Still Human

Osamu Dazai and giving the reader credit

Two things I do a lot: Read older novels, and obsess over every moving part of the process by which new novels come into being. Since I can’t recreate the literary scene of London in 1871 or Tokyo in 1959, the former can at times undercut the latter. But it’s fun to try to articulate where we could do more to carry forward the lessons of older fiction. Osamu Dazai is a particularly interesting teacher.

The protagonist of Dazai’s No Longer Human (1948, trans. Donald Keene) is a dissolute young man from a wealthy family. Yozo is an instance of a classic novel protagonist archetype: The declassé flaneur ne’er-do-welling his way around a cosmopolitan city, in this case Tokyo. The novel is structured as a series of confessional notebooks filled by Yozo from around 1930 to 1935, as explained in an epilogue which pulls the authentification-via-found-text move.

The beach near Kamakura at dusk

When I started reading No Longer Human, it seemed as if it might be a story of true alienation, in the sense of a life lived without familiar human connection. It’s actually something like the opposite. For all that Yozo fears that he is somehow not human and can’t commune with real humans, his ability to connect with people is laughably impressive. Though “people” mostly means “women,” and “connect” mostly means “exploit.”

Lots of women want to sleep with and even care for the broke and self-destructive Yozo. He lets them do so, and then he inevitably leaves them to go on a bender and find another woman. Which makes him far from admirable, in conventional moral terms, both then and now. But it also doesn’t strictly look like alienation to a contemporary reader. After all, we know that the present-day marker of being an Alienated Young Man is to be bereft of all romantic and sexual success. Running around Tokyo shacking up with waitresses while alcoholism destroys your health might have read as a sad and cautionary fall from upper-class grace in 1948. In 2025, it still looks disreputable, yes, but at least no one could call our roguish protagonist an incel.

If it sounds like I’m being harsh on Yozo, just trust me when I say his own narration, and the entire structure of the book, set him up to come off as someone you wouldn’t want to spend time around. I’m sure my sophisticated subscribers don’t need this next piece of analysis, so consider it a memorial to all the times I’ve had to explain that a main character’s moral failings don’t invalidate a made-up story: The hope with a character like Yozo is that you’ll find him interesting to read about when he’s at the safe remove of existing only in language. Why else do we read fiction if not to access forms of understanding (not to invoke the overused concept of ‘empathy’) that are much harder to achieve in real life? It’s more fun to read about Yozo than to have him owing you money.

Dislikable and perhaps irredeemable protagonists are one thing I’d like to see explored more widely in the often far too fussbudget contemporary American novel. Another thing I’d like to see more of is writing like the passage below. Spoiler alert, but though this is a dramatic moment, it’s also just one picaresque turn in a story full of them:

As I stood there hesitating, she got up and looked inside my wallet. “Is that all you have?”

Her voice was innocent, but it cut me to the quick. It was painful as only the voice of the first woman I had ever loved could be painful. “Is that all?” No, even that suggested more money than I had—three copper coins don’t count as money at all. This was a humiliation more strange than any I had tasted before, a humiliation I could not live with. I suppose I had still not managed to extricate myself from the part of the rich man’s son. It was then I myself determined, this time as a reality, to kill myself.

We threw ourselves into the sea at Kamakura that night. She untied her sash, saying she borrowed it from a friend at the café, and left it folded neatly on a rock. I removed my coat and put it in the same spot. We entered the water together.

She died. I was saved.

The “she” here is Tsuneko, a waitress at a cafe in Ginza whom our hero met, seduced, abandoned, and re-embraced, only to lead her to her doom. The action in this passage is of course sad, but I found the way it’s written fascinating.

Yozo’s “humiliation” is familiar and relatable across time and space and culture: Not having enough money to do something you want to do. His reasoning for committing suicide, however, is so minimal as to be gnomic. The issue is that Yozo hasn’t extricated himself from the “part” of the rich man’s son? He’s going to kill himself, and by extension someone else, because his theatrics aren’t going according to plan? Since Yozo is already debauched and disgraced and thus not doing much to save face, this seems like is a thin alibi for an impulsive, reckless search for sensation and meaning. But that’s just a guess, since we get so little on the page.

Yozo and Tsuneko then abruptly go into the water with no ceremony except an attempt to preserve a borrowed kimono sash. “[T]his time as a reality” meanwhile gets ironized only a few sentences after it was first said, when we discover that Yozo’s self-proclaimed reality will become only another lamentable blip for him, while being the realest thing possible for someone else. And then there’s the glib mystery of, “She died. I was saved.” No images, no scene; just skipping ahead to the outcome¹.

Dazai is giving the reader credit for being able to parse Yozo’s actions and narration without hand-holding. You can either believe in this unsettling sequence of events or not. It happened because it happened. It’s being said this way because this is how this guy writes in his notebooks. If you keep reading, it’s because you’re willing to accept the strangeness, the abruptness, and the particularity. This passage is the truth of the narrator (and of the unfortunate Tsuneko), presented without laborious authentication.

Either Yozo convinces you, or he doesn’t, but the worst move of all would be to make him more generic by making him more legible. To circle back to Yozo’s blatant indictability, Dazai is daring the reader not so much to sympathize as simply to understand. If you are interested in this story, told by this narrator, then you have to take the risk of believing someone would act this way and talk this way about it. That it’s all “strange” and “alienating,” to borrow the language both of the novel itself and the decades of discussion around it, is exactly the point.

In lieu of a longer rant, I’ll just say that contemporary American commercial publishers seem to have developed a superstitious belief that people who buy novels need their hands held. There’s a general fear of giving readers almost any credit at all. And yet here I am, telling you about why I appreciated this move when I discovered it in a book that was first published in occupied Postwar Japan, and which I bought at a bookstore in Missoula years ago, kept when I moved to Laramie, and finally finished last week. I can’t be the only one who would rather read this kind of writing than another studious and cautious elaboration of whatever.

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A Poem

Deirdre Brennan is treading on birdshadows.

1. No Longer Human is, if not exactly autobiographical (we can hope), closely inspired by Dazai’s own life. Dazai was a handsome guy from an upper-class background in Tohoku, much like Yozo. He cavorted around Prewar Tokyo, including a stint as a card-carrying communist, and struggled with alcoholism. In his late thirties, he and his lover hurled themselves into a flooded canal near his home in Tokyo. Unlike in the passage analyzed above, both Dazai and his lover died.