What a bizarre and boring book! Horror manga artist Junji Ito adapts Osamu Dazai’s 1948 novel No Longer Human into comic form with mixed results. Ito’s art is fantastic as always but the story, etc.? Yeah, all of that is utter rubbish!
Apparently Dazai’s style was autobiographical fiction and I’ve never read the original book (nor ever will) so I can’t say how much of this is directly taken from the book or whether Ito added in biographical elements from Dazai’s life. But the book opens with an alcoholic writer and his young girlfriend committing suicide by drowning, which is really how Dazai died.
So the story as far as I can tell is that a boy from a wealthy family called Yozo Oba doesn’t feel like he’s human, for no reason, and that causes him great anxiety. Being sexually abused by male and female servants probably also has something to do with it! Anyway, tragedy follows him as an extremely ugly school friend kills himself and a girl he knocks up kills her sister after he has an affair with her. He’s slightly responsible for both so he’s a bit of a shitty guy but still their actions are absurdly over the top!
Later on he gets involved with the communists, continues to jump from woman to woman, becomes an alcoholic, attempts suicide, and that’s it. I’ve no clue what the point was - all I saw was gratuitously gloomy people being sad over their depressing lives. I didn’t understand why Oba doesn’t feel human or what we were meant to think about that.
It didn’t help that almost nothing that happened was remotely interesting. In addition to being tedious, some episodes were simply baffling. Like when Oba, as a defence mechanism, becomes the class clown, purposely making an ass of himself for the amusement of his classmates. But the grotesque friend Takeichi says that he knows Oba is making a fool of himself on purpose, which is apparently a terrible secret that sends Oba on a mental spiral where he contemplates murdering Takeichi to protect this “secret” - what?!? Yeah, he’s being an ass on purpose - so what?! Maybe it’s a cultural thing or has something to do with the era but I totally failed to grasp the significance of this.
Ito’s art though is wonderfully gruesome. I may never have understood what Oba’s problem was but I definitely felt his fear with Ito’s parade of bloated talking corpses, vengeful ghosts and insect people. The nightmare imagery from the suicide attempt on the beach in Chapter 7 (which also really happened to Dazai) was really terrifying.
It’s worth flicking through No Longer Human for the art but don’t torture yourself reading the dull, go-nowhere, overlong story. As far as I can tell it’s about a wretched, cowardly failure, who happens to be blessed with good looks, wandering through a directionless life, being miserable for the sake of being miserable until he finally makes a suicide attempt work. If this is the best thing Osamu Dazai wrote, it’s no wonder he’s unknown outside of Japan.
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