In this blog post, we will explore the linguistic charm of Osamu Dazai, his attitude toward “weak human beings,” and the reasons why his works continue to resonate with younger generations across generations, examining his works, life, and reception.

The Timeless Relevance of Osamu Dazai’s Literature

Osamu Dazai’s prose, which shines with the language of life he internalized to the point of being called a “magician of language,” captivates readers across generations. Dazai is regarded as a leading figure of Japanese Decadent literature and remains one of the most popular authors among young people today.
Dazai’s literature is regarded as a rite of passage for youth and continues to resonate with many. His works have been featured in Japanese textbooks and have enjoyed widespread popularity, achieving high sales figures. Even recently, books reexamining his life and works have been published, and efforts to revive his legacy through manga series, anime, films, and plays continue, keeping the “No Longer Human” phenomenon alive and well.
When reading Dazai’s works, many readers feel that “he truly understands my weaknesses and my dark side.” This sentiment clearly illustrates the contemporary significance of Dazai’s literature. Donald Keene, an authority on Japanese literature, highly praised its universality, stating that young people around the world would relate to any of Dazai’s works.
Keene confessed that he felt a sense of oneness and identification with Dazai’s works. When Dazai confides the secrets of his heart to the reader as if speaking to them personally, the reader is drawn in and ends up confessing their own innermost thoughts. Because Dazai keenly pierced through the dark aspects of human nature—such as weakness, shame, baseness, and ugliness—that people wish to hide, readers feel a sense of relief, as if they are understood even when those aspects are exposed.
Keene asserted that Dazai’s literature will remain as a historical legacy. The period during which Dazai was actively engaged in creative writing spanned a mere 15 years, from *Memories* in 1933 to his posthumous work *Goodbye* in 1948. Although those 15 years were a turbulent time marked by the unfolding of the Pacific War, Dazai’s literature retains a universality and internationalism rarely seen in Japanese literature, as well as a unique charm that still speaks directly to the human soul today.
*Goodbye* is Dazai’s final work. The protagonist, Shuji Tajima, devises a plan to gracefully part ways with his former lovers in order to settle into a stable life. He sets out with Kinuko Nagai to visit each of his former lovers and carry out his plan, but before long, Kinuko takes control of the situation. It is an unfinished novel that blends humor, wit, satire, a warm perspective, and a lighthearted tone.
Unlike the “exoticism”—or taste for the foreign—found in other Japanese writers, Dazai’s literature delivers such a profound emotional impact that it makes one forget the fact that he was Japanese. In this sense, Dazai wrote universal works that resonate with readers as if they were personal experiences.
Japanese literary critic Takeo Okuno said of Dazai, “I have discovered the only writer who can express our feelings on our behalf,” and assessed that Dazai’s influence on the youth of his time was greater than that of Akutagawa or Kobayashi. He notes that even people who did not like literature strongly identified with Dazai and held him dear in their hearts. In this way, Dazai has a firm grip on the hearts of modern people.
Dazai often spoke of “purity.” He believed that beautiful acts of selflessness, often unnoticed, shone like precious gems. Conversely, what he detested most was “hypocrisy.” Having fought against hypocrisy his entire life, he refused to become a government-sponsored writer during the war and wrote works that did not compromise with the world.
In the postwar period, Dazai gradually felt a sense of futility and humiliation, becoming disillusioned with both himself and society. Deeply aware of the decline of Japanese reality and the absence of hope, he confessed that in the midst of extreme turmoil, he could not go on living unless he “drank alcohol and remained in a state of confusion.” At the end of his descent and rebellion, he sought a new ethics and hope, and began a battle against established values such as the hypocrisy of salons, servile mentality, anti-Christian values, and the egoism of the family.
The core of Dazai’s view of humanity is the belief that “the weak are beautiful and noble beings.” He despised those who knew no weakness. He felt terror toward the strong, who were wrapped in layer upon layer of ruthlessness, arrogance, obstinacy, greed, hypocrisy, and meanness. Before his death, he uttered the words “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” and appealed, “Become a little weaker. If you are a writer, become weaker. Become more flexible,“ and criticized the literary establishment—particularly Shiga Naoya, known as the ”God of the Novel”—for living without any awareness of anguish.
Many readers feel as though they are reading their own story when they read Dazai’s works. The novelist Tsuji Hitonari described his experience of encountering *No Longer Human* as being like gazing at his bare face reflected in a mirror—a remark that explains the deep resonance between Dazai’s works and his readers. Within the perception of “another, weaker self,” Dazai overlaps with the reader.
Dazai’s works are filled with a palpable thrill and shiver, as if the reader alone has discovered the author’s deepest wounds. The confessions and words spoken by the characters are songs of life sung from a place beyond resignation and despair, as well as the intense whispers of existence. Facing such scenes, we discover the fragments of emotion, the echoes, and the tears welling up within us.

The Life and Literature of Osamu Dazai

Dazai was a tormented writer who lived through the extremely turbulent Taisho and Showa eras, ultimately ending his life by suicide. During that era, Japan faced an economic depression triggered by the ripple effects of the Great Depression before the wounds of the First Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War had even healed, and it endured the maelstrom of the “Fifteen-Year War”—a conflict that began with the Manchurian Incident in 1931 and continued through the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War. At the same time, as socialism spread globally, the Japanese literary world also fell under the influence of ideology, and proletarian literature was becoming the mainstream.
Dazai was born as the tenth of eleven children and the sixth son in a wealthy, landowning family in Kitatsugaru, Aomori Prefecture. His real name was Shuji Tsushima. His childhood home was a grand mansion completed in 1907, which was later opened to the public as the Osamu Dazai Memorial Museum “Shayokan” and designated a National Important Cultural Property in 2016.
Despite being born into a wealthy family and receiving special treatment, Dazai felt a deep sense of guilt about his background. In particular, when he learned that his family’s wealth had come from usury, he fell into uncontrollable self-loathing. The cold stares directed at the son of a prominent landowner during an era marked by strong leftist sentiment are clearly reflected in his later literary works.
During his restless youth, Dazai tried launching a fanzine with friends but soon lost interest and began turning his attention elsewhere. His sense of guilt toward his family led him to immerse himself in Marxism, and in his work *The God of Kyogen*, proletarian literature took root as a form of atonement, as evidenced by the confession: “I am the son of a landowner. There are no exceptions for landowners.”
For Dazai, the communist movement was less a matter of firm ideological conviction and more an active commitment stemming from a sense of guilt about his position as a bourgeois and empathy for the underprivileged. He was so active that he even used his own home as a base for the communist organization, but his older brother, who had entered politics, was enraged by this and sternly ordered him, “I will cut off all financial support unless you pledge to withdraw from the leftist movement.”
Ultimately, Dazai abandoned the leftist movement, and that decision led once again to deep self-loathing. Amid such internal conflict and the turbulent times, Dazai’s life and literature became intertwined, forming a unique world.

Rejection of the Family and Escape into Literature

He resolved to become a novelist and devoted himself to his writing. The fate of exposing his family’s shame and rejecting his lineage, along with his rebellion against his father and eldest brother, became the ideological archetype of Dazai’s early works. As Soma Shoichi pointed out, “home” was a factor that influenced Dazai’s very existence. He rejected the path of a pre-ordained elite (national high school → Tokyo Imperial University → high-ranking official) and deviated onto the path of a literary figure.

Obsession with the Akutagawa Prize and Literary Recognition

He later competed for the Akutagawa Prize, and *Reversal* (1935) made it to the final round, but unfortunately, it finished as the runner-up. When Yasunari Kawabata remarked in his review that “dark clouds hang over this author’s current life, preventing him from fully unleashing his talent,” Dazai bristled and retorted, “Is raising birds or watching dance really such a splendid life?” However, after his next rejection, he changed his attitude and even earnestly pleaded with the judges for the Akutagawa Prize, demonstrating an excessive obsession with the award. Ultimately, Dazai also yearned for recognition from the literary world, and this desperation kept him struggling on the path of literature.
Although he wrote novels out of desperate motivation, his fury at the humiliating criticism he received from Shiga Naoya—which led him to continue his desperate cry in *Yeshiamun* (1948), asking, “Is it a sin to stake one’s life on something?”—also stemmed from his extreme fear of isolation within the literary world. In his essay “Speaking of My Work,” he candidly confessed, “I live through my work. I always say what I want to say within my work. I have nothing else to say. Therefore, if my work is rejected, that is the end of it. There is no room for excuses. I feel infinitely small in the presence of those who praise my work… Conversely, I invariably despise those who harshly criticize my work.”

