Modern Mythology 2022
Literacy and Learning
The Paradox of No Longer Human
No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai is a compilation of paradoxical philosophical thought. An unreliable narrator agonized by his isolation from society creates the effect of a peine forte et dure (literally being crushed to death). Dazai’s writing is imbued with inescapable darkness, his thoughts heavy, his mood melancholic - and yet, far from being an oppressive read, it is enlightening.
Although the book’s introduction and conclusion is presumably Dazai writing as himself, the bulk of the novel is three fictionalized diaries. Thus, No Longer Human’s real protagonist is Oba Yozo - not that it makes much difference, since Yozo is Dazai’s author surrogate. The first person narration immerses us in Yozo’s psyche, regardless of whether or not we have experienced what he has.
This tendency towards deeply personal writing, whether in his fiction or memoirs, was likely influenced by the shishōsetsu (a portmanteau of the Japanese characters for ‘I’ and ‘novel’) movement. “I-novels” became popularized in conjunction with the concept that an author’s bibliography could directly represent the author’s empirical self. It is for this reason that No Longer Human is considered a ‘barely fictionalized autobiography’, as well as because many scenes are pulled directly from Dazai’s own life.
Although it’s mostly referred to as No Longer Human in the Western world, the book is actually called Ningen Shikkaku (人間失格). A more literal translation would be “Disqualified from Being Human.” While both translations have their purposes, I prefer Disqualified from Being Human, because at least to me, it has a greater emotional impact. Yozo is not becoming no longer human, he is disqualified - that is, he doesn't fit the requirements of a human being. It encapsulates the oppressive mood of the novel, the overpowering fear that underneath flesh and blood, something else lurks. The insinuation that there are certain traits that must be fulfilled to be classified as human, and that without them, Yozo is not, creates a drowning sense of helplessness. Yozo’s fear that he is only an empty shell has greater emphasis in the latter.
Additionally, it has adds another layer of nuance to Yozo’s character. As aforementioned, Yozo was born human, it is an innate characteristic. Therefore, it should be impossible for him to not be human. Over the course of the novel, his agonies, originally directed inwards, begin to manifest themselves externally. In order for a tragedy to be deemed as such, the protagonist must face the consequences of his own actions. Like Oedipus Rex, their undoing must be by their own hands.
Similarly, Yozo’s disqualification from being human is due to his own flaws. As his mind decays, so does his moral degradation consume him. We watch him inflict terrible actions on not only himself, but the people around him, particularly women. Nearly every woman who comes into contact with him has her life destroyed as a result. But if Yozo is a monster, he is a human one, despite his own fears to the contrary.
Nearly from the day he was born, Yozo lived in perpetual guilt, shame, and fear. He despairs of ever connecting with another individual, saying “I still have no idea what it is that makes human beings tick. I have always felt as if I were suffering in hell.” He finds the very quality of being human unrelatable - when others nod at universal experiences, he panics, but hides this distress, fearing that it will alienate him even further. Even worse, he is passive by nature, a people-pleaser who can’t understand people. He is unable to deny anyone, so much so that the first time he ever refuses something given to him is later in the novel, when his wife attempts to give him more of the morphine he is addicted to. Even when he finds society oppressive, unlike other protagonists of similar novels containing messages rebelling against a meaningless society, Yozo is unable to fight back. His only mechanism of defense is to resort to clowning.
Yozo tries to conceal his nature by making the people around him laugh. In an attempt to deflect attention from his fear that his differences will not be tolerated, Yozo masks his inability to understand others with comedy. His lack of confidence in his ability to behave like a human being results in him performing like one. He says, “As long as I can make them laugh…it’ll be alright. The one thing I must avoid is becoming offensive in their eyes: I shall be nothing, the wind, the sky.” And yet, this only leads to another fear - that he will be revealed for what he is, nothing but a fraud.
Yozo mistrusts all other humans because he believes everyone else is dishonest. He projects his own insecurities onto them. However, his lack of humanity does not exempt him from this - his clowning, in fact, leads him directly to assume these falsehoods. He’s just as awful as the people around him: hypocritical, selfish, and cruel. But unlike the rest of Japanese society, Yozo is unable to lie about his flaws. Just as Dazai’s shishōsetsu writing style created novels that were intensely critical of himself, Yozo continuously points out his own sins, more than any anyone else. That inability to recognize that his flaws, far from disqualifying him from humanity, actually made him human, led him down a path of self destruction.
