No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai

First published:Ningen shikkaku, 1948 (English translation, 1958)

Type of work: Autobiographical fiction

Time of work: From the 1910’s to 1930

Locale: An unnamed village in northeastern Japan and Tokyo

Principal Characters:

• Yozo, the narrator-protagonist, a college dropout and artist
• Horiki, a college student, artist, and Yozo’s friend
• Flatfish, a family friend and guardian of Yozo
• Yoshiko, Yozo’s girlfriend and, later, his wife

The Novel

In No Longer Human, the first-person narrator, Yozo, traces his development and experiences from childhood through his twenty-seventh year. Using the device of a journal kept by the narrator which has been recovered and is being read by someone else, the author has made this book a revelation of his innermost self and a confession of his increasing alienation from society. In fact, the book is highly autobiographical and belongs to the “I novel” genre, a style popular in Japan.

Yozo learns very early as a child that he is apparently quite different from the people around him, and he consequently fears these people. Yet he wants to be accepted, so by constantly playing the role of clown, he makes himself popular. He observes in general that people live in mutual distrust and are insincere. On the way home from a political rally sponsored by his father, he overhears family friends saying how idiotic the meeting was; these same friends then congratulate his father on a “wonderful meeting.”

After going away to high school, Yozo learns that his clowning and posturing are easier now that he is away from family and familiars. He discovers that he loves painting and wants to make it his profession. His art parallels his public and private selves: He paints standard “pretty pictures” for others to see and odd self-portraits, which he calls “ghost pictures,” for his private amusement. While in high school, he also discovers that he gets along better with women and finds them easier to clown for, even though he finds them rather difficult to understand.

Although Yozo wants to go to art school, his father makes him go to college. There, Yozo meets Horiki, who introduces him to the world of drinking, smoking, and prostitution. Yozo finds Horiki’s friendship (such as it is) necessary because he is afraid to get around Tokyo on his own, and Horiki consequently becomes a crutch, for he is very accomplished in all the skills needed to survive in a big city. Yozo also begins attending student Communist meetings while in college, but he has no liking for Marxist economic theory. He merely prefers the personality of the Communist movement; it exists, as he does, on the margins of society.

After several years, he must leave the comfortable house in which he has been staying and move to a room in a lodging house. He is now on a tiny monthly dole from home and has real financial worries. He drops out of school, neglects his painting, and ceases to attend the Communist meetings. He rarely sees Horiki but spends most of his time with a succession of girlfriends and prostitutes, and he becomes a heavy drinker. He finds a waitress in a Ginza cafe who is as unhappy as he. They both decide that there is no hope living in an upside-down society in which they are so miserable, and they attempt a double suicide which leaves the girl dead but Yozo still alive.

The suicide attempt embarrasses his relatives, and his father forces Yozo to live with a family friend whom Yozo calls Flatfish. Yozo is quickly disgusted with Flatfish’s lack of straightforwardness and leaves. He eventually lives with Shizuko, a woman journalist, and her daughter. Flatfish reaches an agreement with the woman whereby Yozo severs all relations with his family and takes Shizuko as a common-law wife. This arrangement does not work, and he drifts into a relationship with Yoshiko, a seventeen-year-old girl, virginal, innocent, and trusting, who works in a tobacco shop. Yoshiko, so completely unlike other people in society, enchants Yozo and he marries her.

Yozo is very happy with her, but his happiness is short-lived, for she is raped by a man who takes advantage of her innocence. This event completely shatters Yozo, not because of her physical defilement but because of the defilement of her trusting nature. He tries to commit suicide with sleeping pills but is unsuccessful. By now, he is coughing blood and has become addicted to morphine. Flatfish and Horiki offer to put him into a hospital for a cure. Yozo wants to be helped so he lets them do this, but they have tricked him—the hospital is really an insane asylum. Yozo believes that he is not insane, but there is nothing he can do—he has been officially branded as mad. This marks his ultimate disqualification as a member of society. He has utterly ceased to be human.

