No Longer Human - Osamu Dazai - A Short Summary and Review

 No Longer Human - Osamu Dazai - A Short Summary and Review

By: a.d. elliott | Take the Back Roads - Art and Other Odd Adventures

A Rite of Fancy Book Recommendation and Review

The life and multiple deaths of a man who survives by playing the clown.

A Short Summary:

Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human follows Ōba Yōzō, a deeply alienated young man who believes himself incapable of understanding ordinary human beings. Terrified of being discovered as different, he learns to survive by becoming a clown, making people laugh, playing whatever role is expected of him, and hiding the emptiness underneath.

As Yōzō moves through adulthood, his carefully constructed persona collapses beneath alcohol, destructive relationships, addiction, and repeated suicide attempts. Told through a series of notebooks supposedly discovered after the fact, the novel becomes less the story of one dramatic downfall than the record of a man slowly disappearing from his own life.

My Favorite Quote From the Book:

"I do not know what it is, but at the bottom of the human world there seems to be something not only economic, something oddly like a ghost story."

- Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

Questions to ponder while reading:

What rules you?

What have you betrayed?

My Review:

A stark look at addiction as a kind of slow suicide and, very, very bleak.

There isn't much hope hiding inside No Longer Human. Yōzō spends much of the novel convinced that there is some secret to being human that everyone else understands and he somehow missed. Rather than risk being exposed, he turns himself into a caricature. He jokes. He performs. He makes himself ridiculous. Anything is preferable to allowing another person to see what is actually underneath.

And then comes the addiction.

Dazai's portrayal of addiction is particularly brutal because there is very little romance attached to it. Alcohol and drugs don't make Yōzō rebellious, interesting, or free. They simply help him disappear a little more. His life becomes a succession of small destructions punctuated by attempts at a more literal one. Relationships collapse, dignity disappears, and eventually even Yōzō seems to regard himself less as a human being than as something happening to the people around him.

The strange thing is that his exaggerated clowning occasionally makes the novel almost cartoonish, and that only makes the tragedy worse. The ridiculous persona is camouflage. Underneath it is someone terrified of other people, terrified of himself, and increasingly convinced that neither can be survived.

Knowing how closely portions of the novel parallel Dazai's own life makes No Longer Human even more uncomfortable to read. It doesn't feel like an author calmly examining self-destruction from a safe distance. It feels frighteningly close to a confession.

This is not an enjoyable book, and I don't think it is trying to be. It is a short, devastating portrait of alienation, addiction, and the terrible possibility of losing one's sense of belonging to the human race altogether.

If you liked No Longer Human, you may also like:

The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

Wishful Drinking - Carrie Fisher

The Girl on the Train - Paula Hawkins

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About the Author

a.d. elliott is a wanderer, photographer, and storyteller traveling through life

She shares her journeys at Take the Back Roads, explores new reads at Rite of Fancy, and highlights U.S. military biographies at Everyday Patriot.

You can also browse her online photography gallery at shop.takethebackroads.com.

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