Yozo was not a good person by any means - he confesses his vices himself very well. The way other people hide their shames, he hides his graces, but bears his failures stone faced, described in excruciating detail. Perhaps No Longer Human is so beloved because of his raw, aching honesty. It’s difficult to turn away from someone who makes no efforts to cover up their own faults, who presents the very worst of themselves and asks nothing else.
Although Yozo was unable to ever speak a good word about himself, the final scene of the novel closes on a woman who took care of Yozo, and perhaps knew him best, confessing that he “was a good boy, an angel.” In not recognizing the humanity within him, Yozo is tortured by his isolation from the rest of his society and his inability to coexist with them. On the other hand, in this very misery lies his only chance at salvation. Yozo was not only unable to see his humanity, but he was unable to accept others' perceptions of him, which were fairer and kinder to him than he ever was to himself. Whether or not these assessments of his character were accurate is inconsequential, but they are telling of one thing.
His desperate attempt to abide by an ethical code for humans he himself cannot understand is what causes No Longer Human to transcend peers of similar statuses. While calling Yozo ‘an angel’ is perhaps too generous, the fact remains that even when tormented by internal demons he could not escape, he often behaves as righteously as is within his power, and he rarely exercises cruelty on purpose. Most of all, it is his honesty that is devastating.
No Longer Human is groundbreaking because of how raw it feels. It’s as if you’re a priest in a confessional, and on the other side of the wood, Yozo, a poor, hapless sinner, is pouring his heart out to you, expecting no redemption, only the cruel hand of justice. Yozo’s inability to communicate ends up being No Longer Human’s greatest strength. Dazai writes with no filter. The poignancy of his novels is such that they feel a direct landline to him, hundreds of years after his death.
Once, someone called Russian the language of suffering - Dostoevysky has probably done much to perpetuate that reputation, but to me, Japanese literature holds that title. Recently, I have been attempting to diversify my reading. When not restricted to placing American and European works on a pedestal, abundant masterpieces from various countries can be discovered. In particular, I have discovered a special fondness for Japanese novels. It is never correct to classify a genre’s literature with one characteristic, much less an entire nation, but overall, a distinct theme emerges in many works of Japanese art - loneliness.
It may come as a surprise when Japan is so homogenous and community based, especially compared to the individualistic America, but many of my favorite Japanese authors’ center their books on characters dealing with an inescapable loneliness: Haruki Murakami, Sayaka Murata, and of course, Osamu Dazai. Their solitude speaks to a kind of internal emptiness - an isolation from all the rest of society. A singular animal, like the 52 Hz whale.
Keiko, another protagonist of a Japanese novel, Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, faces similar struggles in her separateness from other humans, ostensibly of the same kind, but different in every regard. Yozo takes great pains to imitate other humans, believing himself inhuman for it - not realizing that this is not only normal, but a quintessential human experience, something that is explored in Convenience Store Woman. Keiko muses that “infecting each other like this is how we maintain ourselves as human is what I think,” and “my present self is formed almost completely by the people around me.” While not all of us do it as consciously as Keiko and Yozo, each of us finds ourselves inevitably as a result of our environment. Yozo’s fear is that if he has to try at being human, he is inherently not, a being that is contrary in nature, an other. However, as Keiko explains, this is human nature.
The Thai version of No Longer Human depicts a man trapped under a glass jar is reminiscent of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Across literature, this theme of isolation is prevalent, an internal struggle between man and himself, and an external struggle between man and society. It’s clear, then, that Yozo (and through him, Dazai) was never lacking in humanity, and indeed, that no one who feels the way Yozo does was ever inhuman, although Yozo is continuously unable to realize this.
Even in the introduction, Yozo’s face as a child is described as animalistic. He impresses the terror this visage inspires upon the reader with, “It is a monkey. A grinning monkey-face. The photograph reproduces an expression so freakish, and at the same time so unclean and even nauseating, that your impulse is to say, ‘What a wizened, hideous little boy!’”
Immediately, Dazai presents us with a distinction between beauty and ugliness, believing most people to be incapable of discerning between the two in a meaningful way. It’s a meta introduction that Dazai may not have even realized when he had written it - No Longer Human is a brutally sad read about a man who descends deeper and deeper into a hell of his own creation. What beauty could you find in such a work?
