‘No Longer Human’ by Osamu Dazai (Review)

January is slowly coming to an end, which means that another #JanuaryInJapan is drawing to a close, and it’s again been an enjoyable month of reading (and rereading) J-Lit.  Before we’re done, though, I’ve got just enough time to look at one last book, a novel I should have got around to long ago.  This one’s a modern classic, a story of a man behaving rather badly, and telling the story in his own words.  Let’s head off to Tokyo, then, for a few nights on the town in the company of someone whose qualities as a person leave a lot to be desired…

*****
Osamu Dazai’s 1948 novel No Longer Human is a frame narrative where a prologue and epilogue bookend three notebooks, or journals.  In the frame, an unnamed narrator describes a man he’s seen in three photos, not very favourably, it must be said.  However, once we get onto this second man’s notebooks and learn more about his life, we can see why the first narrator was less than impressed.

The notebooks, told in the first-person by a certain Yōzō Ōba, are nothing less than an autobiographical account of the man’s life.  From his childhood to his adult life, we’re ‘treated’ to reflections on his character and behaviour.  This is a warts-and-all account of a young man’s life, and believe me, there are many warts – the reader won’t find it hard to agree that Yōzō’s right when he says he’s no longer human…

No Longer Human is an entertaining story of a man who can’t quite get to grips with everyday life.  There are clues as to the causes of his many issues in his childhood as he describes his upbringing as a young child in a big, affluent family, with hints of abuse at the hands of the household staff.  We’re shown a boy, and then a man, who confronts the world wearing a mask.  He’s a clown, a joker, always quick to put on an act to prevent anyone seeing what lies beneath his buffoonish exterior.

Dazai’s novel is an undisputed modern classic, but his subject matter is rather different from certain other famous Japanese writers.  Far from the clinical aesthetics of Kawabata or the classical influences of Tanizaki, his tale is very much one of the seedier side of life, with Yōzō taking us on a drunken tour of Tokyo.  We visit bars and brothels, see cheap dives and cheaper women (with whom Yōzō finds himself at ease) – this is not so much a story of cherry blossoms as of cherry liqueur…

Another interesting character is a friend Yōzō makes in Tokyo, Horiki.  Here the upper-class youth is initiated into the capital’s secrets by someone fully at home in the lower levels of society, and after their chance encounter, the pair spend many a day and night painting the town red, with Yōzō’s new friend showing him how to make the most of his freedom, and money, in the big city.  In many ways, Horiki acts as a devil on Yōzō’s shoulder, appearing when he’s at his weakest, enabling his misbehaviour and giving him a push in the wrong direction, just when it looks as if he’s about to turn a corner.

For anyone familiar with the writer’s life, No Longer Human almost reads like stylised non-fiction.  Last January, I looked at Self Portraits and The Saga of Dazai Osamu, two excellent books combining the writer’s fiction with tales from his life, and it was easy to recognise how many of the events of the novel were taken from the writer’s experiences.  There are Yōzō’s flirtations with Marxism, an attempted love suicide and his strained family relations, all things that happened to Dazai himself.  While Yōzō isn’t Dazai, he’s a very close copy, which adds to the appeal of the story.

In describing a young man’s experiences growing up, you could also argue that No Longer Human is a Bildungsroman of sorts.  At times, I was reminded of a  recent read, Hermann Hesse’s novel Demian, another tale of a lonely, misunderstood young man going off the rails.  Many contemporary readers sympathised with Yōzō/Dazai, feeling that he’s not bad as such, just lost and misguided.  That’s a view shared by the many women of the book, all believing they’re the one to save him, or tame him.  Alas, he may well just be beyond salvation.

And yet I’d sound a word of caution here as it’s far too easy to make excuses for poor Yōzō/Dazai when he may not really deserve it.  The voice (very well done) certainly invites our sympathy, but to a detached onlooker, this is merely the story of a spoiled rich kid who refuses to take responsibility for his life and ends up dragging a string of women down with him.  Disgracing the family name, getting in trouble with the police, causing a woman’s death and worse – it’s hardly the behaviour of a man who’s good at heart.  Dazai may be a cult figure, but in my view, cults are rarely a good thing…

Still, in literary terms, No Longer Human definitely *is* a good thing, fun and funny, a well-crafted look at a man’s descent into depravity.  Funnily enough, what comes to mind when I think about Yōzō (Dazai) is a quotation from another twentieth-century icon, footballer George Best.  When once asked by an interviewer where all his money went, the former Manchester United star came up with a classic reply:

“I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered.“

That’s a reply reflecting an attitude towards life that Yōzo would undoubtedly endorse…

*****
You may have noticed a rather large elephant in the room over the course of this post as several features usually reflected in my reviews are missing.  Where are the direct quotations?  Who published the book in English?  More importantly, who translated it?  Well, these omissions are deliberate…

As far as I’m aware, there have been three major translations of the novel 人間失格 (ningen shikkaku) into English.  The first was by Donald Keene, brought out by New Directions in 1958.  It then took sixty years for another one to appear, Mark Gibeau’s 2018 version, published by Stone Bridge Press, yet we have another one, this time by Juliet Winters Carpenter, coming out in March of this year from Tuttle Publishing.  So, which one did I read?

All of them, of course…  Today’s review post was just the start of my work with Dazai’s novel.  Look out for more on the various translations, including some close comparisons, over the course of this week 🙂

*****
Photo of the writer retrieved (9/1/24) from the English-language Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osamu_Dazai