Similar to Notes from the Underground (I sense a pattern in the books I’m reading!), Yozo feels like a stranger. I think the reason for that was everything is told in such a matter-of-fact way, almost in passing, that I couldn’t fully grasp the gravity of the events until I had thought about them for a while. (Okay, slight exaggeration but you know what vein I’m getting at.) It’s brutally honest and just so sad. I’m honestly impressed that I didn’t cry while reading. No Longer Human is a disturbing yet moving account of literally all the bad things a person can face in a lifetime. Reading this book, it felt like Dazai stared depression in the face and wrote unflinchingly of the devastating impact it can have on a person. The observer tracks down one of the people in the notebooks who knew Yozo personally and says Yozo was “an angel.” They put him up in an isolated house away from the city.
He is put into a mental institution and his brothers reaches out to him through Flatfish. He becomes an alcoholic and addicted to morphine. Yozo becomes distant from Yoshiko when he sees her get assaulted. Horiki comes back into his life and leads Yozo into drinking and all that once more. The next day, he’s drunk at her feet but in her naivette, she thinks he’s just messing with her. He leaves them for “the madam at the bar.” He drinks a lot and keeps running into a girl named Yoshiko who implores him to stop drinking.
He starts a relationship with a single mother with a daughter but feels he can’t be his true self with them either. His family abandons him but gives him money through a man he call Flatfish. In the third notebook, Yozo is expelled from university and hospitalised. Yozo sinks into this pattern and, after sleeping with a married woman, agrees to commit suicide with her. He befriends Horiki, another artist, who spends Yozo’s money on drinking, smoking and sleeping with prostitutes. Yozo likes art and paints a self-portrait of himself. In the second notebook, Yozo befriends Takeichi because Takeichi seems to see through his act. He’s clever but doesn’t try at his studies. He feels alienated from everyone around him. He feels he has to be funny and puts on a clown act around others. The first notebook is about Yozo’s childhood. The prologue is from an observer’s POV who talks about three photographs of Yozo.
The story of a troubled man who hides behind a facade to gain acceptance from others around him.
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