REVIEW

The bewildering guise of human beings comes into perspective as Yozo, a young man raised in rural Japan, experiences a series of events that question the nature of human morality and ethics. His first-person narration describes a deep-seated despondency, a skin born unto him in which he had no way of shedding. Forlorn, morose, and loathsome, Yozo begins his life as an anomaly. 

“…but it was extremely difficult for me to explain to Shigeko how much I feared them all, and how I was cursed by the unhappy peculiarity that the more I feared people the more I was liked, and the more I was liked the more I feared them – a process which eventually compelled me to runaway from everybody.”

As a child, Yozo masked his fearsomeness of the human species with mischief and petulant clowning, believing himself to be a thespian and spectacle among his peers, teachers, and family members. He embodied the bromide, “He feared what he could not understand,” and concluded this stratagem of clowning diverted their attentions. Therefore, the hopelessness that lurked within him became lost in his absurdity.

Yozo, brilliant and painfully aware, examined the nature of human beings under a microscope and could not make reason for their ways. The same people who smiled together whispered wicked things about one another in the wake of their absence; from this, he found humans duplicitous. His first adult acquaintance in Tokyo was a man who drowned him in cheap liquor, prostitution, and Marxism; he found him wicked yet succumbed to his miserable companionship in which that misery was their pew.

“I am convinced that human life Is filled with many pure, happy, insincerity, truly splendid of their kind—of people deceiving one another without (strangely enough) any wounds being inflicted, of people who seem unaware even that they are deceiving one another.”

Osamu Dazai explores the nadir of humanity by creating a character so tragic and anxious, so blinded and sensitive to the monsters under his bed, a rancor so rooted within him he could not even begin to fathom the monster within himself. Yozo is unable to know the human and lives life in a drunken stupor at any sign of introspective recognition, at any indication that he could share anything with the species from who he emerged. Every action, every step of existence, was to have such a visceral effect that would make him as sober as it would sick. He couldn’t stand the human, society, or any potentially meaningful relation with them because of his natural, inbred proclivity to despise.

This story is dismal. This story is beautiful. In the 21st century, our generation, so polarizing and delusional, have brainwashed the masses into not feeling a thing. ‘No Longer Human,’ written with poignant and rhythmic prose, limns the essence of a sadness deeply endured, unyielding to any force that only believes in hell and no heaven and that, after such loathsome action against those who surrounded it, thought hell only fitting.  This sadness, so unsuitable and undesirable in our time, is a shunned relic from a past more accepting and much simpler. Through Yozo, it’s nostalgic and shamefully relatable.

“…as he laughed at me, his neck drawn in. it [his face] resembled contempt, yet it was different: if the world, like the sea, had depths of a thousand fathoms, this was the kind of weird shadow which might be found hovering here and there at the bottom.”

Yozo was a thinker and observer. At times, he was pathetic and pious about his longstanding relationship with suffering, as it was the only thing he knew how to do until alcohol took away even that. 

This story is the best book I’ve read this year.

★★★★★

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