The Characters

In the Japanese style of autobiographical fiction, readers expect to see a portrait of the author, and Osamu Dazai provided in Yozo an artfully contrived view of himself, his problems, and his outlook on life. Yozo is highly sensitive to beauty and pleasure, and one of the circumstances of life which gives him most pain is the dull, prosaic aspect of things in the world. As a child, he was fascinated by the beauty and poetry of bridges and subway trains until he discovered that they were constructed for strictly utilitarian purposes.

What causes Yozo the most pain is the greed, insincerity, and hypocrisy of humans. He has a dread of other people and adopts a mask of camaraderie and extroversion, although he is constantly afraid that someone will discover his real self. He comes to a gradual realization that the rules and regulations of society have a cold and cruel logic. He sees that society actually consists of each individual, and survival means being victorious in a series of conflicts between individuals. Virtue and vice were invented by humans for a morality also invented by humans. He further becomes aware that he is attracted to the disorganized and somewhat silly Communist meetings because of the irrationality of the students involved. For Yozo, this irrationality and the possibility of going to jail are preferable to the dread “realities of life” found in society at large.

Yozo has a vague awareness that drink, tobacco, and prostitutes are a means of dissipating his dread of humans. Although he eventually stops seeing prostitutes, he continues to have a number of relationships with other women. For his part, he feels more secure with women because they have no ulterior motives. The women apparently see in Yozo a gentle and tortured person beneath the antics and drunkenness on the outside. It is through these various relationships that the revelation is made that Yozo is actually more human than anybody else. He leaves Shizuko and her daughter immediately when he realizes that he is interfering with their mutual happiness. He is especially shattered and reaches his lowest point when his wife is raped. Yozo himself has trusted little in others and marvels that Yoshiko can be so trusting. Her rape merely confirms his conviction that no one who relies on trust can survive.

Horiki and Flatfish are representatives of the society which is so threatening to Yozo. Horiki, although leading virtually the same wild life-style as Yozo, turns out to be petty and cruel. He insults and mortifies one of Yozo’s earlier girlfriends because he detects an “air of poverty” about her. This treatment contributes to her eventual suicide. He sadistically makes sure that Yozo stumbles upon his wife in the act of being raped so that he will get the maximum shock. Flatfish is a respectable businessman, but he is never honest with Yozo. It is Flatfish who takes advantage of Yozo’s weakness and has him committed to an asylum.

Yoshiko is typical of the women who can get along with Yozo. She accepts Yozo and his weaknesses, but it is her complete trust and innocence which make her memorable. When Yozo tells her that he has quit drinking and then comes home drunk, she insists that he is not drunk but is playacting. She trusts a complete stranger who then rewards her trust by raping her. She never understands that Yozo’s later addiction to morphine is harming him. She is unfit for survival in a cruel world.

Critical Context

No Longer Human is Dazai’s last and most important book. It is regarded as the most outstanding example of Japanese autobiographical fiction, or shishosetsu (“I novel”). A concern for the author and his or her personal revelations has a long history in Japan, going back to the female diary literature of the 800’s and 900’s. The “I novel” itself, which appeared in the 1920’s, was not only a recounting of events in the author’s life but also a merciless expose in the style of a confession, with the emphasis on fact, not fiction or art. Dazai took this form and stretched it by placing far more emphasis on art. He suppressed some facts of his life, rearranged others, and paid far more attention to the demands of narrative than did previous “I novel” writers.

In the 1940’s and after his death in the 1950’s, Dazai was the most popular writer in Japan, especially among younger people. First with The Setting Sun and then with No Longer Human, he chronicled Japan’s postwar atmosphere of degradation, despair, and nihilism, especially among those who had lost their money and their place in society. A new term entered the Japanese language based on Dazai’s fiction, the “setting sun tribe,” describing those people who scarcely felt human.

Bibliography

Keene, Donald. “Dazai Osamu and the Burai-ha,” in Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era, 1984.

Lyons, Phyllis. The Saga of Dazai Osamu: A Critical Study with Translations, 1985.

O’Brien, James A. Dazai Osamu, 1975.

Rimer, J. Thomas. “Dazai Osamu: The Death of the Past,” in Modern Japanese Fiction and Its Traditions, 1978.

Ueda, Makoto. “Dazai Osamu,” in Modern Japanese Writers and the Nature of Literature, 1976.