Autobiographical Fiction and a Rebellious Disposition

When Dazai began his literary career in earnest with the publication of his first collection of short stories, *Man-nen* (1936), he was caught in a conflict between a sense of inferiority as a “failure at life” and a pride in being a “chosen one.”
During this period, he worked as an author of autobiographical fiction—in which he projected people around him into his works (novels where the author himself appears as the protagonist, directly depicting or confessing personal matters)—and as a writer of the “Rōha” school, which dealt with the anguish and anxiety of modern people in extreme situations, as well as the essence of human existence.
Critic Kamei assessed that while Dazai struggled with the deep trauma he had suffered in his youth, he “attempted to reflect from various angles on the ‘destiny of being a writer’ and his unique method of survival.” The “Muroha” refers to a group of writers who, during the chaotic period around the end of the war, attempted to rebel against the authority and ethics of established society through anti-conventional, anti-authoritarian, and immoral words and deeds; among them, Dazai caused a strong sensation by writing works that starkly exposed the inner emptiness of humanity and the absurdities of society.

Postwar Self-Negation and the Anti-Authoritarian Spirit

In the postwar era, when ideology, morality, ethics, and values were turned upside down, Dazai felt that Japan was hurtling in the wrong direction and that there was no hope, making it impossible for him to live with a clear mind. This was the backdrop against which the Muroha writers, who rejected existing authority and urged brutal self-reflection, gained immense popularity. As the illusion of the modern self disintegrated, Dazai realized that there was no path forward other than “self-destruction.” To confront human hypocrisy and flawed social order and ethics head-on, he practiced “self-denial” and “self-destruction.”
He expressed the postwar sense of powerlessness and emptiness through his writing and life, crying out in anguish. His literary world, which rebelled against the authority and ethics of the older generation, reflected his perception of a chaotic reality. Dazai emphasized the importance of knowing shame, repeatedly appealing throughout his works with statements such as, “Know shame. If you are human, you must know shame. For feeling shame is an emotion unique to humans.”

Literature on the Side of the Weak and Distrust of Humanity

Dazai resolved to stand with the weak and fight against the strong and the wicked. For him, literature was a form of self-assertion and an act of justifying his own existence. As evident in the line, “Please live, even if it is painful. Behind you, a hundred thousand lost souls are swarming.” As this passage reveals, he sought to comfort and empower those plagued by a sense of lack and living in the shadows—those consumed by anxiety, fear, and loneliness.
However, his experience of being admitted to a mental hospital due to the betrayal of trusted acquaintances dealt him such a profound shock that he declared, “This admission has determined the course of my life,” and as a result, he lost all trust in humanity. He lived his entire life burdened by the conviction that “I have been stripped of my humanity. People see me as a madman.” Furthermore, even his wife, Hatsuyo Oyama, committed adultery. In despair, he attempted suicide but failed; eventually, he divorced his wife and sank into loneliness and nihilism.

The Turmoil of the Era and Repeated Suicide Attempts

Until his late twenties, Dazai continued to wander and struggle amidst the madness of the wartime era. At the time, Japan was undergoing extreme change and turmoil both nationally and socially; in particular, a wartime regime was established following the Manchurian Incident of 1931, and the country entered a total war with the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. Dazai once described this period as “an era of suffering for us.” The line from his work, “I was like a leaf drifting on angry waves. Everything was in disarray,” offers a glimpse into the growing mental exhaustion he experienced amid the turmoil of the times.
He attempted suicide four times before remarrying in 1939 and wrote numerous autobiographical works that reflected his awareness of death, influenced by factors such as drug addiction. Specifically, he was deeply shocked by Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s suicide in 1927 while attending Hirosaki High School, and in 1929, he attempted suicide with Calmotin due to anguish stemming from communist ideology. In 1930, he jumped from a building with a waitress at a café in Ginza; only the woman died, and he was detained on charges of aiding suicide but released on a suspended indictment. In 1935, after failing a newspaper company entrance exam, he attempted suicide in the mountains of Kamakura but failed; in 1937, upon discovering his wife Hatsuyo’s affair, he attempted a double suicide but failed, eventually leading to their divorce.
During this period, Dazai’s literary mentor, Masuji Ibuse, believing that a stable family life was essential above all else, arranged his marriage to Michiko Ishihara. After the marriage, many changes occurred in Dazai’s personal life, which became an opportunity for self-reflection and influenced his work. During the war, he refused to become a government-sponsored writer and continued to write, but after the war, he once again despaired over the futility and humiliation of society and began a battle against established values, morals, and order.
In his writings—such as “A country that has forgotten shame is not a civilized nation,” “Japan has suffered a crushing defeat. If Japan had won, it would have become a land of demons rather than a land of gods,” and (…) I now love this defeated Japan” reveal the image of a shameless human being and offer a glimpse into his consciousness as he faced a turbulent era.

