He also had the literary chops to back it all up, and wrote voluminously and brilliantly during his short but productive career.

Small wonder post-WWII Japan took him to heart he was a self-martyring embodiment of their collective misery. His life story reads like Gothic drama: multiple suicide attempts, usually with a woman indulgences in drugs and alcohol bitter feuds with family and rivals vomit and terror and finally death by his own hand. Human is the most unabashedly autobiographical of Dazai’s works, and for that reason one of the most difficult to stomach. I know I’m the one that’s changing, of course, and I suspect the day I sit down to read No Longer Human and find nothing in it any longer will be the day I no longer see any of myself in it.

And yet I’ve come back to that short space again and again, and each time I do, I find something else that simply did not seem to be there before. Oe’s story is epic in detail and unabashedly literary in its language and imagery, while Dazai’s novel is barely two hundred pages and constructed out of language so simple and spare there seems to be no room for further reduction. The two books could not be more dissimilar. One was Kenzaburo Oe’s The Silent Cry another, most likely the one I have come back to the most, is Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human. In the fifteen or so years that I’ve been reading literature from Japan, there are maybe two or three books from that whole oeuvre that I’ve come back to again and again and discovered more in each time.

No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai