No Longer Human

by Osamu Dazai

They did not hide their interest even in things which were nauseatingly ugly, but soaked themselves in the pleasure of depicting them.

The front door of another person’s house terrified me more than the gate of Inferno in the Divine Comedy, and I am not exaggerating when I say that I really felt I could detect within the door the presence of a horrible dragon-like monster writhing there with a dank, raw smell.

Mood

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