, in ridiculous defeat, mirror his experiences. The difference between his earlier books and "No Longer Human", is that in those there was an element of humour. The breaking point is "The Setting Sun", which has a woman as the main character. There are two Dazai alter egos there, both rotten to the core, while she's trying to survive in the midst of a defeated Japan. I too think that by the time Dazai wrote "No Longer Human", he was just indulging on his own missery for the sake of pure missery. There was nothing else for him, not even literature. Some time ago I published in some literary magazine an article arguing precisely this: what used to keep Dazai alive (his artistic endevour), became disgusting and vain. After writing this novel, he then went on to write another one, called "Goodbye", but left it unfinished and instead wrote a message directed to Masuji Ibuse (also an important author and possibly the only man who believed in him), calling him a pig for no apparent reason. Then he drowned in the Tamagawa cannal with yet another lover. All in all, I don't think you missed anything. While I do like Dazai, I never recommend anyone read "No Longer Human" first. If you're interested, I would point you to Natsume Soseki and Kenzaburo Oe. Soseki, being the father of modern Japanese literature, became increassingly pessimistic as time went by (his gastric issues didn't help at all, just as Bernhard with his lung problems), but his books tackle important questions regarding modernity at the turn of the century. Kenzaburo Oe is, by my estimation, the best Japanese author of the XX century, he's also the most "Western" one in the sense that he was informed mostly by French and English authors. Especially important are "A Personal Matter" and "The Silent Cry", the latter being one of the few books that have made me sick. Someone else recommended Mishima, which is very standard. I'm in the minority, but I think Mishima is not a good novelist at all, even if he has the most refined pen in Japan. I think of him writting the most beautiful sentences, and yet his books bore me to death (except for "Sping Snow", "The Golden Pavilion" and maybe "Runnaway Horses").
Had never heard of Ozamu before listening to your review, and intriguing it was. I've long enjoyed Murakami but never really ever read anything of his countrymen before or since. The character feels like an exaggerated version of himself, veering from sad to buffoon clown as he bumbles his drunkard way from incident to incident. It sometimes had a freewheeling beatnik feel to it too, like a more jaded Kerouac, very much colored by the culture in Japan at the time.
It's funny that you say it's somewhat comparable to Dostoevsky. I once had a person ask me if No Longer Human was worth reading and I said it reminded me a little of Notes from Underground. He frowned and said, "Well I don't know about that" and I said, "I do, I'm the one who read the book."
i spent an extended period of time in the hospital a few years ago and a few weeks into my sojourn a young man was brought in following a suicide attempt. overhearing a conversation he was having with a hospital therapist, he mentioned the name of this book
I liked the review. I’ve been told that much is lost in translation with this book. That’s possible but I agree with your review. I read this novel in the throes of depression and still hated it. It does feel exactly like a suicide note pretending to be a novel, but I also thought it was a terrible novel. I never had the feeling of wanting to get away from it. Of course, it did make me aware of how selfish and nihilistic this author was but mostly I just had the sense that it was a very bad novel. I did not think it was well-written and I thought the story was too meandering to be any good. You might find it interesting to contrast this novel with the novels of Yukio Mishima and Natsume Soseki, Soseki’s Kokoro in particular. Yukio Mishima famously hated Osamu Dazai and confronted Dazai when Dazai spoke at his university, insisting that Dazai was a dangerous person. All of three of these writers wrote about depression and suicide and are currently very popular not only with the sort of people who read Michel Houllebecq and Emil Cioran but also with the sort of people who get this book recommended to them by TikTok alongside Franz Kafka and Fyodor Dostoevsky, which a lot can probably be said about.
I only got through NLH by reading Junji Ito's graphic novel adaptation, which I would recommend for the outstanding artwork. The protagonist is still horrible.
There's also an anime adaptation, which, if I remember correctly, is well done. It's called "Aoi Bungaku" and it's about three or four episodes. The same series also adapts other novels, such as Soseki's Kokoro.
I read this book last year when I had made the decision to stop re-training but still had to work my notice period. I.e. I was miserable because I was in a job I both hated and had objectively failed at.
I found it to be, like a lot of similar literature, company in misery. I especially liked the parts that you actually point out where he finds himself alienated from mundane human realities, completely misunderstanding them or not experiencing them at all. For anyone that struggles with connection I think seeing those feelings articulated in an admittedly extreme way can be cathartic.
It was the extremism of misery that I liked least, though. The piling on of shocking and depressing events surpassed even Michael Wellbeck’s worst excesses.
I think you’re right to point out the lack of a question here, whilst some of the other pessimistic writers seem to be writing to attack or question aspects of society they find absurd, I got the impression that Dazai accepted the fundamental validity of societal standards but was simply describing a failure to meet them. The protagonist’s happiest times are when he’s managing to live a normal life.