Dazai’s Life and Final Days

“After the suffering I endured at that time, I came to understand, at least to some extent, what life is. I came to understand the true meaning of marriage. I believe that marriage and family require effort. I believe it is a solemn effort. I have no frivolous thoughts. Even if we are poor, I will strive with all my might for the rest of my life. If I were to break off an engagement again, please consider me a complete madman and abandon me.” (October 25, 1938)
Dazai lived in an era of chaos and ruin, and was consumed by self-destruction throughout his life. This stemmed largely from a sense of guilt over being born with more than others, and his sympathy for and involvement with communism were also not unrelated to that sense of guilt. Amid a reality rife with corruption and absurdity, he constantly gazed inward and reflected upon himself. In this way, Dazai’s literature was an urgent cry of existence, questioning the problem of human existence and what it means to live as a human being.
On June 13, 1948, Dazai committed suicide by jumping into a river with his live-in partner, Tomie Yamazaki. Their bodies were discovered on June 19, which was Dazai’s thirty-ninth birthday.

Periods and Characteristics of His Works

Dazai’s works are broadly divided into three periods. The early period (1933–1937) marks the beginning of his literary career; the middle period (1938–1945) saw him actively writing while leading a stable life after marriage; and the late period (1945–1948) represents the maturation of Dazai’s literature. His mid-period works, in particular, display a bright, ambitious character marked by the exploration of new methods.
Dazai could not forget the wounds of his heart, and these wounds reappeared repeatedly in his various works. He viewed acts of self-destruction and ruin as sacrifices for others, and this attitude deeply influenced the expression of his works.

