Very bleak but Osamu Dazai pierces your heart with his writing. Nobody lives like the protagonist but we can all identify with some of his moods and behaviour. ( )

i adore osamu dazai s way of writing stories from the perspective of someone completely broken. kind of reminds me of other stories by storied storywriters. ( )

Stupidly absorbing. A 20th-century Notes from the Underground and everything Diary of an Oxygen Thief wanted to be but couldn't muster. An intimate portrayal of the heaviness of depression, isolation, and addiction. Amazing narrative framing, adroit prose, and meaningful structural irony. I can't wait to read more of Dazai's work. ( )

I was surprised to read that this remains one of the best selling novels in Japan. I guess it’s hard to know what will resonate with something from a different culture, especially when reading that work in translation. About a year ago I guess, i read George
Scialabba’s How To Be Depressed and William Styron’s Darkness Visible in succession - this book here would make a fitting triumvirate of depression literature. I might have mentioned this in one of the reviews I wrote for those books, but it seems to me that depression is a horribly narcissistic disease - the depressive episode makes all the world bend inward towards the black void swirling inside you. Everything seems designed to stab and poke at you in particular, and every perceived slight on the part of others is taken to be a sweeping criticism of your who existence. Perhaps this book’s greatest contribution is it’s title, whose English translation doesn’t seem to capture the feeling it has in the Chinese characters that constitute its original Japanese title 人間失格, approximately disqualified from humanity. It’s a great way, if a bit untranslatable, to describe the truly depressed person’s way of interfacing with the world. The fact that this act of disqualification is carried out and enforced by the depressive himself is an irony not lost on Osamu Dazai. The final lines of the book, where the narrator Yozo is described by one of the many women he was involved in over the course of the story as “a good boy, an angel,” far from the depiction Yozo himself gives as an alcoholic, alienated, good for nothing loser. It can often be bewildering for those around the depressed person, who they might see as a fine (qualified?) person, spiral into self destruction. If they could only just be happy like a normal person, they might say. Despite the criticism this kind of statement would get in the current climate of “accepting” mental illness, it’s actually true, and I think most depressed people would agree. I also think most depressed people are fighting every second of every day to be happy, and it’s only when they become too exhausted to fight anymore that depression wins.

All that being said, Yozo has really serious case of Main Character Syndrome. You may say, well sure, he’s the fucking main character of the book. What I mean is, we are presented with the unbroken ramblings of someone who is clearly self obsessed, with his good points (we hear a lot about his spectacular good looks and sense of humor) and his bad points. He only has to walk into a room for women to be falling all over him, and his emotion instability seems to spread like fire to anyone who draws near him. While this is a very accurate depiction of the depressed mindset, it can also be frustrating to spend a book’s length listening to someone like that ramble on. It makes you want to reach out and shake the bitch, saying shut up! You are so up your own ass that you can realize the great gift it is to be alive! You are small and insignificant in a way you can hardly imagine, and that is actually the most liberating realization you can have in life! Of course, Yozo can’t hear you; he’s a character in a book by an author who died long ago. But if you are depressed sometimes too (and I would venture most people who come to this book are) the things you might say to Yozo could equally be said to yourself. Don’t expect to come away from this with some transcendent knowledge about how to continue living in the face of the yawning void of melancholy - if anything, this is more a paean to desolation, a manifesto of someone too tired to keep fighting. But maybe you can think of this book as mirror for all the bad habits and cycles of thinking that keep you trapped, and next time you feel the black void opening again, do everything in your power not to be like Yozo. ( )

https://bnagasravika.wixsite.com/sravikareviews/post/book-review-no-longer-human... ( )