No Longer Human

by Osamu Dazai

(It is a strange use of the word to speak of a woman’s chivalry, but in my experience, at least in the cities, the women possessed a greater abundance of what might be termed chivalry than the men.

For example, this system decreed that steamship and steam engine were both tragic nouns, while streetcar and bus were comic. Persons who failed to see why this was true were obviously unqualified to discuss art,

The antonym of black is white. But the antonym of white is red. The antonym of red is black.

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.

“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. But for God there is the antonym Satan, for salvation there is perdition, for love there is hate, for light there is darkness, for good, evil. Crime and prayer? Crime and repentance? Crime and confession? Crime and ... no, they’re all synonymous. What is the opposite of crime?”

Crime and punishment. Dostoievski. These words grazed over a corner of my mind, startling me. Just supposing Dostoievski ranged ‘crime’ and ‘punishment’ side by side not as synonyms but as antonyms. Crime and punishment—absolutely incompatible ideas, irreconcilable as oil and water. I felt I was beginning to understand what lay at the bottom of the scum-covered, turbid pond, that chaos of Dostoievski’s mind—

The feelings which assailed me as I looked up at the summer night sky heavy with rain were not of fury or hatred, nor even of sadness. They were of overpowering fear, not the terror the sight of ghosts in a graveyard might arouse, but rather a fierce ancestral dread that could not be expressed in four or five words, something perhaps like encountering in the sacred grove of a Shinto shrine the white-clothed body of the god.

I had been split through the forehead between the eyebrows, a wound that was to throb with pain whenever I came in contact with a human being.

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.

I tried reading them, but I could not find a single instance of a woman violated in so lamentable a manner as Yoshiko.

“Where does this little path go? Where does this little path go?”

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.

Unhappy people are sensitive to the unhappiness of others.”

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.

I had been intimidated by the fear that if I declined something offered me, a yawning crevice would open between the other person’s heart and myself which could never be mended through all eternity.

I was definitely not mad. I have never been mad for even an instant. They say, I know, that most lunatics claim the same thing. What it amounts to is that people who get put into this asylum are crazy, and those who don’t are normal.

I would be forever branded on the forehead with the word “madman,” or perhaps, “reject.”