No Longer Human, the 1948 novel by Osamu Dazai, follows the life of Yozo, a man unable to show, have or understand emotions. He views being human as an act and it frightens him how easily it comes to others. He understands that his views of people and of his lack of emotions makes him an outcast.
Yozo fears people because he cannot understand them. He fears the power they have over him and his ability to remain in society. Being rejected by people and excluded from society would confirm that there is something extremely wrong with Yozo. So, despite his perceived inability to be human, he keeps up a façade and does what he believes people want him to do.
This approach makes Yozo miserable and leads him into a self-destructive life. It introduces him to alcohol, which he ends up abusing for the majority of his adult life. He develops a morphine addiction towards the end of the book and by this point he has attempted suicide multiple times. Although it initially worked for him, his method used to pass as a “normal” human was hard for him to follow as it wasn’t natural to him.
At the worst of his morphine addiction, his friends Flatfish and Horiki have him sent to a psych ward where he stays for about three months until his older brother and Flatfish take him out. Yozo’s brother then banishes him to the countryside where he wastes aways for three years until his death at the age of twenty-seven.
I found out about No Longer Human around November of 2022 through a video of a man talking about the novel. I only got about twenty minutes into the video when I decided I wanted to read the book for myself before I heard anyone else’s opinion on it. When I finished the novel, I found that Oba Yozo’s descriptive and pessimistic tone, his take on being human, and the overall structure of the novel really stuck with me.
Yozo focused on the most horrific parts of his life and mind in his notebooks. As a reader we only come to know Yozo through what he presents in his notebooks as they are all that’s left of him. He paints an unfavorable picture of himself and of the world around him. His confessions on how doesn’t get why he should love his family or how he doesn’t really care for the women he becomes involved with wouldn’t be so bad if he had tried to understand why he isn’t feeling a certain way and why he should. However, Yozo never makes the attempt to understand feelings and the importance of empathy. The façade he upholds only benefits him. He does not wish to stay in society for the interest of others but because he does not know what he would be if not given the choice to pass as human anymore. For this reason, when Yozo says he’s “disqualified as a human being,” one doesn’t really feel bad for him because of how he has depicted himself up until that point (Dazai 167). For the reader, Yozo’s disqualification occurred at the beginning of the novel, not when he’s being put in the psych ward.
The novel makes it clear however that the notebooks do not depict the real Yozo. The structure of the novel consists of a prologue, the three notebooks, and an epilogue. While the three notebooks are Yozo’s written account of his life, the prologue and the epilogue are narrated by an unnamed character who has never met Yozo. Both are set more than ten years after the end of Yozo’s third notebook, and both offer two different perceptions of the contents of the notebooks.
In the prologue, the narrator looks through pictures of Yozo that he has come into possession of. By looking at these pictures, the narrator depicts Yozo as the man we come to read about. Yozo is described as having a face with the inability to show a “suggestion of a smile” (14). A face that “fails inexplicably to give the impression of belonging to a human being” (15). A face that “fails even to leave a memory” (16). An array of negative depictions of Yozo are thrown at the reader before they read about Yozo for themselves. The physical description of Yozo provided this early on by a source who never knew him leaves the impression that there was always something innately unhuman about Yozo.
The epilogue explains how the unnamed narrator comes into possession of the notebooks. A mutual acquaintance of his and Yozo gifts them to the narrator more than ten years after Yozo’s presumed death. Unlike the prologue, the epilogue provides a positive depiction of Yozo.
The Bartender from Kyobashi, the mutual acquaintance of the unnamed narrator and Yozo, has also read the notebooks. Unlike the reader and the unnamed narrator however, she knew Yozo beyond his own critical description of himself. The Bartender and Yozo’s friends understood he was flawed, as all humans are, and constantly tried to help him through his struggles. Yozo was always seen as a human being by those who knew him. Yozo’s lack of empathy and his inability to read and understand emotions prevented him from seeing what those who cared for him saw. Because of this, we come to know only the Yozo he understood and not the Yozo he couldn’t.
No Longer Human, the semi- autobiographical novel by Osamu Dazai published a month after he committed suicide, intentionally portrays a man the reader struggles to relate to or feel sympathy for. His lifelong experience with depression and the struggles he faces because of it are saddening, however, his views of the world, of other people, his harmful actions, his lack of remorse, and his self-righteous manner despite his situation make him a character the reader cannot grow fond of. Osamu Dazai wrote Yozo this way to comment on the complexity of human experience. Through Yozo, Dazai presents a sad and miserable man who cannot understand what he’s going through and refuses to understand what he’s going through to present his own reality of the human experience. Dazai humanizes the perceived non-human because in doing so, he humanizes himself and, perhaps, ended up understanding himself, even if by just a little.
Sources
Dazai, Osamu, and Donald Keene. No Longer Human. New Directions, 1958.