The book No Longer Human is one of Japan’s best-selling books by Osamu Dazai. This book is Japan’s second best-selling book ever. Considering that this book only has 271 pages it’s a pretty light read, although it does cover many heavy topics. This is a semi-biography and not completely fiction. Some of the events and how the protagonist portrays his feelings are a reflection of Dazai himself.
In this book, we follow the character Oba Yozo through life and discover his negative self conduct and how he copes with that. Through all the things he experiences he still feels as though he is incapable of understanding human beings, and does not view himself as one. He makes it through high school with a “clown” persona to mask himself for not being human. The narrator of the story is the protagonist himself. I like the idea that we are viewing him through his own eyes. Throughout the book, Yozo the main character characterizes himself as not being human despite acting like one from the reader’s pov. My whole thought process throughout the book was not that he is inhuman, but what seems to make him more human-like. No matter what he said about himself being non-human I couldn’t disagree more. Throughout this read, Yozo makes many mistakes; things I don’t want to condone or inflict upon anyone. But that’s also what makes this read so interesting because we can still sympathize with him yet despise him at the same time. I think something people might overlook while reading this is that we only ever get to see Yozo’s perspective in the book. Not until you get to the end do you truly get to see someone else’s views on him but it also makes you think. How do people view us over how we view ourselves? We only get to see the bad things because that is how Yozo truly feels about himself. Those feelings carry over to the reader as well. I genuinely liked this book and felt like I could relate to some of the emotions that were conveyed. I would definitely recommend this book to people who are able to read heavy topics or just enjoy reading any genre and to try something new. Published in 1948 -Jasmin Comments are closed.
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