“How much of a failure in life do you have to be until you’re no longer considered a human being?”

Trigger Warning: themes of mental illness, sucide, death, and things of that nature. Please be advised.*

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No Longer Human

9/10 (Personal Rating) - Would recommend for someone to read this who can tolerate the level of "excitement" I went through with this book.

Pre-Review Intro

Watching an anime called “Bungo Stray Dogs”, an anime character that I liked named Osamu Dazai which I then later found out to be a real person, with his ability in the show called “No Longer Human” is actually his semi-autobiographical book in real-life. I decided to delve deeper into his works as I read the synopsis of the book.

“Relatable” is the first thing that popped up inside of my head and it resonated with my feelings at that time. But nothing could have prepared me for what was about to come as I absorbed myself into reading it for only 3 days. I came out reading from this book as if I went through the Vietnam War. Now reminiscing at the feeling I went through those 3 days, I felt as if I shared the same suffering that the main character went through his life in this book.

This book is probably one of the worst books you could start reading. Because of this book, I came up with the quote modified from its original quote “Stick and stones may break my bones but stories have the ability to break one’s sanity". But luckily mine didn't as I was reading this book.

Review

The Main Character

"Oba Yozo", the main character and also the narrator of his own story, at a very young age had always seen himself to be indifferent towards other people. He grows up to be a failure of a human being as he himself describes his life as “a life of shame”. This is further exemplified as his statement says:

“Disqualified as a human being.
I had now ceased utterly to be a human being.” - Page 106

Observations (& Few Details of the Story)

Determinism

I feel as if Yozo’s fate was predetermined as his childhood was already him feeling that sort of disconnect from others, while you could say that his feelings of disconnection from childhood was normal and it could’ve been sorted out. His circumstances in life and his choices and actions nevertheless lead him to his inevitable demise.

One of the characters in the story in which swayed Yozo to be the person he ended up becoming. "Masao Horiki", a close friend of Yozo that accompanies him for a majority of the storyline. He introduces Yozo to a fellow artist and also introduces him to drinking, smoking and sleeping w/ s*x workers.

Horiki also brings Yozo to a communist party meeting. Though Yozo doesn’t necessarily agree to their agendas, nevertheless he pretends to agree and likes the idea of having company with his new comrades as he runs his errands for them.

Now that we have introduced Horiki, reading through the book and following the storyline, I believe that once Yozo actually met Horiki, his fate was sealed in shut. As we have described him to have introduced Yozo to the horrible addictions he could get into. Only then did Yozo's actions really start to ramp up combined with his addictions.

Existential Despair

This book almost broke me, the height of it reached it's peak when Yozo and a female bartender he met named "Tsuneko", commited double su*cide. But with the twist of events, Yozo was met with the mercy of Death, but Tsuneko unfortunately didn't.

Now towards the ending of the story, Yozo gets into another drug addiction in which I will not specifically mention. He got it from a pharmacist in which "sensed" that familiarity they had with each other's feelings of being miserable.

Recovery

Then the story actually does conclude at which Yozo, after getting released from the psych ward(got there because of another su*cide attempt), was sent to the countryside in which he wrote his lifelong story in his notebooks and gave it to a bartender.

Which I though it was just odd but considering the events that took place in this story, the ending was just something that I quickly brushed off but I'm glad it ended in this type of way.

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Overall, the story is unique in my opinion. And was not generally something I would've expected from a semi-autobiographical book(not that I never knew about the synopsis to begin with). This is also one of those books to where I really did just finish it in one night because of how engaging it was to me, since I can't do that regularly due to "attention spans with Gen Z". Which says that the structure of the story really did keep me entertained throughout the reading experience.

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Image was captured by my smartphone and edited in Canva, a select elements were used in Vecteezy:
Abstract Vectors by Vecteezy

Street Wear Vectors by Vecteezy

Y2k Vectors by Vecteezy

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Thank you for reading!