No Longer Human

by Osamu Dazai

Indeed, the more carefully you examine the child’s smiling face the more you feel an indescribable, unspeakable horror creeping over you. You see that it is actually not a smiling face at all. The boy has not a suggestion of a smile. Look at his tightly clenched fists if you want proof. No human being can smile with his fists doubled like that. It is a monkey. A grinning monkey-face. The smile is nothing more than a puckering of ugly wrinkles. The photograph reproduces an expression so freakish, and at the same time so unclean and even nauseating, that your impulse is to say, “What a wizened, hideous little boy!” I have never seen a child with such an unaccountable expression.

It has no individuality. I have only to shut my eyes after looking at it to forget the face. I can remember the wall of the room, the little heater, but all impression of the face of the principal figure in the room is blotted out; I am unable to recall a single thing about it. This face could never be made the subject of a painting, not even of a cartoon. I open my eyes. There is not even the pleasure of recollecting: of course, that’s the kind of face it was!

Mine has been a life of much shame. I can’t even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.

I thought that it was one of the most elegant services provided by the railways. When later I discovered that the bridge was nothing more than a utilitarian device, I lost all interest in it.

My apprehension on discovering that my concept of happiness seemed to be completely at variance with that of everyone else was so great as to make me toss sleeplessly and groan night after night in my bed. It drove me indeed to the brink of lunacy. I wonder if I have actually been happy.

It has seemed to me in fact that those who called me lucky were incomparably more fortunate than I.

if my neighbors manage to survive without killing themselves, without going mad, maintaining an interest in political parties, not yielding to despair, resolutely pursuing the fight for existence, can their griefs really be genuine?

I have always shook with fright before human beings. Unable as I was to feel the least particle of confidence in my ability to speak and act like a human being, I kept my solitary agonies locked in my breast. I kept my melancholy and my agitation hidden, careful lest any trace should be left exposed. I feigned an innocent optimism; I gradually perfected myself in the role of the farcical eccentric.

I hadn’t the strength even to choose between two alternatives. In this fact, I believe, lay one of the characteristics which in later years was to develop into a major cause of my “life of shame.”

My definition of a “respected” man was one who had succeeded almost completely in hoodwinking people, but who was finally seen through by some omniscient, omnipotent person who ruined him and made him suffer a shame worse than death.

A mischievous little imp. I had succeeded in appearing mischievous. I had succeeded in escaping from being respected. My report card was all A’s except for deportment, where it was never better than a C or a D. This too was a source of great amusement to my family.

I am convinced that human life is filled with many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity, truly splendid of their kind—of people deceiving one another without (strangely enough) any wounds being inflicted, of people who seem unaware even that they are deceiving one another.

if things went well I would like to become his inseparable friend; but if this proved utterly impossible, I had no choice but to pray for his death.

During the course of my life I have wished innumerable times that I might meet with a violent death, but I have never once desired to kill anybody. I thought that in killing a dreaded adversary I might actually be bringing him happiness.

“What a messy business it is to be fallen for” by the more literary “What uneasiness lies in being loved.”

Nevertheless, it was with very much the sensation of treading on thin ice that I associated with these girls. I could almost never guess their motives. I was in the dark; at times I made indiscreet mistakes which brought me painful wounds. These wounds, unlike the scars from the lashing a man might give, cut inwards very deep, like an internal hemorrhage, bringing intense discomfort.

Women sleep so soundly they seem to be dead. Who knows? Women may live in order to sleep.

In my case such an expression as “to be fallen for” or even “to be loved” is not in the least appropriate; perhaps it describes the situation more accurately to say that I was “looked after.”

Long personal experience had taught me that when a woman suddenly bursts into hysterics, the way to restore her spirits is to give her something sweet.

I never could think of prostitutes as human beings or even as women. They seemed more like imbeciles or lunatics.

I know that I am liked by other people, but I seem to be deficient in the faculty to love others. (I should add that I have very strong doubts as to whether even human beings really possess this faculty.)

I was frightened even by God. I could not believe in His love, only in His punishment. Faith. That, I felt, was the act of facing the tribunal of justice with one’s head bowed to receive the scourge of God. I could believe in hell, but it was impossible for me to believe in the existence of heaven.

But everybody says you’re so nice.” That’s because I deceived them.

It occurred to me that a man like myself who dreads human beings, shuns and deceives them, might on the surface seem strikingly like another man who reveres the clever, wordly-wise rules for success embodied in the proverb “Let sleeping dogs lie.” Is it not true that no two human beings understand anything whatsoever about each other, that those who consider themselves bosom friends may be utterly mistaken about their fellow and, failing to realize this sad truth throughout a lifetime, weep when they read in the newspapers about his death?

I wondered, did he mean by “society”? The plural of human beings? Where was the substance of this thing called “society”? I had spent my whole life thinking that society must certainly be something powerful, harsh and severe, but to hear Horiki talk made the words “Don’t you mean yourself?” come to the tip of my tongue.

Before you know it, you’ll be ostracized by society. It’s not society. You’re going to do the ostracizing, aren’t you?

I came to hold, almost as a philosophical conviction, the belief: 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. A toad. I sluggishly moved—that’s all.)

The thought of dying has never bothered me, but getting hurt, losing blood, becoming crippled and the like—no thanks.

“Right. Let’s hook fingers on that. I promise I’ll give it up.” The next day, as might have been expected, I spent drinking.

Then, just when I had begun to entertain faintly in my breast the sweet notion that perhaps there was a chance I might turn one of these days into a human being and be spared the necessity of a horrible death, Horiki showed up again.

Extremely tragic is a good description of you.”

He could only consider me as the living corpse of a would-be suicide, a person dead to shame, an idiot ghost.

“Actions punishable by jail sentences are not the only crimes. If we knew the antonym of crime, I think we would know its true nature. God . . . salvation . . . love . . . light. But for God there is the antonym Satan, for salvation there is perdition, for love there is hate, for light there is darkness, for good, evil. Crime and prayer? Crime and repentance? Crime and confession? Crime and ... no, they’re all synonymous. What is the opposite of crime?”

It seemed to me, however, that any husband who still retains the right to forgive or not to forgive is a lucky man.

She quickly wrapped the little box. It was morphine. She said that it was no more harmful than liquor, and I believed her.

“No,” I said, “I won’t need it any more.” This was a really rare event. I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that it was the one and only time in my life that I refused something offered to me. My unhappiness was the unhappiness of a person who could not say no. I had been intimidated by the fear that if I declined something offered me, a yawning crevice would open between the other person’s heart and myself which could never be mended through all eternity. Yet I now refused in a perfectly natural manner the morphine which I had so desperately craved.

I was no longer a criminal—I was a lunatic.

I ask you, is non-resistance a sin?

I had now ceased utterly to be a human being.

I felt as though the vessel of my suffering had become empty, as if nothing could interest me now. I had lost even the ability to suffer.

Everything passes. That is the one and only thing I have thought resembled a truth in the society of human beings where I have dwelled up to now as in a burning hell. Everything passes.

“The Yozo we knew was so easy-going and amusing, and if only he hadn’t drunk—no, even though he did drink—he was a good boy, an angel.”