I first came across No Longer Human thanks to the Bookstagram algorithm, which served me a quote that felt uncomfortably close to my own thoughts. The title alone, No Longer Human, almost sounded like something I could have written in my journal.

As the years pass and I become more aware of the world as well as myself (and admittedly, spiral into overthinking), I often run into contradictions in human behaviour that clash with basic reason. There’s this constant push and pull, moral confusion here, social inconsistency there, and none of it lines up with the neat “common sense” answers human like to offer. It reminded me of a line often attributed to Nietzsche: when you see too much, you eventually stop fitting anywhere. That Nietzsche’s quote gives the similar impression with this book before I read it.

No Longer Human unfolds through the journals of Yozo, whose life story is pieced together by a narrator who has stumbled upon his notebooks. Through Yozo’s first-person reflections, we follow him from childhood to adulthood and witness his desperate attempts to understand himself. His writing is raw, often uncomfortable, and endlessly self-scrutinizing.

Throughout his life, Yozo slips into whatever role he believes society demands of him. He plays the clown to survive childhood, later becomes a husband and father, and tries to function in routines that never quite feel natural to him. Beneath all of this, he hides behind vices, convinced they will mask what he perceives as his fundamental flaw: that he isn’t fully human.

But that’s the tragedy. The very struggle Yozo believes makes him inhuman is, ironically, what makes him human. Who hasn’t, at some point, felt like they’re pretending at adulthood? Performing normalcy? Scrambling to meet expectations that feel impossible or unclear? Yozo’s belief that he is uniquely broken blinds him to the fact that many of us feel the same way.

This is what makes the story’s conclusion so quietly devastating. In trying so hard to distance himself from humanity, Yozo never realizes he reflects it all too clearly. He is not the exception.

I believe that the reason why I did not tell anyone about that loathesome crime perpetrated on me by the servants was not because of distrust for human beings, not of course because of Christian leanings, but because the human beings around me had rigorously sealed me off from the world of trust or distrust.

Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

As someone who’s been feeling increasingly aware of the contradictions around me, this novel cut deep. It captured that unsettling sensation of growing older and realizing that clarity doesn’t always bring comfort. Sometimes it just exposes the distance between what we hope the world is and what it actually shows us.

Dazai writes all of this with a striking sense of restraint. His portrayal of despair ishonest, weary, and strangely familiar.

My Favorite Bits

• Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness. Everything passes. That is the one and only thing that I have thought resembled a truth in the society of human beings where I have dwelled up to now as in a burning hell. Everything passes.

• I wonder if I have actually been happy. People have told me, really more times than I can remember, ever since I was a small boy, how lucky I was, but I have always felt as if I were suffering in hell. It has seemed to me in fact that those who calle me lucky were incomparably more fortunate than I.

• I was obsessed with the idea that since I lacked the strength to act in accordance with this truth, I might already have been disqualified from living among human beings. This belief made me incapable of arguments or self-justification. Whether anyone criticized me I felt certain that I had been living under the most dreadful misapprehension. I always accepted the attack in silence, though inwardly so terrified as almost to be out of my mind.

• It is only too obvious that favoritism inevitably exists: it would have been useless to complain to human beings. So I said nothing of the truth. I felt I had no choice but to endure whatever came my way and go on playing the clown.

• I fail to see, however, that a distrust for human beings should necessarily lead directly to religion. Is it not true, rather, that human beings, including those who may now be deriding me, are living in mutual distrust, giving not a thought to God or anything else?

• I am convinced that human life is filled with many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity, truly splendid of their kind—of people deceiving one another without (strangely enough) any wounds being inflicted, of people who seem unaware that they are deceiving one another. But I have no special interest in instances of mutual deception. I myself spent the whole day long deceiving human beings with my clowning. I have not been able to work much up much concern over the morality prescribed in textbooks of ethics under the name as “righteousness.” I find it difficult to understand the kind of human being who lives, or who is sure he can live, purely, happily, serenely while engaged in deceit. Human beings never did teach me that abstruse secret. If I had only known that one thing I should never have had to dread human beings so, nor should I have opposed myself to human life, nor tasted such torments of hell every night. In short, I believe that the reason why I did not tell anyone about that liathesome crime perpetrated on me by the servants was not because of distrust for human beings, not of course because of Christian leanings, but because the human beings around me had rigorously sealed me off from the world of trust or distrust.

• I felt at the time if I should become a party member and got caught, not even the prospect of spending the rest of my life in prison would bother me: it occurred to me that prison life might actually be pleasanter than groaning away my sleepless nights in a hellish dread of the “realities of life” as led by human beings.

• The thought of dying has never bothered me, but getting hurt, losing blood, becoming crippled and the like—no thanks.

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Author: Osamu Dazai
Publication date: 1 January 1948
Number of pages: 176 pages

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