The Cult Classic That Captures the Stress of Social Alienation

A gloomy young man feels deeply alienated from society. He is preoccupied with his inability to reveal himself to others but has learned to act the clown; he notes that, since childhood, he has “seemed to lack the qualifications of a human being.” He feels distant from his family and freely criticizes his friends. He trains his considerable wit equally on social norms—which he finds almost uniformly silly—and on himself, for his unease in navigating them. He treats his alienation alternately as a joke and as a life sentence.

A reader discovering Yozo Oba today might see in his ironic detachment and biting self-judgment the telltale signs of an antihero. His caustic first-person narration is the jolting spine of the novel he appears in: No Longer Human, by the Japanese writer Osamu Dazai. The 1948 book, which follows Yozo from childhood to adulthood as he unsparingly traces his (and society’s) failings, is a classic of modern Japanese literature; when it was released stateside a decade after its initial publication, The New York praised it, calling it a “self-prosecution,” a “damning narrative told in a conversational tone.” has since become a minimalist cult favorite, championed by artists and adapted into films and graphic novels; Dazai himself has also popped up as a character in popular manga series.