No Longer Human

by Osamu Dazai

can we with honesty rebuke the Japanese for a lack of purity in their modern culture?

Yet we are apt to find it incongruous if a Japanese ornaments his room with examples of Christian religious art or a lamp of Venetian glass.

they are certainly much more like Americans than they are like their ancestors of one hundred years ago.

He would undoubtedly have preferred to figure at the tail end of a list of Western writers or of world writers in general than to be classed with such obscure exotics.

No Longer Human is almost symbolic of the predicament of the Japanese writers today.

“He was an angel,” and we are suddenly made to realize the incompleteness of Yozo’s portrait of himself. In the way that most men fail to see their own cruelty, Yozo had not noticed his gentleness and his capacity for love.

It has no individuality.

Something ineffable makes the beholder shudder in distaste. I have never seen such an inscrutable face on a man.

When later I discovered that the bridge was nothing more than a utilitarian device, I lost all interest in it.

Unusual or extravagant things tempt me,

The places are all laid out in the proper order and, regardless of whether we’re hungry or not, we munch our food in silence, with lowered eyes.

“Human beings work to earn their bread, for if they don’t eat, they die.”

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?

All I feel are the assaults of apprehension and terror at the thought that I am the only one who is entirely unlike the rest.

Before anyone realized it, I had become an accomplished clown, a child who never spoke a single truthful word.

Whenever anyone criticized me I felt certain that I had been living under the most dreadful misapprehension.

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.

The thought went through my mind that it didn’t make any difference, that nothing was going to make me happy. At the same time I was congenitally unable to refuse anything offered to me by another person, no matter how little it might suit my tastes.

My definition of a “respected” man was one who had succeeded almost completely in hoodwinking people,

It is only too obvious that favoritism inevitably exists: it would have been useless to complain to human beings.

Is it not true, rather, that human beings, including those who may now be deriding me, are living in mutual distrust, giving not a thought to God or anything else?

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.

I find it difficult to understand the kind of human being who lives, or who is sure he can live, purely, happily, serenely while engaged in deceit.

Women led me on only to throw me aside; they mocked and tortured me when others were around, only to embrace me with passion as soon as everyone had left.

Women, on the other hand, have no sense of moderation. No matter how long I went on with my antics they would ask for more, and I would become exhausted responding to their insatiable demands for encores.

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.

There are some people whose dread of human beings is so morbid that they reach a point where they yearn to see with their own eyes monsters of ever more horrible shapes.

What superficiality—and what stupidity—there is in trying to depict in a pretty manner things which one has thought pretty.

but I felt sure that something more obscure, more frightening lurked in the hearts of human beings. Greed did not cover it, nor did vanity. Nor was it simply a combination of lust and greed. I wasn’t sure what it was, but I felt that there was something inexplicable at the bottom of human society which was not reducible to economics.

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.

The proverb means that when a man becomes half-mad, he will shake and shake and shake until he’s free of a woman.

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

In later years I came to realize that if Flatfish had at the time presented me with a simple statement of the facts, there would have been no untoward consequences.

One of my tragic flaws is the compulsion to add some sort of embellishment to every situation—

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.)

The jelly and the way Horiki rejoiced over it taught me a lesson in the parsimoniousness of the city-dweller, and in what it is really like in a Tokyo household where the members divide their lives so sharply between what they do at home and what they do on the outside.

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.

I was cursed by the unhappy peculiarity that the more I feared people the more I was liked, and the more I was liked the more I feared them—a process which eventually compelled me to run away from everybody.

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?

From then on, however, I came to hold, almost as a philosophical conviction, the belief: What is society but an individual?

“The more I look at you the funnier your face seems. Do you know I get inspiration for my cartoons from looking at your face when you’re asleep?”

et puis on recommence encore le lendemain avec seulement la même règle que la veille et qui est d’éviter les grandes joies barbares de même que les grandes douleurs comme un crapaud contorne une pierre sur son chemin.

Society. I felt as though even I were beginning at last to acquire some vague notion of what it meant. It is the struggle between one individual and another, a then-and-there struggle, in which the immediate triumph is everything.

The incomprehensibility of society is the incomprehensibility of the individual.

I had always imagined that the beauty of virginity was nothing more than the sweet, sentimental illusion of stupid poets, but it really is alive and present in this world.

Not long afterwards we were married. The joy I obtained as a result of this action was not necessarily great or savage, but the suffering which ensued was staggering—

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

“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.

God, I ask you. Is trustfulness a sin?