No longer human

Literary fiction · Tragedy

Print length: 177 pagesCharles E Tuttle, 1992

Description

Yozo Oba grows up in a privileged family in northern Japan but feels incapable of understanding the ordinary rules that seem to bind other people together. To conceal his terror of human intimacy, he turns himself into a clown, performing jokes and compliance while privately recording his estrangement. As aristocratic traditions weaken and Western ideas reshape the society around him, Yozo moves through school, artistic circles, failed relationships, drinking, and increasingly destructive attempts to escape himself. Presented through a framing narrative and Yozo’s notebooks, the novel joins stark confession to social dislocation. Its bleak, intimate voice examines shame, dependency, and the exhausting distance between a public persona and a self that believes it has forfeited membership in humanity.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Direct · Essayistic · Lyrical · Spare

Pace

Measured

Tone

Bleak · Intimate · Melancholic · Reflective

Structure

Framed · Linear

Focus

Character · Ideas · Voice

Emotional intensity

5 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 3 / 5
Ideas: 4 / 5
Structure: 3 / 5
Background knowledge: 2 / 5

Themes

AddictionClassGuiltIdentityIsolationMental health

About Dasai Osamu

Osamu Dazai was a Japanese author whose fiction ranges from autobiographical confession to social portraiture and playful revisions of traditional tales. He made the I-novel, with its exposure of the authorial self, a characteristic form, often writing in direct, spare prose that shifts between anguish, irony, and dark comedy. His narrators scrutinize the roles people perform to remain acceptable, along with the shame and dependency concealed behind them. No Longer Human develops this method through a framing narrative and the notebooks of Yozo Oba, whose practiced clowning masks his estrangement as his life narrows through damaged relationships and addiction. Dazai also placed private crises within a changing Japan. The Setting Sun uses letters, journals, and divided perspectives to follow an aristocratic family losing both its material security and its inherited moral order. Blue Bamboo shows another side of his range, recasting Chinese legends and other traditional narratives as witty, psychologically uneasy fables whose scholars, lovers, and wanderers remain vulnerable to vanity and embarrassment.

The setting sun Apple Books

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Charles E Tuttle
Language: English
ISBN: 9784805304730

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