In this blog post, we will examine the meaning of individual misfortune and realism as depicted in ‘No Longer Human’ through the life and works of Osamu Dazai.
Portrait of a Young Man: Osamu Dazai (1909–1948). Bouquets of flowers still never cease to appear at his grave. Although he was branded a decadent and weak nihilist, his literature remains a beacon of hope for the eternally young.
His life and literature, which spanned the militarism of the Showa era, remained trapped in the maelstrom of war. Born the son of a landowner and raised among the emerging capitalist class, he possessed the air of a nobleman; yet the resentment of poor farmers whose land had been seized dominated his body and mind like an original sin. Thus, his literature remains both a product of guilt and a desperate confession of self-redemption.
His sharp sense of ethics, bordering on obsessive-compulsiveness, was what wore him down and ultimately led to his suicide, yet it was also the literary driving force that compelled him to atone for the sins of Japanese militarism through the most agonizing self-flagellation.
He made his literary debut in 1935 when ‘Reversal’ won second place at the first Akutagawa Prize, and in 1947, he received the highest acclaim among postwar Japanese writers for ‘Sunset’. However, after writing ‘No Longer Human’ between March and May 1948, he ended his short life—during which he lived under the pen name Osamu Dazai, leaving behind his birth name Shūjirō Tsushima—by throwing himself into the Tama River reservoir on June 13 alongside his lover, Tomie Yamazaki.
His life was marked by stark contrasts. Born into the landowning class, he enjoyed wealth and prestige, yet he struggled to erase his origins; he devoted himself to left-wing activism, only to face scandal due to his dissolute lifestyle. Yet, in the end, only the novelist Osamu Dazai remains forever. He not only brought his life of glory and disgrace to a close but also stands as a victor of realism, having laid bare with his very being the dark underbelly of Japanese society and the brutal tyranny of imperialism.
“No Longer Human” brings to mind André Malraux’s “The Human Condition.” These two works, which both ask and answer the question of what it means to be human, share similarities in their underlying aspirations. André Malraux depicts characters who respond to the crisis of human existence amidst the absurdity of war and revolution with death, ultimately conveying an affirmative message that the ultimate pursuit of human solidarity is the highest good of the human condition.
“No Longer Human” goes a step further, pushing human existence to its limits even more ruthlessly than Malraux’s work. Osamu Dazai proves with his very being that the tragic fate surrounding humanity is vividly rooted in reality, transcending fiction.
“No Longer Human” is both a novel and a record of Osamu Dazai’s personal history. This work adopts the shashosetsu (private novel) form that emerged in Japan in the 1920s. Shashosetsu is a genre unique to Japan, created by importing and localizing Western modern novel forms; whereas Western novels evolved into social novels that exposed the absurdities of reality, shashosetsu tends to remain within the individual’s inner world. However, for Dazai, the shosetsu form was also a strategy to protect himself from societal oppression and express himself during the harsh era of militarism.
A characteristic of shosetsu is that it uses “I” as the narrator and writes autobiographical content in a confessional tone. In that sense, ‘No Longer Human’ also follows the shosetsu form. Yet, while Japanese autobiographical fiction often remains confined to the personal chronicles of individual authors detached from the masses and is dismissed as “artist’s fiction,” this work transcends those limitations. Dazai completed ‘No Longer Human’ through the process of deconstructing and reassembling the framework of autobiographical fiction. A Japanese poet and novelist once described this work as “poetic.”
The protagonist, Yojō, is none other than Dazai Osamu himself. Just as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary represents the “I” within all of us, this novel unfolds through a memoir format, comprising a preface, an afterword, and three memoirs arranged in a frame narrative. These three memoirs are as sensory and poetic as if they were unraveling the images within three photographs.
Although it is a narrative, the bold omissions and rapid pacing allow the reader to follow the narrator’s inner world, leading to a moment when it feels as though the narrator is none other than oneself. Young readers are captivated by this aspect because the work presents the very image of a youth in anguish. The process of refusing to settle for reality, constantly striving toward the future, and ultimately giving up one’s life without compromise feels as familiar as a rite of passage that everyone has experienced at some point in their youth.
Who is the force driving Yōzō—the protagonist, the author Osamu Dazai, and the reader, who are one and the same—toward the temptation of death? What is the nightmare of history that turns Yōzō and all of us into “clowns” and drives us to self-flagellation? Dazai describes this self-awareness at the end of the novel as “the misfortune of those incapable of refusal.” If so, who has robbed us of our ability to refuse? What has cast us into the abyss of misery? In other words, what are the factors behind “No Longer Human”?
Throughout the novel, Yōjō refers to himself as a “clown.” Yet he is horrified by this hypocrisy. This is because concealing the purity of his heart and acting out an overly excited persona is not the true Yōjō. This brings to mind Thomas Mann’s novel ‘The Clown’. The clown in that work feels a sense of superiority stemming from the privilege of his wealthy background; he is conscious of the upper class and the wealthy, and displays a contemptuous attitude toward the poor and the unfortunate. Yozō’s attempts to gain recognition from his father, family, and friends closely resemble that very hypocrisy. This hypocrisy can be considered the root cause of his failure as a human being. Added to this is the absurdity of Japanese society, symbolized by the father.
The father is portrayed as a figure of profound fear to Yōzō. Only after his father dies of a peptic ulcer does Yōzō realize that he had despised his father all along, and that escaping from him had been the greatest goal of his life. This reflects the social climate of Japan, particularly Tokyo, during the years 1930–32. The reality that no one was free from the grip of Japanese militarism—a reality with no escape—and the masses of people who, in order to survive, became clowns and were driven into war: these are the very essence of ‘No Longer Human’.
The moment Yōko realizes that femininity is the path to escape the symbolic system of the “father” is immediately linked to death. Was the end of her life—which ultimately succeeded after several suicide attempts accompanied by women—a failure? Like the mythical irony that promised a new world through the Fall from Paradise, ‘No Longer Human’ may have dreamed of a miracle that conceives life within tragedy.
Finding an answer to the question of what it means to be human is no easy task. Like Paul Gauguin, who left reality behind in pursuit of an utopia, Dazai chose death as if to cast off hypocrisy and be reborn as a human being, and the record of that journey is the novel ‘No Longer Human’.
This story does not end with the downfall of a single individual. It simultaneously implies the death of Japanese society. Osamu Dazai’s writing broke free from the framework of the autobiographical novel to demonstrate a new form of literature.
Balzac, who wrote the masterpiece ‘The Human Comedy’, was a royalist aristocrat, yet he starkly exposed the hypocrisy of the aristocratic society to which he belonged. By depicting the hypocrisy of 19th-century French society—which had spiraled into materialism following the restoration of the monarchy—as it truly was, he exposed social absurdities bordering on pathology. This triumph of realism can also be witnessed in ‘No Longer Human’.
By presenting an undeniable reality as it is, Osamu Dazai rescues the countless lives lost as victims of militarism from the swamp of oblivion.
