No Longer Human is a semi-autobiographical novel written Dazai Osamu in 1984 and was later translated into English by Donald Keene.
The name Dazai might sound familiar to any fans of the anime Bungou Stray Dogs, or anyone who’s ever dipped their toe into anime in general. He’s a very popular character because... y’know. Look at him. Look at that face. Thousands of people simping over him and I don't blame them.
The artwork I’ll be showing throughout this video is from a manga adaptation by Junji Ito. There have been a couple different adaptations, but Ito’s is my favorite by far, and I think his art is the closest to what I pictured as I read the novel. But back on topic. The novel is told as a series of notebooks written by the main character Yozo Oba. It is a Japanese classic and arguably Dazai’s masterpiece. The notebooks cover Yozo’s life from childhood to adulthood and describe his fear of humanity and his inability to understand them. He turns to alcohol, nicotine, women, and eventually morphine to try and assuage this fear to no avail. After a failed suicide attempt, his second, he is taken to a mental institution where he writes that he is “disqualified as a human being.” The direct translation of the original Japanese title, Ningen Shikkaku, is in fact “Disqualified From Being Human.”
But this brings up an important question for the reader: Is Yozo truly disqualified as a human?
The basic structure of this analysis will be as follows:
First, I’ll discuss why I care about this at all. What makes this novel, and in particular Yozo, so fascinating? Why is this novel still captivating readers all over the world decades later?
After that, I’ll outline the possible answers to this question, and discuss how arguments posed by professionals fit into this outline.
I’ll conclude with my thoughts on the arguments and how I would answer the question.
So first: why do I care? Why am I spending my time analyzing this book? The short answer is: how can I not? Yozo’s story is dark, depressing, almost overwhelming in its tragedy. The reader is given a front row, splash-zone seat from which to witness Yozo’s suffering and repeated falls from grace, from his first attempt at suicide with a lover to the brutal rape of his wife. In the words of David Brudnoy in his article “The Immutable Despair of Dazai Osamu,” “As it was, we saw too much, heard too much, gasped for fresh air and were denied it.” This is not a novel that leaves you feeling satisfied. There are no happy endings here. It leaves you feeling suffocated, disoriented, even a little empty. You feel like something is missing and you can’t figure out what. Like something was stolen. At least that was my experience with the book; perhaps others might see it differently.
But enough of me rambling about how incredible this book is. Now let’s discuss the arguments that other, much more qualified and much more intelligent people have made— but before that (sorry), let’s frame the inquiry. Robert Rolf in his article “The Turn of the Narrative Screw in Dazai’s No Longer Human” gives a particularly good outline for the argument. He writes, “The reader must behold Yozo’s life and philosophy from three different points of view, before determining for himself whether Yozo was insane or normal, evil or godlike.” So the three possible conclusions are: insane, godlike, or normal, represented by the unnamed narrator in the prologue and epilogue, the bar madame in the epilogue, and Yozo himself, respectively. I’ll explain these briefly for those who haven’t read the book.
The unnamed narrator views Yozo as insane, even monstrous. His descriptions of Yozo’s photos in the prologue include phrases such as, “indescribable, unspeakable horror,” “something strangely unpleasant,” “a genuinely chilling, foreboding quality,” and perhaps most cruel of all, “nothing so much as a human body to which a horse’s head has been attached.” (Bit harsh there, no?)
The bar madame, in contrast, views Yozo in a much more positive light. She says the last line in the novel: “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 original Japanese uses the word “kamisama,” which is better translated as “god” or “godlike.” It’s a stark contrast to Yozo and the narrator’s views of Yozo.
While it might be a stretch to say that Yozo views himself as normal, he at least views himself as not insane. He writes, “But no, I was definitely not mad. I have never been mad for even an instant.” It might not fit perfectly, but this is the context for the argument that Yozo is neither monstrous nor godlike, but merely normal.
So here we have what I will use as the framework upon which to structure the arguments. It is slightly different, but the core principles are the same. Was Yozo too evil to be human? Too good? Or was he indeed human?
Rolf believes that Yozo was too good to be human, but lost his humanity due to the world’s darkness, writing:
“Society is hypocritical not because of its mutual deception alone… but because to Yozo it seems to be free from doubt, anxiety, and shame while so doing. This is what Yozo is incapable of and what leads him to believe that he is not a part of society…. Yozo is guilty of no other crime than weakness…. Yozo’s purity and honesty, his innocent, trustful nature, cannot survive undefiled in this corrupt world.”
Yozo does not understand other humans. He cannot understand their deception and their lack of guilt for this deception. Yozo still deceives others, but he is fully aware of this deception and agonizes over it quite frequently. This inability to live unburdened by lies like everyone else is what Yozo believes separates him from other humans. But Yozo and his honesty are not meant for a world such as ours. Yozo finds himself seeking trust and repeatedly it is stolen from him, and the final betrayal through the rape of his innocent wife, whose most prized value to Yozo was her, quote, “immaculate trustfulness,” breaks him. This final break in trust causes him to give up hope in ever assimilating with society, causes him to give up his humanity.
