The Confessions of a Dead Man

No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai

As I made my way through the bookstore in search of this book, I saw the bookseller’s eye shuffle. As soon as I located and subsequently picked up the book and admired its cover art, he approached me and discouraged me from reading it if I was going through something tragic. “This is a confession”, he said. He proclaimed that the depiction of the worth of human life or its absence thereafter has made readers lose their sanity, has made grown men mad, and women weep. I am already insane. I bought two copies.

The book “No Longer Human” was originally written by Osamu Dazai, and later, Junji Ito wrote and illustrated a manga adaptation. I read Osamu’s book and grew sad. Then, I read Ito’s adaptation and wept. Then, I researched Osamu and…

I now wish I had listened to the bookseller.

This book talks about a man, Yozo, a son of a wealthy politician and someone who has a very peculiar perspective on life. He looks at life through an economic lens. He believes desire and emotions to be unproductive, human connection to be perplexing, and purpose to be directionless. To paint a picture, he once saw a bridge and grew fond of its unique and weird design. As soon as he learned that the bridge served a purpose (to help people cross it), he lost all interest. Yozo questioned human’s tendency to attach a purpose and a bigger meaning to everything. Why couldn’t they do something for the sake of just doing it?

Due to this mindset, Yozo spent his time alone. He would do whatever others wanted, not because he cared or loved but because he did not want to let other people down. He tried to be the class clown so that people would not take him seriously. As he grew older, he found that the only things in this world that served no greater purpose than to just exist were painting and art. He wanted to go to Art School but his father denied it. This sent him into a life of alcoholism (according to him it made him feel good) and prostitution (again, since it was purely transactional). Yozo was a beautiful man and usually found himself surrounded by women. According to him, something about his loneliness made “them” go crazy. This was Yozo’s biggest fear. For most of his life, the maids of his house used to look after him and care for him. To him, being cared for and loved was hell.

Yozo tried to kill himself twice, once by drowning and the second with an overdose. Unfortunately for him, fortunately for us, he survived both times. At the end of the book, Yozo is in his late twenties, bound to a wheelchair and in between life and death. He is no longer human, he just exists with no greater purpose. To him, everything just passes.

But this is not tragic enough… what I am about to tell you, is.

Osamu Dazai, the author of the original book, was the son of a wealthy politician. He was a class clown. He wanted to go to Art School. He attempted to commit suicide twice. For most of his life, he held some of the beliefs that Yozo also held. One can estimate that the other beliefs that Yozo held were not foreign to Osamu either. Given this background, and a re-read of the original book, one starts to understand that this is not a fictional novel…

It is a diary. However, the only difference in Yozo and Osamu’s life was the ending.

For all I knew, while reading this “fictional” book with its “fictional characters”, I was reading the confessions of a dead man. I say a dead man, because a short while after this book’s release, Osamu’s body was found in a river in Japan. Unlike his creation, Yozo, who lived, Osamu attempted to end his life for a third time. This time, he did not survive.

What eats me up from the inside is that in Ito’s adaption (which is much more brutal may I add), in the epilogue, a girl who knew Yozo says that despite all his shortcomings and weird perspectives. Yozo was a good boy… he was an angel and all of this was his father’s fault. Only if he had let him go to Art School.

A man who made a novel about himself with such rationality and pessimism in each word still tried to give himself a happy ending for some reason. Despite what life had thrown at him, he still somewhere somehow had the will to survive. Maybe the ending was not so much there for the reader, as much as it was there for the author. Perhaps, the ending was a constant reminder that things will eventually get better for him. Unbeknownst to him, the only part of this whole book that would be fiction… was the happy ending.