But No Longer Human is a masterpiece of misery without ever veering into the excessive genre of grimdark. The difference is that pain has a purpose - Yozo’s psychological torture is not gratuitous pain for the sake of indulging the reader’s gluttunous appetite for violence and horror, but rather a genuine, desperate plea for help. Language is transformative. Ocean Vuong states it beautifully when he describes metaphors as a coping mechanism, a “way to talk about trauma without stating the experience outright.” It is not just metaphors, but all fiction that can have this value. In describing universal misery, but delegating it to a character, it is removed from our personal fears and pains.
Such is the value of tragedy. What can be witnessed, can be purged. It is almost sacrificial in nature. In Grief Lessons: Four Plays By Euripides, Anne Carson says, “Watching…other people lost in grief and rage is good for you - may cleanse you of your darkness. The actor, by reiterating you, sacrifices a moment of his own life in order to give you a story of yours.” What Dazai has given us is the ability to move outside of our own heads, a way to talk about things that you find unbearable. It is an artificial vulnerability, a substitute that will do until we work up our own bravery. When you grieve for a character, understand that you are also grieving for yourself, a little.
Perhaps that was why Dazai was so drawn to shishōsetsu writing. He was attempting to exorcise his own demons through Yozo. That makes his death all the more tragic - he killed himself after No Longer Human was published, giving us no chance to witness his growth into a future where he could recover from his difficult youth. He parallels Yozo, or perhaps Yozo parallels him, having been drawn from his life. Like his infamous protagonist, Dazai committed double suicide with a woman by jumping into a river. His body was found on his birthday.
His death has all the elements of a tragedy. But all of this pales in comparison to what is most painful: he was a real human, and he died without ever getting to live past his traumas. As much as I love No Longer Human, I can’t help but see where it fails. I don’t believe that every book needs a happy ending - after all, my favorite genre is tragedy - but No Longer Human feels incomplete. That’s probably because it is - although Dazai finished the novel, as it’s widely considered semi autobiographical and he died shortly afterwards, to me, there’s more to the story.
I like to believe that if he had lived to see his future, perhaps Yozo would have also been spared in the ending of No Longer Human. Yet, perhaps Yozo has already been saved. Many perceive No Longer Human’s ending as a morbid one. Yozo ends up in a sanatorium, and in his final direct sentence to us as readers, he muses that he no longer feels happiness or unhappiness, but simply that time passes. All the misery he has suffered has led him to nihilism. Of course, that view only applies if you believe that the book ends when the words do.
No Longer Human was a slow read for me - not in the literal sense, as I burned through the pages in the matter of hours, but as in the novel haunted me. Months after I had returned it to the library, Dazai’s writing marinated in my mind. Although I could not tell why, I found myself constantly returning to the book. While I did find the themes of isolation fascinating, and could’ve spent hours poring over the meaning hidden behind metaphors, what ended up occupying my thoughts most often were those brief moments of tenderness that were sprinkled throughout, as rare as diamonds, and just as able to afford clarity.
The moments when Yozo was able to connect with others, even if only for a moment before he spiraled again, or whenever the haze lifted and someone showed him kindness without expectation, or he was good to someone else, I remembered clearer than his alcoholism or misery. Of another of Dazai’s works, The Setting Sun, Richard Gilman says in the Jubilee, “Such is the power of art to transfigure what is objectively ignorable or depraved…to know the nature of despair and triumph over it in the ways that are possible to oneself - imagination was Dazai’s only weapon - is surely a sort of grace.”
In the Poetics, Aristotle speaks about the concept of the macabre: how objects that initially terrify us can be transformed by art into something that touches our sensibilities of beauty. Similarly, in describing his dark fate, Dazai may yet help us escape our own. Dazai’s brilliance and tragedy, rather than detracting from each other, operate like diamonds who can only polish each other. In confessing his loneliness, Yozo mitigates ours. Even the most extroverted people will inevitably feel insecure in their relationships at some point, but as No Longer Human, and countless other books prove - your fear of isolation is proof that you are not alone. Everyone is yearning for the same thing you are. If you fear that you, alone, are unrelatable, it is a fear that is shared by millions. No Longer Human tells us what Yozo was unable to internalize - the act of existing is to be human. There is no way to avoid it - just by breathing, you are not only human, but you are excelling at it.
