No Longer Human

It's ultimately funny how I ended up reading No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai. It was recommended to me by an acquaintance who loves Japanese culture more than I do, and I put off  reading it for nearly a year. Then last night I started to write in my journal, with my beer-addled brain, "There is a strength that you get from needing no one. But it comes with a price: you will no longer be human. I will continue this thought when I have read Osamu Dazai's work. That phrase just leapt up in my mind, and that work called me."  So I read it, leaving that stupid introduction to a journal entry justifiably unfinished.

Offhand, I could compare its atmosphere slightly to Camus's The Stranger, only more surreal (as only the Japanese can be - think Haruki Murakami without his gentleness of cadence, and instead of turning to the fantastic as Murakami does, Osamu Dazai turns to the psychological). Nuanced, this book is either a pull under the rug so massive you will feel it only after ten years, or a bacterial infection so subtle you have already had contracted a terminal disease the moment you have opened the cover.  First things first: reading about a man spiraling towards the depths of existential drunkenness while drinking yourself is not a good way to approach this book, if you want to avoid parallels (which might turn out to be only superficial). To avoid these unnecessary parallels my brain came up with the account of a metaphorical schizophrenia of a culture so bent on discipline that it drives itself inwardly insane, with either a very blatant transgression of social norms or a complete loss of self altogether. In the protagonist we see both of these, and an awareness of how impossible those two courses of action are, based on a hyper-awareness of the ignorance of what it means to be human in a culture that has long defined humanity a certain way being heavily exposed for the first time to something very antithetical to it.  That, however, might be the alcohol in my brain feebly resisting the destructive recursivity that starts when I'm like this, so you may disregard the last few sentences.

We see Yozo, who is fundamentally and wholly afraid of human beings for the majority of his life and resorted to farce for his default mode (hence his name). Throughout the book he could not understand human beings and human intentions, which go with human duplicity and the intricate hermeneutics of communication, so he, apart from playing the jester, dared not contradict anybody. Ubiquitous mention of this in self-aware reflections scattered throughout the book may be one of the fundamental reasons he cannot consider himself human, as his voice never really surfaced anywhere, even as a grown man. It would possibly have been a small mercy had he scabbed this perceived defect over and accepted his acceptance, but again, throughout the entire book he never changed - he was always undulating between his perverse and hated desire to please, and his weakness which he was powerless over.  He did not understand, he was afraid of human beings, never certain whether he was one himself, certain that no one human being is actually happy but admittedly knowing that this might be his projection: "The weak fear happiness itself. They can harm themselves on cotton wool. Sometimes they are even wounded even by happiness." (81)  He found calm in prostitutes for a while, whom he never treated as human beings, rather as imbeciles or lunatics. For the most part he associated with various women, who he admits "found in me a man who could keep a love secret," (40) if only because his first taste of love was also where death was several pages later. He also became a part of a Marxian group, if only because he didn't assent to the final accounting involving economics and materialism, and wanted to find out the worm that lurks in the hearts of men, which caused nothing but suffering, loneliness, and separation, even when in the most intimate of actions.

Everything that Yozo underwent, he battled with himself and the world against, rendering one performance after another - performances which were "all but inspired - a great performance which brought me no benefit whatsoever," (90) until it became a matter of his very real addiction to drink, and then to morphine. We might see this as an active destruction of a self you do not understand, in a world you have never understood, in a life you cannot even begin to understand, appreciate, or even, at the end, suffer. The last and only modicum of humanity he finally lost by the end of the book: "I had lost even the ability to suffer." (168)  He looked in his late forties while 27, and the book ends.

This is nowhere near a reflection of the psychological depth to the story, rendered more deeply because of the hand and the time that wrote it. Maybe when I read it again I might churn out a decent, more thought-out and rigorously framed analysis, but this book leaves you incapable of that upon first reading.  It renders you both defensive and defenseless: on the one hand you might not also understand what it is that makes you human, if at all; and on the other hand you shout with voice you cannot even bring a body to, "I am human. I am human." The title captures this unease with the word Longer, for it suggests that Yozo (and perhaps you) once was (were), but when he was, he didn't know it, hadn't known it, and never understood it. For he never really belonged to the other word in the title, either - Human: "For what was society but an individual?" (120).

From this book, there is no strength that you get from needing no one. It is weakness that does that, and a mind that only operates on the most fundamental polarities of strength and weakness. Yozo's mind is not even weak, it borrows all feelings and categories from what it has never been. The Longer in the title is the tragedy (which the book talks about in a dazzling display of antonyms and synonyms which were anything but straightforward), it is only belonging briefly, by default, as an afterthought, which did not receive articulation in proper human thought to begin with - primarily because of the separation necessary for articulation of belongingness to the human that one both needs and despises, using the very separated thing to articulate this belongingness while knowing that it has never been, and will never be, human.