Rating: 4/5, good
I originally read this on a plane, quickly, without much thought. I tried to sit down and review it a few weeks ago, but I felt like I didn’t understand it well enough. I looked up Osamu Dazai’s biography and then reread No Longer Human, and it seemed to come into place.
No Longer Human is short (about 170 pages) but deceptively complex. Everything is there, but if you blink, you’ll miss it.
No Longer Human is a semi-autobiographical confessional novel about depression, anxiety, alienation, drug abuse, and sexual abuse. The protagonist, Oba Yozo, is a young man who feels like he is at the bottom of humanity. To say he has low self-esteem is an understatement. He thinks he is vulgar, weak, and cowardly, so far below humanity as to not be a part of it at all.
As I reread it, there were two main questions in my mind:
What is Oba Yozo’s problem?
and
Is Oba Yozo a good or a bad person?
I think his problems are partly in his nature and partly a result of being sexually abused by his family’s servants as a child.
“My true nature, however, was one diametrically opposed to the role of a mischievous imp. Already by that time I had been taught a lamentable thing by the servants; I was being corrupted. I now think that to perpetrate such a thing on a small child is the ugliest, vilest, cruelest crime a human being can commit. But I endured it. I even felt as if it enabled me to see one more particular aspect of human beings. I smiled in my weakness. If I had formed the habit of telling the truth I might perhaps have been able to confide unabashedly to my father or mother about the crime, but I could not fully understand even my own parents. To appeal for help to any human being–I could expect nothing from that expedient. Supposing I complained to my father or my mother, or to the police, the government–I wondered if in the end I would not be argued into silence by someone in good graces with the world, by the excuses of which the world approved.”
This childhood sexual abuse sets the tone for the rest of his life, yet this (and maybe one other short reference) is the only time Yozo brings it up. Yozo is immensely suspicious of other people. He can never take what they say at face value; he assumes everyone must have some hidden ulterior motive. He despises and fears others’ dissimulation, but he never plays it straight himself either, always joking to cover up the emptiness he feels inside.
I’m tempted to just ascribe everything to the abuse, but he seems to have felt this way since birth:
“People also talk of a ‘criminal consciousness’. All my life in this world of human beings I have been tortured by such a consciousness, but it has been my faithful companion, like a wife in poverty, and together, just the two of us, we have indulged in our forlorn pleasures. This, perhaps, has been one of the attitudes in which I have gone on living. People also commonly speak of the ‘wound of a guilty conscience’. In my case, the wound appeared of itself when I was an infant, and with the passage of time, far from healing it has grown only the deeper, until now it has reached the bone. The agonies I have suffered night after night have made for a hell composed of an infinite diversity of tortures, but–though this is a very strange way to put it–the wound has gradually become dearer to me than my own flesh and blood, and I have thought its pain to be the emotion of the wound as it lived or even its murmur of affection.”
I think it is true that some people nurse their sadness and by so doing, make it stronger, even to the point that it can become a cornerstone of their identity… but what causes some people to be more prone to depression? Is it biological, environmental, even spiritual? That would be a question for a different book. No Longer Human is a novel about one person’s experience of being depressed, not an exploration of causes, but Dazai poses a lot of options, including, enigmatically and at the very end, the madam of the bar in Kyobashi’s opinion that it’s all his father’s fault.
Yozo’s father is distant, but he didn’t seem to unkind to me… Yozo is just very sensitive and takes his father’s neutral expressions or lack of words as strong disapproval. Yozo always has the impulse to obey his father. In one instance, Yozo’s father is going to Tokyo on business and asks Yozo what he wants for a souvenir. Yozo hesitates because he can’t think of anything that could make him happy. Yozo’s father suggests a lion mask, but Yozo’s brother says Yozo would probably like a book better. Yozo’s father frowns and writes “book” in his notes. That night, Yozo sneaks out of bed, crosses out “book” and writes “lion mask” because he thinks that’s what his father wants him to want. His father thinks he must have really wanted the lion mask, and laughs at how weird Yozo is that he didn’t say so.
Similarly, Yozo goes to college to study to become a government official, which is what his father wants him to do, even though he has a passion for visual art. Yozo doesn’t tell him about his passion, but he ends up skipping school most days to take painting lessons.
His father does stop speaking to him after he gets in trouble for engaging in communist party activities and attempting double suicide with Tsuneko.
