A stark but powerful novel of modern Japan focuses on one unhappy young symbol of a dejected generation.

Booklist

**Mine has been a life of much shame. I can’t even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being. **

No Longer Human

Fiction by Osamu Dazai

Translated from Japanese by Donald Keene

Portraying himself as a failure, the protagonist of Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human narrates a seemingly normal life even while he feels himself incapable of understanding human beings. Oba Yozo’s attempts to reconcile himself to the world around him begin in early childhood, continue through high school, where he becomes a ’clown" to mask his alienation, and eventually lead to a failed suicide attempt as an adult. Without sentimentality, he records the casual cruelties of life and its fleeting moments of human connection and tenderness. Semi-autobiographical, No Longer Human is the final completed work of one of Japan’s most important writers, Osamu Dazai (1909-1948). The novel has come to “echo the sentiments of youth” (Hiroshi Ando, The Mainichi Daily News) from post-war Japan to the postmodern society of technology. Still one of the ten bestselling books in Japan, No Longer Human is a powerful exploration of an individual’s alienation from society.

Paperback(published Apr, 01 1973)

ISBN
9780811204811
Price US
14.95
Page Count
192

Ebook(published Apr, 01 1973)

ISBN
9780811220071
Price US
12.95
Portrait of Osamu Dazai

Osamu Dazai

20th century Japanese novelist

A stark but powerful novel of modern Japan focuses on one unhappy young symbol of a dejected generation.

Booklist

Seventy-five years later, No Longer Human still reads with an apt urgency. As the musician Patti Smith once put it, Dazai 'wrote at the pace of a dying man, yearning for...the solution to an unresolved equation.'

Jane Yong Kim, The Atlantic