No Longer Human

by Osamu Dazai

Nothing was so hard for me to understand, so baffling, and at the same time so filled with menacing overtones as the commonplace remark, “Human beings work to earn their bread, for if they don’t eat, they die.”

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. It is almost impossible for me to converse with other people. What should I talk about, how should I say it?—I don’t know.

I managed to maintain on the surface a smile which never deserted my lips; this was the accommodation I offered to others, a most precarious achievement performed by me only at the cost of excruciating efforts within.

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.

Whenever I was asked what I wanted my first impulse was to answer “Nothing.” The thought went through my mind that it didn’t make any difference, that nothing was going to make me happy.

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. Human beings never did teach me that abstruse secret. If I had only known that one thing I should never have had to dread human beings so, nor should I have opposed myself to human life, nor tasted such torments of hell every night.

I have often felt that I would find it more complicated, troublesome and unpleasant to ascertain the feelings by which a woman lives than to plumb the innermost thoughts of an earthworm. 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.

Before he left he informed me that my father and all the rest of my family were so enraged that I might easily be disowned once and for all. Such matters did not concern me; I thought instead of the dead Tsuneko, and, longing for her, I wept. Of all the people I had ever known, that miserable Tsuneko really was the only one I loved.

this is heartwrenching

How much better things would have 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.” Only later did I learn that this in fact was the situation. If I had been told that, I should probably have done what Flatfish asked. But thanks to his intolerably prudent, circumlocutious manner of speech, I only felt irritable, and this caused the whole course of my life to be altered.

ini!!! gemes banget sama flatfish andai aja dia ngomongnya to the point :(( gw sendiri kadang sering banget ketemu orang yang kalo ngomong teh pabeulit padahal intinya sederhana

One of my tragic flaws is the compulsion to add some sort of embellishment to every situation—a quality which has made people call me at times a liar—but I have almost never embellished in order to bring myself any advantage; it was rather that I had a strangulating fear of that cataclysmic change in the atmosphere the instant the flow of a conversation flagged, 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.

i can somewhat relate to this

Though I have always made it my practice to be pleasant to everybody, I have not once actually experienced friendship. I have only the most painful recollections of my various acquaintances with the exception of such companions in pleasure as Horiki. I have frantically played the clown in order to disentangle myself from these painful relationships, only to wear myself out as a result.

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.)

The thought that the only hope left me in the world was Horiki filled me with a foreboding dreadful enough to send chills up and down my spine.

ini lucu sih

That’s because I deceived them. I was aware that everybody in the apartment house was friendly to me, but it was extremely difficult for me to explain to Shigeko how much I feared them all, and how 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.

it’s hard to please others. i too sometimes want to disappear 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?

I gradually came to relax my vigilance towards the world. I came to think that it was not such a dreadful place. My feelings of panic had been molded by the unholy 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 bacteria which infest the public baths, the hundreds of thousands of microbes in a barber shop which will cause baldness, the swarms of scabious parasites infecting the leather straps in the subway cars; or the tapeworm, fluke and heaven knows what eggs that undoubtedly lurk in raw fish and in undercooked beef and pork; or the fact that if you walk barefoot a tiny sliver of glass may penetrate the sole of your foot and after circulating through your body reach the eye and cause blindness. There is no disputing the accurate, scientific fact that millions of germs are floating, swimming, wriggling everywhere. At the same time, however, if you ignore them completely they lose all possible connection with yourself, and at once become nothing more than vanishing “ghosts of science.”

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

ini lucu sih #2 dan relatable :”

God, I ask you. Is trustfulness a sin?

:(

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. For someone like myself in whom the ability to trust others is so cracked and broken that I am wretchedly timid and am forever trying to read the expression on people’s faces, Yoshiko’s immaculate trustfulness seemed clean and pure, like a waterfall among green leaves. One night sufficed to turn the waters of this pure cascade yellow and muddy. Yoshiko began from that night to fret over my every smile or frown.

Is immaculate trustfulness after all a source of sin?

There are all kinds of unhappy people in this world. I suppose it would be no exaggeration to say that the world is composed entirely of unhappy people. But those people can fight their unhappiness with society fairly and squarely, and society for its part easily understands and sympathizes with such struggles.

I thought, “I want to die. I want to die more than ever before. There’s no chance now of a recovery. No matter what sort of thing I do, no matter what I do, it’s sure to be a failure, just a final coating applied to my shame. That dream of going on bicycles to see a waterfall framed in summer leaves—it was not for the likes of me. All that can happen now is that one foul, humiliating sin will be piled on another, and my sufferings will become only the more acute. I want to die. I must die. Living itself is the source of sin.”

My unhappiness was the unhappiness of a person who could not say no.

God, I ask you, is non-resistance a sin?

Disqualified as a human being. I had now ceased utterly to be a human being.

Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness. 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.