人間失格

1948

fiction
near and far eastern fiction (fictional works by one author)
literature
men
comic books, strips
anxiety
social life and customs
comics & graphic novels, manga, general
youth
suicide

The story

Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human, this leading postwar Japanese writer's second novel, tells the poignant and fascinating story of a young man who is caught between the breakup of the traditions of a northern Japanese aristocratic family and the impact of Western ideas. In consequence, he feels himself "disqualified from being human" (a literal translation of the Japanese title). Donald Keene, who translated this and Dazai's first novel, The Setting Sun, has said of the author's work: "His world . . . suggests Chekhov or possibly postwar France, . . . but there is a Japanese sensibility in the choice and presentation of the material. A Dazai novel is at once immediately intelligible in Western terms and quite unlike any Western book." His writing is in some ways reminiscent of Rimbaud, while he himself has often been called a forerunner of Yukio Mishima.

What it’s like

Told as a run of confessional notebooks, the prose is first-person, precise and quietly sardonic, with a clown's mask of charm laid over a deep, steady dread. Its world is postwar Japan: a northern provincial house with its fading gentry rituals, then Tokyo cafés, bars and rented rooms under grey winter skies, with cigarette smoke, cheap sake and the damp of unheated apartments, and occasional flashes of sharp, unexpected humour. The sensibility is intimate and claustrophobic rather than lush, the pacing uneven, with long, looping passages of self-examination broken by sudden episodes that land hard. The tone is bleak, lonely and wryly self-mocking, and the arc follows a young man who keeps failing to connect with the people around him and drifts toward ruin. Intensity is high in emotional terms: suicidal thoughts and attempts, heavy drinking and drug use, and some sexual exploitation, all handled without gore or graphic violence, though the despair is unrelenting. This suits late-night reading when you want melancholy that feels truthful, and readers drawn to Dostoevsky-style interiority, mid-century European existentialism, or Japanese literature about alienation. It is not gentle, and it is not a comfort read.

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