No Longer Human

I loved every second, picked up this book due to a book review episode from pewdiepie.

The book was boring and the narrator made it even more boring.

It’s really good especially if you like Bungou stray dogs

Dazai Osamu (1909-1948) was the pen name of Tsushima Shuji, a writer born in the town of Kanagi on the Tsugaru Peninsula in what is now Aomori Prefecture. The family were wealthy landowners in the region and both his father, who represented the district in the Japanese Diet, and his elder brother were political figures of some renown. As Dazai was the tenth of eleven children and the fourth surviving son, he was very far down the food chain, however. This was to prove both a curse and a blessing. The difficult part was that his family was so large that he was raised in his aunt's household. When he reached school age, he was sent off to board in a distant town and did not often see his family. On the other hand, not being the first-born son did have its advantages. There wasn't much expected of him and he was free to study what he wanted. He was given a generous allowance - first by his father and then by his elder brother, and lived well. Well enough, in fact, to take up with a geisha named Oyama Hatsuyo before leaving Tsugaru for Tokyo. Most students go off to school with a trunk full of clothes and maybe a bicycle. Dazai wanted to bring his geisha. A few months after enrolling in the course of French literature at Tokyo Imperial University, Hatsuyo moved in with him. But the family intervened and Dazai was separated from Hatsuyo. Shortly thereafter, Dazai attempted to kill himself with a woman he had just met. He lived; the woman drowned. Dazai seems not to have learned much French at university, but he did get the bohemian part of the literature down. In fact, Edward Seidensticker wrote that Dazai's life was "almost a parody on desperate bohemianism: flirtations with communism, drunkenness, addiction to drugs, repeated attempts at suicide." No Longer Human has been favorably compared to Kafka's Metamorphosis and there are certainly many parallels between the two works. Like Kafka, Dazai gets right to it. There is no "lost Eden" to yearn for because there never was an Eden to begin with. In the opening pages we learn that the narrator's alienation is complete and that whatever accommodations he has made to his family or society have been only ruses to mask his total estrangement from "human beings": "I gradually perfected myself in the role of the farcical eccentric. I thought, `As long as I can make them laugh, it doesn't matter how, I'll be all right. If I succeed in that, the human beings probably won't mind it too much if I remain outside their lives. The one thing I must avoid is becoming offensive in their eyes: I shall be nothing, the wind, the sky.'" Ordinarily, you would put such a book down quickly and look for something a bit more, shall we say, inspirational? But as with Kafka, the thing that grabs you - that by turns horrifies and amazes you - is the earnestness of the appeal and the art with which it is made. So powerful is it at times that you want to reach through the spine of the book and lay hands upon the suffering narrator. In spite of its rather depressing rhetoric, No Longer Human is in many ways a comic novel and it calls to mind John Kennedy Toole. The mock romanticism of the book is hilarious and the juxtaposition of comic elements throughout the novel lightens the gloom. But there are few things in life less humorous than suicide. And as with Toole's Confederacy of Dunces, whatever mirth there is to be found in Dazai's work is tempered by the author's suicide. Shortly after No Longer Human was published in 1948, Dazai Osamu jumped into a river and drowned. This time, both he and the woman who accompanied him succeeded in killing themselves.

Easily one of the best books I've ever read, more problems to contend with.

Excellent read.