Isn’t the misogyny explained by the main character being sexually assaulted by a woman in early life? I may have misremembered that. At any rate, hatefulness is unsurprising in misanthropes and failures so I wasn’t too bothered by it. Depression certainly doesn’t necessitate hate but is on the other hand a possible outcome, and I would defend things like this book and American Psycho, or something like the Joker movie, on the earlier ground of catharsis. It’s not the most noble or sublime artistic technique but I think it provides a certain frisson or frenzy to those who might otherwise look for it in their real life.
Enjoyed this review James. I had very similar feelings when I started reading this book, after about 50 pages I had to put it down. Being inside a mind like that filled me with so much disgust, sickness and numbness. I liked your critique of his lack of outwardly focus and absence of cosmic nature-he’s not despaired about the state/condition of the world he’s despaired about his own lack of power & self-control. The protagonist is so inwardly directed, it becomes an incredibly self-serving form of nihilism. His misanthropy is similar to Charles Bukowski in that he uses it to fuel his own degeneracy and rage against women. He uses others as objects and drags them down with him and feeds off their grief. It’s repulsive to read because it’s like a precursor to 4-chan incel shitposts, except there’s no hidden humour/sarcasm it’s sterile, devoid of all human emotions.
I guess I'd say this review falls into one of two typical reactions to No Longer Human: one of disgust while the other is one of empathy. Ironically both reactions stem from taking the comments of either Yozo (in the notebooks) or the characters around him (from the epilogue) at face value (which is understandable given how matter of fact and sincere Dazai presents his prose).
Those who sympathize with Yozo usually refer to the epilogue where one of the women involved with Yozo calls him an “angel” and more so believes the father is at fault (p. 177). One would do well to also remember that she states: “I just kept thinking that when human beings get that way, they’re no good for anything.” (p. 176). This perspective shows at least to some degree that Dazai wasn't completely lacking in self-awareness (more on this at the end of the comment).
Addressing Yozo's misogyny I believe one can equally observe a sense of solidarity between Yozo and the prostitutes (and the women in the novel) that cannot be reduced to mere hatefulness. It is true that Yozo displays cruel misogynistic behavior throughout novel (predominantly points of view), and I would say that the episode with the violation of his wife where he just idly observes the crime is especially grueling (bearing in mind he just passively put up with the abuse of the maids and manservants as a child, it is hardly a profound observation that Yozo from an early age learned to cope with traumatic events by dissociation). But regarding the solidarity I mentioned, Yozo apart from calling the prostitutes “imbeciles or lunatics”, he also observes that “[i]t was pathetic how utterly devoid of greed they really were. And perhaps because they felt for me 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.” (p. 63). Again and again Yozo is constantly looked out for by women of low social standing. I guess it would be mostly correct to say that this has little to do with any inherent sympathetic qualities of Yozo, but just a combination of his good looks and a helpless dejected demeanor that people with high levels of empathy can't help but try to mitigate, be it the prostitutes, the impoverished Tsuneko or the single mother, Shizuko.
Yozo is not a sympathetic person at all, I don't want to suggest that he was justified in his outlook on the world or the way he mistreated people. But I would at least acknowledge that Yozo at times displays a certain degree of self-awareness in his relationship to these women. In the initial encounter with Tsuneko, we can once again observe the misogynistic attitude of Yozo. Thinking to himself, while Tsuneko relates her tragic situation with her imprisoned husband, he remarks cruelly and indifferently: “She rambled on, but I have never been able to get interested when women talk about themselves. It may be because women are so inept at telling a story (that is, because they place the emphasis in the wrong places), or for some other reason. In any case, I have always turned them a deaf ear.” (p. 80). When we take this comment in isolation there can be no doubt that Yozo comes off as a terrible person. But this scene with Tsuneko also marks perhaps the only moment of what could be described as genuine connection between him and another person: “[…] something like a silent current of misery an inch wide flowed over the surface of her body. When I lay next to her my body was enveloped in her current, which mingled with my own harsher current of gloom like a “withered leaf settling to rest on the stones at the bottom of a pool.” I had freed myself from fear and uneasiness. It was entirely different from the feeling of being able to sleep soundly which I had experienced in the arms of those idiot-prostitutes (for one thing, the prostitutes were cheerful); the night I spent with that criminal’s wife was for me a night of liberation and happiness. (The use of so bold a word, affirmatively, without hesitation, will not, I imagine, recur in these notebooks.)” (Ibid.). I quote this passage at length to include both his dismal mindset and these brief moments of connection. His fearfulness of course leads him to distance himself Tsuneko (“The weak fear happiness itself. […] I was impatient to leave her while things still stood the same, before I got wounded, and I spread my usual smokescreen of farce.” p. 81) before their attempted double suicide after they meet up again under