“No Longer Human”—A Final Assessment and Interpretation

When you open “No Longer Human,” you are confronted with the question: “What does it truly mean to live a life worthy of a human being?” After this work, Dazai attempted to explore a different technique in “Goodbye,” but as it remained unfinished, “No Longer Human” effectively became his posthumous masterpiece. Evaluated as “the author’s literary testament and self-portrait in his finest form,” this work has been widely discussed from Dazai’s death to the present day.
Literary critics have consistently emphasized the importance of *No Longer Human*. One critic noted that few works in Japanese literature delve so deeply into the essence of humanity, while another pointed out that it is a scathing critique of postwar democracy. The work starkly reveals the protagonist, Yōzō Oba’s, questioning of human nature, as well as the frustration and anguish stemming from the contradictions, evil, and anxiety inherent in everyday life.
“No Longer Human” was serialized in a magazine in 1948 and is structured in the order of a preface, the first diary entry, the second diary entry, the third diary entry, and an epilogue. It takes the form of the narrator, “I,” introducing a photograph and diary entries of a man named Yozo.
The first diary entry begins with the sentence, “I have lived a life of utter shame,” and this single sentence is so powerful that it serves as the introduction to the entire work. Born into a wealthy family in the countryside, Yojo was so innocent that he struggled to adapt to the world from childhood. In particular, he felt terror toward people who lived by deceiving one another without ever being hurt, and he suffered from the anxiety that his concept of “happiness” was completely different from that of the world. Yojo felt inferior within the world’s standards of superiority and inferiority, and lived his life burdened by “shame.”
While confessing that ordinary people and ordinary lives are difficult for her, Yojō puts on a comical act out of a desire to be with them, viewing herself as something like nothingness, wind, or the sky, and striving to blend in with others.
The second essay depicts the process by which Yojō briefly finds comfort in a “foreign land,” only to see her life there eventually crumble as well. He learns about alcohol, cigarettes, prostitutes, pawnshops, and leftist ideology from Horiki, an art student, and temporarily forgets his fear of people, but this does not provide a fundamental solution. While selling his belongings and sinking deeper into that lifestyle, he attempts a double suicide with a café waitress, but she dies and only Yozo survives.
In the third memoir, Yōjō comes to the realization that “the world is perhaps just an individual” and begins to live with a bit more of his own will than before. He lives with Shizuko, a divorced woman, and draws manga for magazines, but leaves out of fear of ruining their happiness, and later lives a life as the lover of a stand-up bar madam. Even amidst a sense of loss, he gradually comes to believe that “the world is not such a scary place.”
Yozo marries Yoshiko, the daughter of a tobacco shop owner, drawn to her innocence, but his happiness is short-lived. After witnessing his wife’s infidelity, he attempts suicide by poisoning due to extreme despair and anxiety. This is followed by a life of debauchery, leading to alcohol and morphine addiction and eventual admission to a mental hospital. Ultimately, he comes to the realization that he is no longer human—a state of “Disqualification from Humanity.”
A protagonist named “Oba Yōjō” also appears in Dazai’s other works. The 1935 novel *The Flower of the Clown* is an experimental work based on a failed double suicide attempt in 1930; although Yōjō is hospitalized after being rescued, the novel depicts only his casual conversations with friends, revealing none of his inner anguish. Later, in the 1948 novel *No Longer Human*, Yōzō addresses the reader directly in the form of a memoir, revealing that this incident remained a lifelong source of guilt for Dazai.
Dazai wrote *HUMAN LOST* immediately after his discharge from a mental hospital in 1936; when translated, this became *No Longer Human*, serving as the prototype for the later work. In 1940’s *The Second Angel*, he outlined the concept for *No Longer Human*, and the shock of that experience is repeatedly addressed in works such as *The 20th Century Rider*, *The Thief of Spring*, *Eight Views of Tokyo*, *The Seagull*, and *Fifteen Years*. Dazai never forgot that trauma, not even for a moment.
The writing process for *No Longer Human* was far from smooth; as the chaos and fatigue of his life intensified, the work ultimately took on the character of a suicide note. Even as he prepared to write the novel, Dazai left behind his plans and hopes in numerous letters and writings. For example, in *The Second Angel* (1940), he wrote: “I am not a bird. I am not a beast. I am not a human being. Today is November 13. Four years ago on this day, I was permitted to leave a certain ominous hospital. I intend to write about those events step by step, slowly, over the next five or six years, once I have calmed down a bit. I plan to title it *No Longer Human*.”
In a letter sent to a friend on January 25, 1946, he wrote, “I plan to serialize the novel *No Longer Human* in a quarterly magazine, and I want to write a masterpiece by the time I turn forty.” In a letter sent to his wife on May 7, 1948, he wrote of a concrete plan to “complete *No Longer Human* by the 15th” and shared news about a job at a newspaper. Just one month after these letters were written, Dazai chose to commit suicide alongside the publication of the work.
“No Longer Human” is a work in which Dazai attempted an artistic autobiography, breaking away from his “for others” mindset to reveal a self-portrait as a sinister, goblin-like figure. Until then, he had sought to become a model of vice through methods intended for others, believing that he could devote himself to others only by thoroughly destroying himself.
Critics have viewed Dazai’s expression as “a journey of asceticism to manifest the incomprehensible Other existing outside of myself,” and have assessed that what the narrator “I” in *No Longer Human* requires is a strong self-awareness that highlights only the difference between self and Other while avoiding direct engagement with the Other. The self-awareness expressed in the work ultimately suggests that it includes an obsession with the Other.

Yōzō and the Crisis of Existence

The protagonist, Yōzō, is consumed by despair and anxiety over the profound alienation between himself and the world, and their mutual incomprehension. The “world” referred to here is an incomprehensible Other that stands in opposition to Yōzō. The confession at the beginning of the work—“I do not understand human life”—provides the key to the story that unfolds thereafter.
Amid human life—filled with a “refreshing, truly clear, bright, and cheerful distrust” where people deceive one another on the surface yet seem to escape hurt—the absurdity of life and the duality of daily existence that Yojo witnesses are transformed into a psychology of constant awareness of the Other and reenacted through performance.
The realization that she is detached from the world leads to the fundamental question: “What is human life?” Driven by the anxiety that she cannot fully understand others, Yōjo becomes a clown to hold onto the threads of her relationships. Hiding her solitary anguish, depression, and anxiety, she puts on a show of being an innocent optimist, performing her clownish antics with skill and ease. This performance functions as both a psychological defense mechanism and a means of maintaining relationships, operating precisely when and where needed.
Scenes such as when Takeichi sees through Yōjō’s true feelings by asking, “You did that on purpose, didn’t you?” or when he hears Shigeko—who had looked up to Yōjō like a father—express her sincere wish to “have a real dad” reveal the nature of others and the complexity of human relationships.
Contrary to common perception, Yōjō carves out a separate space for himself. He feels at ease in the world of illegality and even finds greater relief in prison than in his everyday surroundings. After being detained at the police station following his attempted suicide with Tsuneko, Yōjō confirms his position as an Other who cannot take root anywhere. Completely cut off from his hometown and having seen the true face of the world through Horiki’s hypocritical admonitions, Yojō comes to understand the world through the equation “Horiki = the world = the Other.”

