No Longer Human

by Osamu Dazai

Irrationality. I found the thought faintly pleasurable. Or rather, I felt at ease with it. What frightened me was the logic of the world; in it lay the foretaste of something incalculably powerful. Its mechanism was incomprehensible, and I could not possibly remain closeted in that windowless, bone-chilling room. Though outside lay the sea of irrationality, it was far more agreeable to swim in its waters until presently I drowned.

The weak fear happiness itself. They can harm themselves on cotton wool. Sometimes they are wounded even by happiness.

I frequently felt obliged to add, almost inadvertently, my word of embellishment, out of a desire to please born of my usual desperate mania for service.

What is society but an individual?

(That is what I was—a toad. It was not a question of whether or not society tolerated me, whether or not it ostracized me. I was an animal lower than a dog, lower than a cat.

The incomprehensibility of society is the incomprehensibility of the individual. The ocean is not society; it is individuals. This

Virtue and vice are concepts invented by human beings, words for a morality which human beings arbitrarily devised.”