![]() Then Horiki shows up, turning Ōba to self-destructive behavior again. Thanks to Yoshiko's grounding influence on his life, Ōba stops drinking and finds gainful work as a cartoonist. He then lives with the madam of a bar before he meets Yoshiko, a young and inexperienced woman who wants him to stop drinking. He tries to have a normal relationship with a single mother, serving as a surrogate father to her little girl, but soon he returns to his drinking habits and his fear of humanity and abandons them. Ōba is expelled from university and comes under the care of a friend of the family. He survives and she dies, leaving him with an excruciating feeling of guilt. After spending the night with a married woman, he attempts to commit shinjū (double suicide) with her by drowning. ![]() ![]() Influenced by a fellow artist, Horiki, whom he meets at a painting class, Ōba descends into a pattern of drinking, smoking and harlotry, and attends communist meetings without being a staunch follower. Ōba paints a self-portrait which is so dreadful that he dares not show it to anyone except Takeichi, who predicts him a future as a great artist.Īfter finishing high school, Ōba is sent to Tokyo to visit the university. Inspired by a painting of Van Gogh which Takeichi shows him, he starts to paint to express his inner agony through art. Ōba befriends him to prevent Takeichi from revealing his secret. Ōba becomes increasingly concerned over the potential penetrability of his cheerful facade when his schoolmate Takeichi sees through one of his false buffooneries. He is sexually abused by a male servant and a female servant during his childhood but decides that reporting it would be useless. He also describes numerous times that his antics is a way to not anger humans and not to be taken seriously to avoid reprimands. Establishing the mood of the rest of the book, Ōba describes humans as he is separate from them, describing them foolishly and always perplexed by humans. The notebooks are bookended by a preface and an epilogue by a nameless narrator, who is given Ōba's notebooks by a mutual acquaintance ten years after they had been written.Īfflicted with an intense feeling of alienation and otherness and finding it nearly impossible to understand those who surround him, Ōba resorts to buffoonery in early years to establish interpersonal relationships. These are divided into three chapters which chronicle Ōba's life from his early childhood to his late twenties. No Longer Human is told in the form of notebooks left behind by the principal character Ōba Yōzō ( 大庭葉蔵). It ranks as the second best-selling novel by publishing house Shinchōsha, behind Sōseki Natsume's Kokoro. No Longer Human is considered a classic of postwar Japanese literature and Dazai's masterpiece, which enjoys considerable popularity among younger readers. The book was published one month after Dazai's suicide at the age of 38. The original title translates as "Disqualified as a human being" or "A failed human". It tells the story of a troubled man incapable of revealing his true self to others, and who, instead, maintains a facade of hollow jocularity, later turning to a life of alcoholism and drug abuse before his final disappearance. ![]() No Longer Human ( Japanese: 人間失格, Hepburn: Ningen Shikkaku), also translated as A Shameful Life, is a 1948 novel by Japanese author Osamu Dazai.
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