No Longer Human

by Osamu Dazai

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

It wasn’t until I was about twenty that I realized that they actually served a practical purpose, and this revelation of human dullness stirred dark depression in me.

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

I have sometimes thought that I have been burdened with a pack of ten misfortunes, any one of which if borne by my neighbor would be enough to make a murderer of him.

but that is precisely what I don’t understand: 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?

What kind of dreams do they have? What do they think about when they walk along the street? Money? Hardly—it couldn’t only be that.

this was the accommodation I offered to others,

This belief made me incapable of arguments or self-justification. 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 one thing I must avoid is becoming offensive in their eyes: I shall be nothing, the wind, the sky.”

Being a sickly child, I often missed school for a month or two or even a whole school year at a stretch.

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.

“to fall for” is to betray a precocity of sentiment

van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and Renoir

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.

they plainly saw monsters in broad daylight, in the midst of nature.

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

I had gone through elementary and high schools and was now in college without ever having been able to understand what was meant by school spirit.

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.

All my life in this world of human beings I have been tortured by such a consciousness, but it has been my faithful companion, like a wife in poverty, and together, just the two of us, we have indulged in our forlorn pleasures.

The agonies I have suffered night after night have made for a hell composed of an infinite diversity of tortures, but—though this is a very strange way to put it—the wound has gradually become dearer to me than my own flesh and blood, and I have thought its pain to be the emotion of the wound as it lived or even its murmur of affection.

When I think back on it now, in those days there were Marxists of every variety. Some, like Horiki, called themselves such out of an empty “modernity.” An attraction for its odor of irrationality led others, like myself, to participate in the movement.

After just one meeting I was so tied by gratitude to her that worry and empty fears paralyzed me.

The weak fear happiness itself. They can harm themselves on cotton wool. Sometimes they are wounded even by happiness.

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

part. Women do not bring to bear so much as a particle of connection between what they do after going to bed and what they do on rising in the morning; they go on living with their world successfully divided in two, as if total oblivion had intervened.

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.

She too seemed to be weary beyond endurance of the task of being a human being;

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

I yearned with such desperation for “freedom” that I became weak and tearful.

Ever since coming to this house I had lacked all incentive even to play the clown;

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.)

It was hardly to be expected that someone like myself could ever develop any close friendships—besides, I lacked even the ability to pay visits.

I had no friends. I had nowhere to go.

I afterwards painted pictures of every description, but they all fell far, far short of those splendid works as I remembered them. I was plagued by a heavy sense of loss, as if my heart had become empty.

A sense of loss which was doomed to remain eternally unmitigated stealthily began to take shape.

Whenever I thought of my situation I sank all the deeper in my depression, and I lost all my energy.

This strong-minded woman herself dealt with the complications which developed from my running away, and took care of almost everything else for me. As a result I became more timid than ever before her.

I was frightened even by God. I could not believe in His love, only in His punishment.

“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?

“Don’t you mean yourself?”

Society won’t stand for it. It’s not society. You’re the one who won’t stand for it—right? If you do such a thing society will make you suffer for it. It’s not society. It’s you, isn’t it? Before you know it, you’ll be ostracized by society. It’s not society. You’re going to do the ostracizing, aren’t you?

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

. . . 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. . . .

(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.)

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.”

I craved desperately some great savage joy, no matter how immense the suffering that might ensue, but my only actual pleasure was to engage in meaningless chatter with the customers and to drink their liquor.

Waste not your Hour, nor in the vain pursuit Of This and That endeavour and dispute; Better be merry with the fruitful Grape Than sadden after none, or bitter, Fruit. Some for the Glories of This World; and some Sigh for the Prophet’s Paradise to come; Ah, take the Cash, and let the Promise go, Nor heed the music of a distant Drum! And that inverted Bowl we call The Sky Whereunder crawling coop’d we live and die Lift not your hands to It for help—for It As impotently rolls as you or I.

‘Oh, plagued no more with Human or Divine, To-morrow’s tangle to itself resign: And lose your fingers in the tresses of The Cypress-slender Minister of Wine.’