The Paradox of No Longer Human and Dazai’s Perspective

Yojō does not completely exclude or annihilate that “Other” from himself. “Cowards are bound to fear even happiness. Even cotton can cause a wound. One can even be wounded by happiness.” As these words suggest, he is filled with fear and anxiety toward life. His sense of alienation from human life causes him anxiety and terror, yet he could not bring himself to give up on relationships with others.
Yozo adopts clowning as his final act of courtship toward humanity, seeking to confront the world solely through this means. He navigates life leaning on the thought that “Isn’t the world just a collection of individuals?” Because he regarded himself as “a man who has lived in the shadows since birth,” he found illegality more comfortable than legality among people full of pretense and hypocrisy, and felt a warm affection for those living in the shadows.
The passage where Yozo’s perspective is most clearly revealed is the latter half of the “Third Diary.” While engaging in wordplay with Horiki to trace the essence of sin, Yozo encounters the question: “What is the antonym of sin?” This stems from his expectation that knowing the antonym of sin would allow him to grasp its true nature. The question of how to interpret Dostoevsky’s *Crime and Punishment* within its context, and how to define sin, was a perplexing one for Yōzō, who was burdened by a sense of guilt—a question that “slipped past him like ice and charcoal.”
Dazai was a writer who took Japan’s defeat seriously.
He witnessed the corruption of established morality, customs, and authority figures, and clearly recognized the reality of rampant base egoism, hypocrisy, and the survival of the fittest. Dazai exposed these contradictions of reality and depicted the downfall of characters striving to transcend them. This can be read as a form of self-destruction and a proof achieved through suicide.
For example, in *Obasute*, the protagonist refers to himself as a member of a “doomed race” and states, “The stronger the evil of the doomed, the more vigorously the healthy light that follows will shine.” This passage emphasizes the paradox that “destruction” leads to creation. The ultimate role of such destruction is revealed even more clearly in *No Longer Human*.
“Doesn’t the fact that one can continue the struggle of life without committing suicide, without going mad, without despairing over politics, and without yielding—doesn’t that imply a lack of suffering? Moreover, isn’t it possible that by taking this for granted and becoming a thoroughgoing egoist, one has never once doubted oneself? If so, that would be comfortable. But isn’t it precisely because all humans are like this that they are, in and of themselves, the most perfect beings imaginable? ……I don’t know.” This passage compels us to deeply contemplate the meaning of human existence and “No Longer Human.”
“No Longer Human” poses the fundamental question of how one must live to exist as a human being. In the work, the weapon chosen by Yojō, who wrestled with “fear of humanity,” was clowning. Because he could not completely give up on humanity, he sought to connect with the world in this way.
This work does not definitively state why Yojō is “disqualified” or what it takes to “pass.” Dazai depicts how every human being, simply by existing, commits sins against others, inflicts wounds, and inherently carries the risk of being wounded themselves—making everyone a potential “disqualified person.” Through this, he reveals the darkness within humanity with the reflection: “Isn’t anyone who bears the duty of life a disqualified person?” Readers, too, should ponder this existential crisis and the paradox of “No Longer Human.”
Throughout Dazai’s various works, one hears the voice declaring, “I have been disqualified from being human. I simply do not know what it means to be human.” Expressions such as “I am not a human being now. I am a kind of strange animal called an artist,” or the final passage of *No Longer Human*, which concludes with “The Yōjō we knew had a very pure and delicate heart; as long as she didn’t drink—or even if she did—she was a child as good as God,” may have been Dazai’s desperate self-defense.
The distortion and weariness of human existence symbolized by Yojō serve as a critique of Japanese society at the time and urge introspection and reflection on the human psyche. Yozo, who recognized himself as “No Longer Human” and murmured, “I have neither happiness nor unhappiness now. Everything simply passes by,” evokes reflection on existence and a sense of shame. Perhaps Yozo is a self-portrait of us today, the image of “another self.”