No Longer Human

Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human is a devastatingly raw, hauntingly beautiful novel that grips the soul and refuses to let go. It’s not just a book—it’s a mirror, a scream, and a confession all at once. More than any other novel I’ve read, it captures the ineffable ache of being alive, the dissonance between how we are perceived and how we perceive ourselves, and the quiet horror of emotional alienation. This is, without a doubt, my favorite book—not for the comfort it offers, but for the way it understands. Told through the fictional notebooks of Ōba Yōzō, No Longer Human is a semi-autobiographical descent into isolation, mental illness, and existential despair. Yōzō is a man plagued by the inability to connect with other people genuinely. To survive, he wears the mask of a clown—playing the fool, the comic relief, the harmless one. But this charade, this emotional self-exile, eventually corrodes his inner life, leaving him numb, broken, and spiraling. What makes this book unforgettable is Dazai’s prose—both clinical and poetic, unflinching yet tender. He writes with the rawness of someone who has lived every word. You feel the cold detachment of Yōzō’s observations, but also the deeply buried desire to be known, to be loved, to be human. The contradictions within Yōzō reflect the contradictions we often suppress in ourselves: the desire to belong versus the instinct to run; the need for love versus the fear of being seen. You just have to read it!

It's a semi-autobiography about his life with a few details with names changed, and focusing only 15yrs prior to his death while briefly speaks on his youth. The way he portrayed his life and his image towards society is put into full perspective. You can see how his depression and the lack of trust in even his own closest around are getting progressively worse. Only finding solace in drugs and prostitutes, he sees no reason to "live" if you can call it that. He questions what human beings are, what society is, and if he still has the right to be considered a human being anymore.

Dazai’s spare prose cuts deep, exposing the agony of living behind a clownish mask. Bleak, brilliant, and painfully honest, it’s a devastating portrait of depression and isolation. A modern classic that hits hard. 5/5.

I stumbled across this in a Jacob Geller video essay (if you haven’t watched his essays, you should; in my opinion he’s the best horror-centric video essayist out there), and so I was immediately interested because of how Geller pitched it; he gave the viewer a pretty intense trigger-warning, insinuating that this was going to be an intense, very bleak novel (the way he described it made me think it was going to in the vein of Murakami). Apparently Geller has never read Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, or Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory, or anything written by Kristopher Triana, but I digress. Published in 1975, it’s a very introspective, quasi-autobiographical novel—also one of the ten best-selling novels in Japan (I find this kind of surprising, but I suppose it captured the country’s zeitgeist at the time of publication)—exploring the liminal cultural spaces spanning from post-war Japan and a technology-driven postmodernism through the perspective of a very lonely, aimless, depressed MC who keeps on doing self-destructive things and to which bad things continually keep happening. It is bleak but not very “edgy” or graphic. And the one graphic event involved the r-word that rhymes with grape. But it mostly happened off-screen, was poetically insinuated to boot, and was more about the MC’s psychological reaction to it happening rather than a reliance on graphic details (which, again, there were none); unsettling but swallowable due to Dazai’s delicate approach. I liked this book but didn’t love it—partially because I wished there was a bit more Japanese culture interwoven throughout, partially because it was slightly overhyped. It is a very readable, well-paced book with great translated prose, but it didn’t quite scratch any of my genre, narrative, or prose itches. I kind of recommend it, though.

Definitely a must read.

Loved this book! Ending got me. I believe this book is relatable for everyone in some form

This book is so good. You should really get it.

Started kind of slowly. Took me a while to get through the first half. But once I locked in, wow, what a thuroughly depressing masterpiece