No Longer Human
Osamu Dazai's 1948 novel, written months before his suicide and translated into English by Donald Keene, is presented as three notebooks left behind by Oba Yozo, framed by a brief preface and afterword from a stranger who finds them. Yozo's notebooks trace his life from a wealthy provincial childhood in northern Japan, through art school in Tokyo, into a long downward spiral of clowning, womanizing, alcoholism, morphine addiction, a botched double suicide that drowns the woman he is with, and finally a stay in a psychiatric ward. He insists, page after page, that he has never managed to feel like a human being among other human beings, that the entire performance of ordinary life has always struck him as terrifying. Dazai writes the disqualification with a clarity that has made the book one of the best-selling novels in Japanese history and a touchstone for outsiders everywhere.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about No Longer Human
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Three notebooks tell the life of Yozo, a young Japanese man who has spent his life impersonating other people because he cannot understand how to be human. The novel is one of postwar Japan's most read books.
No Longer Human (Ningen Shikkaku) was written by Osamu Dazai and published in 1948 shortly before his suicide. It is widely considered one of the most important novels of postwar Japanese literature and has remained in print for over 75 years.
Yes. Junji Ito's 2017 manga adaptation of No Longer Human reframes the novel's psychological darkness through Ito's signature horror imagery. The original novel is the more widely studied work.
No Longer Human is 188 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, No Longer Human takes most readers 3 to 4 hours to finish.
No Longer Human is a standalone novel by 太宰 治, not part of a series.
No Longer Human is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.