Hijiya Yukihito, on the other hand, in his article “A Religion of Humanity: A Study of Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human,” argues that Yozo was human because he was good, writing:
“The misfortune of Oba comes from his fragile sensitivity. He is keenly susceptible to the dark side of human nature that destroys the beautiful and good things of life… Oba has been aware of many problems that stem from human nature. Yet he loves people and is loved by them. His sensitivity makes him genuinely human; his susceptible mind allows him to demonstrate a true human sympathy with those in sorrow and pain…. Oba’s capacity to look beneath the surface of life gives rise to his despair; yet he persists in his efforts to remain human.”
Yozo is, at his core, kind and he is deeply sensitive to all the flaws of human nature: deceitfulness, greed, cruelty, and more. Despite this sensitivity and the many hurts he has received from the world, he still seeks honesty. He looks past the flaws of those around him and clings to the good in people. He gives up and gives in to every demand, unable to say no, and seeks to please in all he does. This sensitivity, this softness, this weakness in the eyes of the world, is what brings about his downfall, again and again, but he continues to try.
I was unable to find any articles arguing that Yozo was monstrous or evil. Considering the context of the novel, I think it might be a bit insensitive to make such an argument.
So those are two arguments by two intelligent, qualified individuals. Yozo is too good to be human, or he’s human because he is good.
Now as a disclaimer: I’m very unqualified among this crowd of smart academics. I’m an undergrad in a STEM major. Zero qualifications. Zero. So now that that’s out of the way, here’s what I think:
They’re both wrong.
Yozo is not too good to be human, nor is he human because he is good. He is just human.
This stems from how we define humanity. Rolf doesn’t specifically define humanity, but there is an underlying implication that to be human is to be hypocritical, deceptive, and corrupt, qualities that Yozo does not possess. Hijiya does define humanity in a sense: he states that the “fundamental elements which make humans most human [are] honesty, kindness, understanding, [and] love.” I digress. Politely :)
I believe that to be human is to be flawed. To be human is to want to be good but also to make mistakes, to hurt others and ourselves but also to care and yearn for approval from others. To be human is to be messy and confused, maybe even a little broken. It is not to only be good or only evil; it is somewhere in the middle.
Rolf and Hijiya both view Yozo as good, but to be honest, Yozo isn’t perfect; in fact, he’s far from it. He deceives others, he runs from his responsibilities and never manages to fully commit to any of the women in his life. He uses alcohol and morphine to escape, ignoring those around him who need him and even using others, such as the lonely pharmacist that provides him with morphine, for his own gain. Yozo is presented as a sympathetic character mainly because of the way the novel is written: Yozo’s self-loathing is so strong and his misery so paralyzing that it would be cruel of the reader to not sympathize with him. He’s not a bad person, but he’s not quite the angel that the bar madame claims he was.
Yozo is human, painfully so. He is a reflection of both the best and worst of humanity, kind and loving and sensitive, but also materialistic, non-committal, and manipulative. He tries and fails, hopes and gives up, loves and is loved. Alan Stephen Wolfe in his book Suicidal Narrative In Modern Japan says:
“Thus it is that Dazai’s writing is filled with monsters, ghosts, but above all human paradoxes, created by a self-referential language conveyed through a disembodied narrative voice. Thus it is that the reader is cajoled into seeing the ‘no longer human’ ghostly persona of Dazai as ‘all too human.’”
Yozo’s story is not a happy one. It’s the story of a depressed, anxious, traumatized young man who turns to every form of escapism in his search for peace. Alcohol. Nicotine. Women. Morphine. It’s the story of a sensitive child who never really grew up, never really hardened the way his peers did.
So, was Yozo disqualified from being human? I don’t believe so. He is flawed and imperfect and desperately needs therapy, and many of Dazai’s readers can see themselves in Yozo. Perhaps that is also why the novel captures our attention so much. If even Yozo with all his shortcomings and failures is human, so too are we.
hello hello, here is another kinda formal thing i wrote for my english class! this is actually a script for a video essay which is why it's not in an essay format and it's much less formal. this was a fun thing to write and research! i thoroughly enjoy talking about why i think other people are wrong, and i could talk about this book for hours and hours. the next post(s) will probably be significantly less well put-together than this because i'm not writing them for school! so enjoy the coherency while it lasts.
Works Cited
Brudnoy, David. “The Immutable Despair of Dazai Osamu.” Monumenta Nipponica, vol. 23, no. 3/4, Sophia University, 1968, pp. 457–74, https://doi.org/10.2307/2383500.
Dazai, Osamu, and Donald Keene. No Longer Human. New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1973.
Hijiya, Yukihito. “A Religion of Humanity: A Study of Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 15, no. 3, 1974, pp. 34–42., https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.1974.10690061.
Rolf, Robert. “The Turn of the Narrative Screw in Dazai's No Longer Human.” Approaches to the Modern Japanese Novel, edited by Kinya Tsuruta and Thomas E Swann, Sophia University, Tokyo, 1976, pp. 25–44.
Wolfe, Alan Stephen. “Dying Twice: Allegories of Impossibility.” Suicidal Narrative in Modern Japan: The Case of Dazai Osamu. Course Book ed. Princeton University Press, 2014. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/book/33907.
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