No Longer Human

Portraying himself as a failure, the protagonist of Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human narrates a seemingly normal life even while he feels himself incapable of understanding human beings. Oba Yozo's attempts to reconcile himself to the world around him begin in early childhood, continue through high school, where he becomes a "clown" to mask his alienation, and eventually lead to a failed suicide attempt as an adult. Without sentimentality, he records the casual cruelties of life and its fleeting moments of human connection and tenderness.

“"No Longer Human is his masterpiece, though all his work is worthy. Dazai was an aristocratic tramp, a self described delinquent, yet he wrote with the forbearance of a fasting scribe. "”

"Dazai’s brand of egoistic pessimism dovetails organically with the emo chic of this cultural moment." -- Andrew Martin - The New York Times
"Seventy-five years later, No Longer Human still reads with an apt urgency. As the musician Patti Smith once put it, Dazai 'wrote at the pace of a dying man, yearning for ... the solution to an unresolved equation.'" -- Jane Yong Kim - The Atlantic
"No Longer Human is his masterpiece, though all his work is worthy. Dazai was an aristocratic tramp, a self described delinquent, yet he wrote with the forbearance of a fasting scribe. " -- Patti Smith
"What I despise about Dazai is that he exposes precisely those things in myself that I most want to hide." -- Yukio Mishima
"From the point of view of wholesome common sense, Dazai’s writings may be regarded as the soliloquies of a deviant." -- Yasunari Kawabata

Osamu Dazai (1909-1948) was a 20th century Japanese novelist.

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