No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai translated by Donald Keene (Tuttle)

Osamu Dazai is a Japanese author and is also the pen name of Shuji Tsushima who was born and raised in the small town of Kanagi, located in Aomori Prefecture. He would gain recognition among the literati after the publication of his 1947 novel The Setting Sun. The book was translated into English by Donald Keene, an American scholar and Japanologist who moved to Japan after the 2011 earthquake and became a Japanese citizen. 

Keene is also the translator for No Longer Human, Dazai’s semi-autobiographical novel which was first published in Japanese with the title Ningen Shikaku in 1948. The book was translated into English in 1958. Keene writes in his introduction that the literal translation of Ningen Shikkaku is “disqualified as a human being”. 

The story is about a young man named Yozo Oba. He is a man who has trouble expressing himself to others. He had “a mortal dread of human beings” but was “unable to renounce their society”. In order to deal with his fears and insecurities, he refined the art of being a clown and making people laugh. 

In high school Yozo befriends a classmate named Takeichi who saw through his antics. This created a fear in Yozo’s mind so he deemed that the best way to deal with potential problems was to make Takeichi his friend so he wouldn’t be able to tell the other classmates that Yozo's hilarious antics were nothing more than a farce. 

Although Yozo wanted to go to art school, his father sent him to a regular university. More often than not, Yozo would skip his classes. He did go to one art class where he would meet Masao Horiki. 

Horiki would be a major influence on Yozo’s life, introducing him to alcohol, women, and general debauchery. Yozo gets involved with a married woman who also has a bleak outlook on life. They decide to commit a double suicide by drowning themselves in the sea. The woman dies but Yozo survives. 

Yozo is then expelled from the university and finds himself living with a family friend. Still, Yozo doesn’t see the errors of this way and runs away from the house and finds refuge with a single mother. He continues to drink and falls into a deeper hole as he still fears society as a whole. He runs away from them as well and ends up living with an older woman who works at a bar. His fear of humanity continues to haunt him and he becomes an excessive drinker. 

He gets involved with a young woman named Yoshiko who asks him to stop drinking. They get married and true to his word, Yozo stops drinking and even starts making money by drawing pictures for various magazines. Just when things were looking for the better, Horiki comes to visit him and Yozo relapses into his old ways. 

Yozo becomes an alcoholic, then gets addicted to morphine, and finally is committed to an asylum. He spends three months there before he is released by his older brother and family friend with the promise of him leaving Tokyo immediately and living in the country in a house provided by his older brother. He is now twenty-seven but says “people will take me for over forty”. 

Dazai’s Yozo Obo is the epitome of someone who fears society and yet cannot free himself from it. Everyday is a struggle just to live and survive. The story is written in the first person and separated into three different notebooks, covering Yozo’s life from his childhood until his mid-twenties. 

Yozo’s overwhelming inferiority complex and lack of self-esteem leads him on a downward spiral into hanging out with prostitutes and drowning himself in alcohol. But, does this really disqualify him from being human? ~Ernie Hoyt