Mine has been a life of much shame. I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.
No Longer Human (Ningen Shikkaku in Japanese, translating literally to "Disqualified From Being Human") tells the story of Ōba Yōzō, a man who is incapable of relating to other people. Perpetually resentful of humanity since childhood, he adopts a comical persona early on in life in order to disguise his true feelings. As he grows older, he is unable to overcome his feelings of alienation and trauma, leading him down a path of inevitable self-destruction.
Profoundly pessimistic but deeply insightful, it was the final and most famous work by Japanese writer Osamu Dazai, who committed suicide shortly after its publication in 1948. Though ostensibly fictional, much of it is based on Dazai's own life. Considered a national classic in Japan, it is the nation's second-best selling novel of all time and has been translated into many foreign languages, including an English translation in 1958 by Donald Keene.
The book has been adapted into many mediums such film, anime and manga, including as the first four episodes of the series Blue Literature and a manga adaptation by Junji Ito which alters the story to incorporate elements of horror. Bungo Stray Dogs takes considerable inspiration from it, with one of the main protagonists bearing Dazai's name and wielding a supernatural power named after the book.
This book provides examples of:
- Adaptational Villainy: In the manga version by Junji Ito, Yozo is much more actively malevolent and his antics indirectly get multiple people killed who survive in the book.
- Adaptation Expansion: The manga version also continues for another 12 years after the book, albeit with a timeskip between him leaving the hospital and the part afterwards. Things get far, far, far worse for Yōzō.
- Addled Addict: Yozo becomes an alcoholic and a heavy morphine user toward the end of the story to self-medicate his anxiety problems, which takes a serious toll on his health and results in his confinement to a mental hospital.
- Art Reflects Personality: Yozo becomes enamored with the eerie paintings of artist Amedeo Modigliani, feeling that they communicate the underlying evil of humanity by portraying ordinary people with distorted proportions. As a result he takes up painting himself in order to express his true thoughts on people, and paints a self-portrait so hideous he refuses to show it to anyone except Takeichi, whose approval of Modigliani's work was what inspired him. Takeichi tells him he will be a great artist someday.
- Author Avatar:
- The narrator, Oba Yozo, is essentially a stand-in for Dazai himself, with many elements of his life such as his suicide attempts, tumultuous relationships and drug addictions paralleled in the novel.
- Amusingly, Junji Ito's adaptation outright has an author avatar... for Dazai, who comments that Yozo's life is similar to his, and writes a book called No Longer Human based on Yozo.
- Author Tract: As Yozo is essentially a stand-in for Dazai, the book can be read as a presentation of Dazai's own thoughts on society.
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Yozo himself, who keeps up a facade of friendly humor but is really as dishonest and self-obsessed as all the people around him.
- Blue-and-Orange Morality: Yozo finds his sense of happiness and right and wrong are so different from those of people around him that he cannot comprehend their thinking at all. In a sense, Yozo's true feelings would fall under this trope from someone else's perspective, while the whole of humanity falls under it from his point of view.
- Bookends: He notes that when he was young, he was violated by servants; in this case, sexually. Near the end of the book, he notes that he was being violated by a servant again; this time, he was talking about how his caretaker was giving him laxatives.
- Chick Magnet: Yozo draws female attention like moths to a light, which is attributed to a combination of good looks and a certain kind of melancholy.
- The Cynic: Yozo regards all other people with distrust, while also being aware that he himself is controlled by his vices and insecurities.
- Cynicism Catalyst: Downplayed. Yozo mentions many incidents which confirmed or increased his disconnection from others, such as being molested as a child or witnessing his wife being sexually assaulted. But none of these events seem solely responsible for his state of mind, which instead appears to have been in place since birth.
- Descent into Addiction: Yozo first experiences it with alcohol, then with morphine.
- Dirty Communists: An interesting example. Yozo becomes a member of a communist organization and even becomes one of its highest ranking members, but only as an amusing diversion, because he has no respect whatsoever for the group and its beliefs, viewing them as ineffectual idiots with self-righteous, inflated senses of the importance of their work. He particularly mocks their obsessive beliefs about how dangerous and secret their activities are. In other words, Yozo dislikes communists not because he thinks they're evil but because they're incompetent. He doesn't even seem to disagree with the actual ideas of communism, instead dismissing them because he thinks they're too obvious and self-explanatory.