embarrassing circumstances. Not at any moment are Yozo’s considerations directed outside of himself (but at p. 88, confronted with prospect of being disowned after his attempted suicide with Tsuneko, “[s]uch matters did not concern me; I thought instead of the dead Tsuneko, and, longing for her, I wept. Of all the people I had ever known, that miserable Tsuneko really was the only one I loved.”). I think the comment of this video is correct that there isn’t a relationship for Yozo (I’m not sure that we can conclude the same about Dazai, especially if we look at The Setting Sun that presents a critical view of a character like Yozo through the character of Uehara); notably because he doesn’t allow a relationship to materialize. Despite his iconoclastic remarks about not relating to eating or any other of these absurd statements, Yozo very much shares the human trait of rejection-sensitivity, an unyielding need to please other people no matter what it costs, and therefore everything always comes off as an imposition from the outside. An imposition from the outside, but also a view of himself as an imposition on other people, a fear of ruining others. The last scene with Shizuko is especially heart-wrenching in this regard where he looks through the door crack to see a happy mother and her child: “I saw a small white rabbit bounding around the room. The two of them were chasing it. (They were happy, the two of them. I’d been a fool to come between them. I might destroy them both if I were not careful. A humble happiness. A good mother and child. God, I thought, if you listen to the prayers of people like myself, grant me happiness once, only once in my whole lifetime will be enough! Hear my prayer!) I felt like getting down on my knees to pray then and there. I shut the door softly, went to the Ginza, and did not return to the apartment.” (p. 124).
There are plenty more examples to draw from the novel, but this comment is already too long. None of the examples I’ve given directly contradict the statement that this is hateful novel that rails against the fact that you have to do things in the world and the human condition that life itself demands the answers to your troubles, not the other way around. We rarely get any insight into the psychology of the people around Yozo, but I truly believe that he was never really seen for who he was. You can gauge a tacit critique of traditional familial roles in Japan. Yozo had a hard time coming to terms with the way his life was planned out from the start by his father and the way certain forms of desires was imposed on him (look at the way he is rushed through the school system (p. 56-57), at the scene with the lion mask (p. 30-31) where act of gift-giving is purely transactional and cut off from any genuine curiosity towards Yozo’s internal world). I think there is something to explore here about how conservative familial ties and paternalistic authority figures such as those that can be found in Japanese society can generate deep-seated emotional alienation in a person.
It's unsure to what degree the prologue and epilogue manages to distance Dazai from Yozo. Dazai's subsequent suicide made it indeed hard not to conclude that this novel is just an indulgence of this mindset. I didn't necessarily get that impression when taken together with the examples I've given above and the perspective of The Setting Sun that at times is equally as depressing, but still manages to tell a story about overcoming despair. What about the epilogue? To go back to the other type of reading, the sympathetic one, Donald Keene quotes the “epilogue [where] the only objective witness testifies, “He was an angel,” and we are suddenly made to realize the incompleteness of Yozo’s portrait of himself. In the way that most men fail to see their own cruelty, Yozo had not noticed his gentleness and his capacity for love.” (p. 9). Is it just a desperate attempt to convince people that he wasn't completely broken? It could also be argued this epilogue tries to convey that one’s feeling of alienation isn't an unchangeable deficiency that cancels out any act of kindness that is inherent to one’s character. Yozo is also a character that *could* harbor great kindness in him, but only if he allowed other people to enter and influence his mindset. His lack of trust in people is also a lack of trust in himself which consequently ends up with him not committing to anyone or anything.
Just a follow-up in relation to the ethical implications of Dazai's novel: whether or not one can observe a self-awareness in a piece of literature, the age-old problem persists with literary or film-characters with questionable ethical qualities. Bret Easton Ellis hardly intended to idolize a character like Patrick Bateman who is now being fetishized to a concerning degree by young men in the so called "sigma" community. Patrick Bateman is a warning about a life based on empty status symbols and consumerism, and Yozo is as well a warning about which kind images you mirror yourself through. Junji Ito's rendition of the novel cleverly visualizes how Yozo's ghost pictures become a premonition, a self-fulfilling prophecy of his fate that he couldn't turn away from mentally. In that sense, there is a legitimate concern about the popularity of the novel turning into a justification of a dismal way of life instead of mere appreciation of a piece of literature. With the proliferation of social media and the consequent access to different cultural products that it previously would be difficult to learn about, decontextualization is abound. This is as much a problem of media accessibility and curation as one of the content of the media itself. Just to add if there is a widespread fascination with No Longer Human that praises a character like Yozo as an ideal to replicate (which isn't equivalent to relating to a character), that is indeed disturbing.
