No Longer Human is told in the form of notebooks left by one Ōba Yōzō ( 大庭葉蔵), a troubled man incapable of revealing his true self to others, and who, instead, maintains a facade of hollow jocularity.

Many believe the book to have been his will, as Dazai killed himself shortly after the last part of the book (which had appeared in serial form) was published.Īs of January 1, 2019, the book is in the public domain.

Much like the protagonist Yōzō, Dazai attempted suicide a total of five times in his lifetime, with consorts, until ultimately succeeding in taking his own life with his lover at the time, a woman named Tomie Yamazaki. The novel presents recurring themes in the author's life, including suicide, social alienation, and depression. The novel, narrated in first person, contains several elements which portray an autobiographical basis but is in fact categorized under the semi-autobiographical genre since the characters in the book are all fictional. The literal translation of the title, noted by Donald Keene in his preface to the English translation, is 'Disqualified as a Human Being'. It is considered Dazai's masterpiece and ranks as the second-best selling novel ever in Japan, behind Natsume Sōseki's Kokoro. Still one of the ten bestselling books in Japan, No Longer Human is a powerful exploration of an individual’s alienation from society.No Longer Human ( 人間失格, Ningen Shikkaku) is a 1948 Japanese novel by Osamu Dazai. The novel has come to “echo the sentiments of youth” (Hiroshi Ando, The Mainichi Daily News) from post-war Japan to the postmodern society of technology. Semi-autobiographical, No Longer Human is the final completed work of one of Japan’s most important writers, Osamu Dazai (1909-1948). Without sentimentality, he records the casual cruelties of life and its fleeting moments of human connection and tenderness. Oba Yozo’s attempts to reconcile himself to the world around him begin in early childhood, continue through high school, where he becomes a ’clown' to mask his alienation, and eventually lead to a failed suicide attempt as an adult. Portraying himself as a failure, the protagonist of Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human narrates a seemingly normal life even while he feels himself incapable of understanding human beings. I can’t even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.

No longer human ito