Given the novel’s enduring popularity, it’s no surprise that several manga artists have adapted Dazai’s text as a graphic novel. Framing Yozo’s story is a second narrative delivered by an unnamed author who has found three photographs of Yozo: as a child of ten, “a small boy surrounded by a great many women” as a college student, handsome but “strangely unpleasant” and as man in his later twenties, his hair “streaked with gray,” and his face “devoid of expression.”* In the second and third sections, Yozo documents his troubled adulthood, as he abandons school for a life of drinking and illicit relationships, bouncing from one woman to the next with little regard for the harm he causes them - or himself. In the first, Yozo describes his childhood: his uneasy relationship with his father, his clownish behavior at school, and his abuse at the hands of a female servant. The novel is divided into three sections, or “notebooks,” each corresponding to a period in the protagonist’s life. The protagonist’s life follows a trajectory similar to Dazai’s: convinced that his life is an empty charade, Yozo drops out of school joins the Communist Party enters into a suicide pact with a virtual stranger and woos lonely women, using them for shelter, emotional comfort, and financial support after his father, a prominent politician, disowns him. The story, modeled on Dazai’s own life, chronicles a dissolute young man’s profound estrangement from his family and peers.
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First published in 1948, Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human became one of the most widely read books in post-war Japan.