No Longer Human

by Osamu Dazai

“They say that love flies out the window when poverty comes in the door, but people generally get the sense backwards.

no good for anything. The strength goes out of his laugh, he becomes strangely soured. Finally, in desperation, he shakes off the woman.

even that I had accepted a moment’s kindness: I felt I had imposed horrible bonds on myself. Gradually even the mundane fact that Tsuneko had paid the bill at the café began

anyway, and so I finally chose the expedient of keeping a safe distance from the Ginza. This timidity of nature was no trickery on my part. Women do not bring to bear so much as a particle of connection between what they do after going to

true, I have experienced a vague sense of regret at losing something, but never strongly enough to affirm positively or to contest with others my rights of possession. This was so true

I experienced an instant of shock at her unhappiness; I thought, “It’s all over now.” Then, the next moment, I meekly, helplessly resigned myself. I looked from Horiki to Tsuneko. I grinned.

Tsuneko was in the eyes of the world unworthy even of a drunkard’s kiss, a wretched woman who smelled of poverty. Astonishingly, incredibly

every time Tsuneko and I looked in each other’s face, we gave a pathetic little smile.

suggested more money than I had—three copper coins don’t count as money at all. This was a humiliation more strange than any I had tasted before, a humiliation I could not live with. I suppose I had still not managed to extricate myself from the part of the rich man’s son. It was then I myself determined,

all the people I had ever known, that miserable Tsuneko really was the only one I loved.

“You did it on purpose.” Those were the two great disasters in a lifetime of acting. Sometimes I have even thought that I should have preferred to be sentenced to ten years imprisonment rather than meet with such gentle contempt from

One of Takeichi’s predictions came true, the other went astray. The inglorious prophecy that women would fall for me turned out just as he said, but the happy one, that I should certainly become a great

strange, elusive complexities, intricately presented with overtones of vagueness: I have always been baffled by these precautions so strict as to be useless, and by the intensely irritating

there would have been no untoward consequences. But as a result of his unnecessary precautions, or rather, of the incomprehensible

been if only Flatfish had said something like this, “I’d like you to enter a school beginning in the April term. Your family has decided to send you a more adequate allowance once you have entered school.”

circumlocutious manner of speech, I only felt irritable, and this caused the whole course of my life to be altered.

and even when I knew that it would later turn to my disadvantage, 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. This may have been

everybody, I have not once actually experienced friendship. I have only the most painful recollections of my various acquaintances

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

He was not a simple, endlessly passive type like myself. “You. What a surprise. You’ve been forgiven by your father, have you? Not yet?”

Horiki had assumed a jealous possessiveness about everything in his house down to the last cushion thread, and he glared at me, seemingly quite unembarrassed by this attitude. When

was really grateful for the old woman’s kindness. It is true that I dread poverty, but I do not believe I ever have despised it.) The jelly and the way Horiki rejoiced over it taught me

The woman, evidently an employee of a magazine publisher,

“The Adventures of Kinta and Ota,” the monthly comic strip for Shizuko’s magazine, I would suddenly think of home, and this made me feel so miserable that my pen would stop moving,

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.

it was extremely difficult for me to explain to Shigeko how much

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?

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. But I held the words

“You’ve put me in a cold sweat!” I smiled. From then on, however, I came to hold, almost as a philosophical conviction, the belief: What is society but an individual?

me seriously. “If there’s any liquor left, I’ll drink it. ‘Man’s life is like a flowing river. Man’s river . . .’ no, I mean ‘the river flows, the flowing life’.” I would go on singing as Shizuko took off my clothes. I fell asleep with my forehead pressed against her breast. This was my daily routine.

the evening of the third day I began to feel some compunctions about my behavior, and I returned to Shizuko’s apartment. I unconsciously hushed my footsteps as I approached the door,

fool to come between them. I might destroy them both if I were not careful. A humble happiness. A good mother and child. God, I thought, if you listen to the prayers of people like myself, grant me happiness once, only once in my whole

lifetime will be enough! Hear my prayer!)

at last to acquire some vague notion of what it meant. It is the struggle between one individual and another, a then-and-there

The incomprehensibility of society is the incomprehensibility of the individual. The ocean is not society; it is individuals. This was how I managed to gain a modicum of freedom from my

my single then-and-there contest had been decided, and from that night I lodged myself without ceremony on the second floor of her place. “Society” which by all rights should have

me, and I offered no explanations. As long as the madam was

fear aroused in me by such superstitions of science as the hundreds of thousands of whooping-cough germs borne by the spring breezes, the hundreds of thousands of eye-destroying

until yesterday had accepted such hypothetical situations as eminently factual scientific truths and was terrified by them. This shows the degree to which I had bit by bit arrived at a knowledge

a drop.” “Do you mean it?” “There’s no doubt about it. I’ll give it up. If I give it up,

savage, but the suffering which ensued was staggering—so far surpassing what I had imagined that even describing it as “horrendous” would not quite cover it. The “world,” after all,

the past and the recollection of sin unfolded themselves before my eyes and, seized by a terror so great it made me want to shriek, I could not sit still a moment longer. “How about a

treat me like a full human being. He could only consider me as the living corpse of a would-be suicide, a person dead to shame, an idiot ghost. His friendship had no other purpose but

spoke from somewhere in my heart. It said that I had not caused anyone to die, that I had not lifted money from anyone—but

didn’t know enough to distrust others. Sit down. Let’s eat the beans.”

It was less the fact of Yoshiko’s defilement than the defilement of her trust in people which became so persistent a source of grief as almost to render my life insupportable.

the least resembling love existed between that runt of a shopkeeper and Yoshiko, but one summer night Yoshiko was trusting,

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

long had prized, the unbearably pitiful one called immaculate

All I needed was the woman at the pharmacy to admonish