‘I can’t even guess myself what it must be to live a life of a human being,’ writes Yozo, the narrator of Osamu Dazai’s partly autobiographical novel ‘I can’t even guess myself what it must be to live a life of a human being,’ writes Yozo, the narrator of Osamu Dazai’s partly autobiographical novel No Longer Human. But what is it to be human in the first place and in a society that finds success at the expense of others, have we let the wolves in human clothing dictate the definition for us? Is being human simply the degradations and deceits self-justified by society, sidelining anyone that gets in the way of social climbers who manipulate this social compass as best befitting their hierarchical lusts? The novel, framed as a collection of journals gifted to an overarching narrator, follow the life of self-proclaimed social outcast Yozo from his childhood being a class clown to cover up for his fears and overwhelming imposter syndrome, to a wreckless adulthood of alcoholism and apathy as his world collapses around him. Yet for a novel of being a social outcast, we find this book to be almost unbearably human, and if it is painfully dark it is only because it tears apart the veil of fictions we delude ourselves with to not acknowledge the depths of depravity inherent in reality. Both empathetic yet cowardly and despicable, Yozo is an tormented artist who both stumbles and is pulled downward in a world to slake the thirsts of those who crave the downfalls of others to feel better about oneself. With dark franticness and insights that recall Hamsun's Hunger and Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, Osamu Dazai has created a powerful look at humanity and society that will leave you trembling and agonizing over the sad fate of Yozo.
‘People talk of social outcasts. The words apparently denote the miserable losers of the world, the vicious ones, but I feel as though I have been a "social outcast" from the moment I was born. If I ever met someone society has designated as an outcast, I invariably feel affection for him, an emotion which carries me away in melting tenderness.’
In all of Yozo’s apprehensions, anxieties and absence of trust in others (‘I have always shook with fright before human beings.’) there is something very real and easily empathetic. In his youth, all those around him viewed him as a confident comedian, unshakable and affable but through his words we see just the opposite is true inside. ‘As long as I can make them laugh,’ Yozo writes, ‘I’ll be alright.’ It is a reminder that those who are smiling are not always happy, and that depression can lurk even in the most pleasant of people. The suicides or early deaths of despair within circles of comedians and entertainers, for instance, frequently came to mind while reading No Longer Human.
It also kept bringing a favorite song to mind: That’s Just The Way That I Feel by Purple Mountains (fronted by the amazing poet David Berman, rest in peace buddy). When this album first dropped I listened to this song every single day while walking to work. It was dark, yet darkly funny (c’mon, ‘I spent a decade playing chicken with oblivion’ is a PERFECT line and could also very well be said of Yozo) and sort of soothed the bad vibes I was living through at the time. When Berman decided it was time to depart this world a few months later, relistening to this song it slapped me in the face how present this impending end was all over the lyrics. He said it out loud, but it was only in retrospect how blatant it was. Knowing that Osamu Dazai would throw himself into the ocean in a double suicide not long after completing this novel, there is a certain ominous shadow cast over all the talk and acts of suicide that take place within the book.
But like David Berman’s song, I found this book to be darkly funny and oddly comforting at the beginning, poking fun at those with their fake smuggery and feeling quite understood about many anxieties or distastes for society. It’s hard not to get a chuckle at scenes such as when he joins the student communist group and is annoyed at all their lectures because he insists just basic math is all you’d need to know that capitalism was bad. I also certainly identified with his ‘desire to please born from my desperate mania for service,’ which reminds me why I thrive in customer service jobs like libraries and bartending: what Jean-Paul Sartre referred to as bad faith in his example of being a waiter can sometimes be a fun playacting to assuage imposter syndrome and annul your anxieties in order to make it through the work day. Yet the idealized, playacted self can never truly replace the real self, and the dissonance between the two will slowly eat away at you, day by day, fake smile by fake smile.
‘For someone like myself in whom the ability to trust others is so cracked and broken that I am wretchedly timid and am forever trying to read the expression on people's faces.’
‘I find it difficult to understand the kind of human being who lives….purely, happily, serenely while engaged in deceit,’ he says, which sums up so much of his character. Yozo believes we are all self-deluding and that perhaps he is the only one honest enough with himself and society to truly grasp it. When questioning if he is capable of actual love he writes that he ‘should add that I have very strong doubts as to whether even human beings possess this faculty.’ Yozo is a rather passive person, and while he is able to live in character as his idealized self during his youth, the cracks between the real and the ideal begin to form in adulthood. This is only furthered through substance abuse and that his ‘last quest for love I was to direct at human beings,’ opens him up to pains that even drink and drugs cannot mask.
‘What, I wondered, did he mean by “society”? The plural of human beings? Where was the substance of this thing called “society”?’
As Yozo more and more feels himself as an outcast, he begins to question exactly what it is that divides human society from those no longer human such as himself. Set in a post-war Japan, much of Dazai’s book critiques the modernization of Japanese society in the mid to late 1940s and what Yozo fears is becoming less an actual collective society for common good but one that is a society of the individual. ‘What is society but an individual?’ he asks, baffled by those who pretend it is anything but. Society, it seems, is only those who are productive and valuable for profits of others, but even here there is a hierarchy, much like Sayaka Murata’s modern critique on Japanese society in Convenience Store Woman examines how one can be an outcast even when being a high performer at their job simply because their job is not deemed valuable enough by society (the ironies of the pandemic lockdowns and the “essential workers” remaining at work were often low-wage grocery and other retail workers). Production and use-value are all that seem to be valued, and his idea of beautiful art for the sake of beauty is corrupted into making vulgar cartoons simply because they sell (and the profits can be used to consume more alcohol). Yozo views this shift in society as isolating people from one another, and even in his make-shift family with Shizuko and her daughter he cannot seem to believe they mesh as a ‘true’ family but merely he is an individual near them. In his failure to be a father figure, he has also failed to live up to the duties of a patriarchal society (and Yozo’s struggles with his own father may be Dazai’s criticisms of a patriarchal government as well).
‘Human beings...speak of duty to one’s country and suchlike things, but the object of their efforts is invariably the individual, and, even once the individual’s needs have been met, again the individual comes in. The incomprehensibility of society is the incomprehensibility of the individual.’
This rather bleak portrait of the masks we wear in society does unfortunately also have a very gendered hierarchy that Yozo participates in. Much of the commentary on women is very problematic, and likely reflective of time and society. It is also here we start to see the weakness and cruelties in Yozo that he hides behind his affable nature and often ignores in his own scathing self-assessments. When his own wife is sexually assaulted, he criticizes her for becoming too timid and is more concerned that she might have been unfaithful to him elsewhere than actually worrying about her own emotional state and helping her. He leaves her, the asshole, and becomes the very thing he despises about a world that lets others collapse under the weight of a violent and selfish humanity. It becomes painful to watch his decline into the despicable, but perhaps Dazai is asking us should we not pity and aid even the most wretched? If not, are we any better than the evil people we criticize?
‘The “world,” after all, was still a place of bottomless horror.’
This is certainly not a book for the faint of heart and really probes into the depths of humanity to directly into the darkest corners. ‘The one thing I must avoid is becoming offensive in their eyes,’ Yozo says, and we watch as he falters and falls into being that very thing. Yet this remains more a criticism of the postmodern world, of a society of the individual, and of a world that values profit over people and creates the snares to make others fall. A bleak yet oddly beautiful book.
4.5/5
‘After being hurt by the world so much, they began to see the demons within humans. So without hiding it through trickery, they worked to express it.’...more
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