Japanese Literature Summaries
日本語

No Longer Human — Summary and Characters

Notebooks of a man who played the clown

Author
Dazai Osamu
Published
June 1948
First appeared in
Tenbō
Form
Novel
Genres
  • Psychological
  • Social
Setting
  • Aomori
  • Tokyo
  • Kanagawa
Length
73,021 characters
Reading time
About 2 hr 26 min
Orthography
Modern script and kana

About this work

Dazai Osamu's best-known work and his last completed novel, published in 1948, weeks before he drowned himself in the Tamagawa Canal. It presents three notebooks left by Ōba Yōzō, framed by a narrator who resembles the author. Unable to understand how other people live, and able to reach them only by playing the clown, Yōzō drifts toward ruin. Read as a confession of the anguish of youth, it has continued to find readers in every generation.

Summary

Ōba Yōzō, born into a wealthy family in the northeast of Japan, has been unable since childhood to make sense of how human beings live, and is terrified of other people's anger and of whatever they really think. To hide that fear he makes himself a clown, and turns clowning into his way of getting through life. In Tokyo, Horiki, whom he meets at an art school, introduces him to drink and tobacco, to prostitutes and to the left-wing movement, and he slides toward ruin. He attempts a double suicide with a café hostess in the sea at Kamakura and survives alone, which deepens his sense of guilt. He then marries Yoshiko, an artless and trusting girl, and for a time lives quietly — until she is violated, and he returns to drink, falls into morphine addiction, and is finally shut up in an asylum. He has lost his qualification as a human being. So the notebooks end; a ruined man, Yōzō is taken in by his elder brother and lives out his days in obscurity in the country with an old maidservant.

Characters

Chapter-by-chapter synopsis

The app covers this work chapter by chapter (full text in the app).

  1. 1. About This Work
  2. 2. Main Characters
  3. 3. Major Supporting Characters
  4. 4. Preface — Three Photographs
  5. 5. The First Notebook — Clowning as a Way of Life
  6. 6. The Second Notebook — "On Purpose" Exposed, and the Sea at Kamakura
  7. 7. The Third Notebook (Part One) — Drifting from Woman to Woman
  8. 8. The Third Notebook (Part Two) — The Night Yoshiko's Trust Was Defiled
  9. 9. The Ending — The Asylum, and a Ruined Man
  10. 10. Key Motifs and Foreshadowing

The opening (original text)

Mine has been a life of much shame. I cannot even guess at what it is to live as a human being. I was born in a village in the northeast, so it was not until I was quite grown that I first saw a train. I climbed the station footbridge and came down the other side, never once realizing that it had been built to carry people over the tracks; I was sure it was there only to make the station grounds complicated and amusing and stylish, like something in a foreign playground.

No Longer Human by Dazai Osamu (Aozora Bunko)

The ending (original text)

"The Yō-chan we knew was so straightforward, so quick to see what you wanted — if only he hadn't drunk. No, even when he drank … he was as good as an angel."

No Longer Human by Dazai Osamu (Aozora Bunko)

Famous passages

Mine has been a life of much shame.

The opening line of the protagonist Ōba Yōzō's notebooks. This single sentence sets the tone of self-negation that runs through the entire confession that follows.

Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness. Everything simply passes by.

A line placed at the close of the notebooks. A resignation that happiness and unhappiness alike simply flow away is shown as the endpoint of Yōzō's long confession.

I ask God: is non-resistance itself a sin?

A question posed by Yōzō after he is committed to a mental hospital. In a single line, he lays his whole life of drifting without resistance before God.

Read the original

The original Japanese text is available at Aozora Bunko, and the app downloads the same text for its vertical-text reader.

Aozora Bunko library card

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