- Downer Ending: Despite all of his suicide attempts, Yozo ultimately survives. However, he is no happier than before, and lives a lonely existence, completely estranged from humanity, after his release from a mental hospital. Despite still being young, he looks much older due to the toll taken by all his stress and suffering. He describes himself as "disqualified from being human." The manga is worse, with Yōzō trapped in an abusive marriage, with a son implied to be the reincarnation of the boy from middle school that haunts him, looking like he's 90, and catatonic at the mere age of 39.
- Double Standard Rape: Female on Male: Averted. Yozo is clear about the traumatic effects of his childhood abuse by female servants.
- Driven to Suicide:
- In the manga, Takeichi slices his own throat after being cruelly rejected by Yozo's sister and realizing that Yozo had been lying to him about his sister finding him attractive.
- Yozo attempts suicide multiple times throughout the book, but fails each time. In one case, his suicide partner is not so lucky.
- The manga opens with a man drowning himself with his lover. At the very end, it's revealed that this was the author Yozo met in the asylum , who was so distraught at seeing Yozo in his horrific state at the very end that he lost all the hope for life that he had gained.
- Extreme Doormat: Yozo claims that he is incapable of standing up for his own interests, to the point that, when he refuses the morphine his wife offers him near the end of the novel, he believes it is the first time he has ever turned down something offered to him in his life.
- Gonk: Two instances in the manga:
- Takeichi is described as having a "scrofulous" face, and is extremely ugly, having bulging jaws with widely-spaced teeth and eyes that seem to be much larger under the skin than what is actually shown through his eyelids.
- One of Yozo's father's associates is called "Fish Face" behind his back; when he's finally shown, his large eyes and wide, flat mouth do give him a very fish-like appearance.
- Lack of Empathy: Yozo's biggest problem is that he can never seem to emotionally relate to anyone. He's not quite sociopathic in that he still experiences the ability to distinguish acts of morality beyond simply relating to himself, especially rape, but he's never able to involve himself in a relationship beyond a surface level.
- Misanthrope Supreme: The entire book is focused on Yozo's experiences living as a misanthrope. He views all people as egotistical and dishonest to the point that none of them should be trusted in any way.
- Off the Wagon: Yozo briefly recovers from his alcoholism only for the reappearance of Horiki in his life to send him back into his old habits.
- Older Than They Look: By the end of the book Yozo is only 27, but says you would more likely expect him to be 40 by how he looks. In the manga, he's 39, but looks and acts like he's in his 90s.
- Rape as Drama:
- Yozo is molested as a child by both male and female servants in his household, which greatly affects him.
- Near the end of the book, he sees his wife Yoshiko being sexually assaulted, which causes a major rift in their previously (by Yozo's standards) healthy relationship and encourages his descent into morphine addiction. The manga clouds this by implying that the sex was consensual, but its effect on Yozo is the same.
- Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: Even with as negative a view of humanity as Yozo holds, he still singles out child rape as one of the worst things a person can do and is more hurt by his wife's rape than by any other incident in his life.
- Sad Clown: Yozo's basic nature. He can only stand to live by pretending to be a clown and amuse others, while inside he secretly fears and hates the same people he entertains.
- Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: As far to the cynical side as one can get. Yozo despises humanity for all its faults, yet he himself is also guilty of the same shortcomings. Nobody in the book is especially sympathetic, nor does anything good happen to any of them. Yozo's view of human beings is portrayed as more or less correct, but he suffers anyway.
- Too Dumb to Fool: Yozo's dull-witted classmate Takeichi is the only person to see through Yozo's merry facade and recognize how miserable he actually is.
- Unreliable Narrator: Yozo frequently makes claims about himself and others which are implausible or contradicted elsewhere. For instance, he describes himself as always being sympathetic to those whom society deems outcasts, yet his narration treats Takeichi, an ugly and unpopular classmate, with the same derision as everyone else.
- Wide-Eyed Idealist: Yozo's wife Yoshiko is so idealistic she even seems to truly believe Yozo needs morphine as a beneficial medicine even after he's hospitalized for his addiction to it. She also stays devoted to him long after he stops caring about her.