I've read almost everything by Dazai that has been translated, both in English and Spanish (my mother tongue). While many people regard "No Longer Human" as Dazai's magnum opus, I think "The Setting Sun" is much better. There's also an earlier novel that deals with one of the events of "No Longer Human" (the double suicide attempt with some girl Dazai just met);. It's called "The Flowers of Buffonery" and, as the title implies, is full of humour. I'm not encouraging you to read them since Dazai's whole project was rejoicing in his hopelessness, always inserting alter egos that, in ridiculous defeat, mirror his experiences. The difference between his earlier books and "No Longer Human", is that in those there was an element of humour. The breaking point is "The Setting Sun", which has a woman as the main character. There are two Dazai alter egos there, both rotten to the core, while she's trying to survive in the midst of a defeated Japan.
I too think that by the time Dazai wrote "No Longer Human", he was just indulging on his own missery for the sake of pure missery. There was nothing else for him, not even literature. Some time ago I published in some literary magazine an article arguing precisely this: what used to keep Dazai alive (his artistic endevour), became disgusting and vain. After writing this novel, he then went on to write another one, called "Goodbye", but left it unfinished and instead wrote a message directed to Masuji Ibuse (also an important author and possibly the only man who believed in him), calling him a pig for no apparent reason. Then he drowned in the Tamagawa cannal with yet another lover. All in all, I don't think you missed anything. While I do like Dazai, I never recommend anyone read "No Longer Human" first.
If you're interested, I would point you to Natsume Soseki and Kenzaburo Oe. Soseki, being the father of modern Japanese literature, became increassingly pessimistic as time went by (his gastric issues didn't help at all, just as Bernhard with his lung problems), but his books tackle important questions regarding modernity at the turn of the century. Kenzaburo Oe is, by my estimation, the best Japanese author of the XX century, he's also the most "Western" one in the sense that he was informed mostly by French and English authors. Especially important are "A Personal Matter" and "The Silent Cry", the latter being one of the few books that have made me sick.
Someone else recommended Mishima, which is very standard. I'm in the minority, but I think Mishima is not a good novelist at all, even if he has the most refined pen in Japan. I think of him writting the most beautiful sentences, and yet his books bore me to death (except for "Sping Snow", "The Golden Pavilion" and maybe "Runnaway Horses").
Had never heard of Ozamu before listening to your review, and intriguing it was. I've long enjoyed Murakami but never really ever read anything of his countrymen before or since. The character feels like an exaggerated version of himself, veering from sad to buffoon clown as he bumbles his drunkard way from incident to incident. It sometimes had a freewheeling beatnik feel to it too, like a more jaded Kerouac, very much colored by the culture in Japan at the time.
It's funny that you say it's somewhat comparable to Dostoevsky. I once had a person ask me if No Longer Human was worth reading and I said it reminded me a little of Notes from Underground. He frowned and said,
"Well I don't know about that" and I said,
"I do, I'm the one who read the book."
I listened to this in the last hour of work as my body and mind were giving up. God, that was bleak.
i spent an extended period of time in the hospital a few years ago and a few weeks into my sojourn a young man was brought in following a suicide attempt. overhearing a conversation he was having with a hospital therapist, he mentioned the name of this book
I liked the review. I’ve been told that much is lost in translation with this book. That’s possible but I agree with your review. I read this novel in the throes of depression and still hated it. It does feel exactly like a suicide note pretending to be a novel, but I also thought it was a terrible novel. I never had the feeling of wanting to get away from it. Of course, it did make me aware of how selfish and nihilistic this author was but mostly I just had the sense that it was a very bad novel. I did not think it was well-written and I thought the story was too meandering to be any good. You might find it interesting to contrast this novel with the novels of Yukio Mishima and Natsume Soseki, Soseki’s Kokoro in particular. Yukio Mishima famously hated Osamu Dazai and confronted Dazai when Dazai spoke at his university, insisting that Dazai was a dangerous person.
All of three of these writers wrote about depression and suicide and are currently very popular not only with the sort of people who read Michel Houllebecq and Emil Cioran but also with the sort of people who get this book recommended to them by TikTok alongside Franz Kafka and Fyodor Dostoevsky, which a lot can probably be said about.
Wendigoon’s video on the same subject is amazing as well
I only got through NLH by reading Junji Ito's graphic novel adaptation, which I would recommend for the outstanding artwork. The protagonist is still horrible.
There's also an anime adaptation, which, if I remember correctly, is well done. It's called "Aoi Bungaku" and it's about three or four episodes. The same series also adapts other novels, such as Soseki's Kokoro.
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