Yozo’s father is kind of a non-entity in his life, but the image of his father’s judgment terrifies Yozo. This is what he says when he hears of his father’s death from a gastric ulcer:
“The news of my father’s death eviscerated me. He was dead, that familiar, frightening presence who had never left my heart for a split second. I felt as though the vessel of my suffering had become empty, as if nothing could interest me now. I had lost even the ability to suffer.”
Maybe there’s more about his father between the lines, or that Dazai didn’t write…
As a society, I think we put a lot more emphasis on a mother’s involvement, and when things go wrong we blame the mother, but I think lack of approval from the father can hinder a child’s sense of self-confidence.
Another source of Yozo’s discontent is his impatience and boredom with mundane, everyday life. The first notebook starts out with Yozo talking about the bridge at the train station in his hometown:
“I was born in a village in the Northeast, and it wasn’t until I was quite big that I saw my first train. I climbed up and down the station bridge, quite unaware that its function was to permit people to cross from one track to another. I was convinced that the bridge had been provided to lend an exotic touch and to make the station premises a place of pleasant diversity, like some foreign playground. I remained under this delusion for quite a long time, and it was for me a very refined amusement indeed to climb up and down the bridge. I thought that it was one of the most elegant services provided by the railways. When later I discovered that the bridge was nothing more than a utilitarian device, I lost all interest in it.”
Yozo’s very imaginative, and he seems to want to live in a more extraordinary world than our own. He’s not interested in anything practical; for example, he likes interesting foods but he doesn’t feel hunger.
This childlike attitude takes a darker turn when he faces down adulthood:
“Eat or die, the saying goes, but to my ears it sounded like just one more unpleasant threat. Nevertheless this superstition (I could only think of it as such) always aroused doubt and fear in me. Nothing was so hard for me to understand, so baffling, and at the same time so filled with menacing overtones as the commonplace remark, ‘Human beings work to earn their bread, for if they don’t eat, they die.”
So, Yozo’s problem is kind of an amalgamation of things. I think Osamu Dazai does a great job of describing Yozo’s feelings and worldview and I found a lot of relatable passages in this book.
As for whether Yozo’s a good person or not, it’s hard to say…
On the plus side: he’s polite to everyone, compassionate to people who are hurting, is generous, good with children, and makes people laugh.
On the negative side: he’s self-centered, drunk, and always clowns instead of telling the truth. He relies on women for financial support while at the same time having affairs with other women. He fails to save his last wife when she’s in trouble.
He makes it out like women are entrapping him because he’s handsome and his personality is too easy-going, but he does have the power to say no, as he does with some of the young women in his college days… though he gets less picky with his lovers as his life goes on… he doesn’t have a high opinion of himself, so he’s drawn to women who feels are also miserable. He’s kind of an unreliable narrator in this respect: Is he using women, or are women using him? He’s the one telling the story, so it’s impossible to know objectively.
He’s good to people, but his goodness is fake and motivated by fear or shared melancholy.
I don’t think he’s all that great a person, and he might be a terrible person but he’s not so bad… at least as far as his own narrative portrays him.
Osamu Dazai committed suicide shortly after this book was released and a lot of the events line up with his life. He was raised in the north part of Honshu, which was cold and far away from Tokyo. He was raised in a wealthy family, yet participated in communist activities. He attempted a double suicide and survived, though his lover died (he would attempt suicide three more times). He also was an alcoholic and addicted to painkillers and spent time in a mental institution. He had five lovers over the course of his life.
Did Dazai write No Longer Human as excuse or confession? I think as it is written it is a confession, but he doesn’t paint himself in an entirely negative light. At the end, the madam of the bar in Kyobashi says:
“The Yozo we knew was so easy-going and amusing, and if only he hadn’t drunk—no, even though he did drink—he was a good boy, an angel.”
Hmm.
This book is beautifully written, and the way it’s presented as three photographs and three notebooks is interesting. I don’t know if I would recommend it…
I’ve been trying to get away from depressing literature lately because as much as I like it, it’s not great for my mental health. For that reason, even though it’s a Japanese classic, I wouldn’t say it’s essential reading. I think this kind of repudiation-of-life stuff is kind of over-represented in literature. I mean, I don’t know, there’s a lot of humor and beauty in it too, but I have to ask why this the most popular Dazai book? Is it just sensationalism and morbid curiosity? Or are people drawn to tales of suicide as a form of escape? Why is that considered literary?
There has to be a way to transcend this world without leaving it. We need to learn to face the world and try to fix it instead of always trying to escape it.
Speaking of real life, the full moon is very beautiful tonight ~
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