No Longer Human

by Osamu Dazai, Donald Keene (Translator)

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

No Longer Human is a beautifully crafted novel that tells the story of a man who feels disconnected from those around him, ostracized by society. With a fresh voice that doesn’t hold back, Dazai perfectly captures the wonders — and cruelty — of the human experience.

The poignant and fascinating story of a young man who is caught between the breakup of the traditions of a northern Japanese aristocratic family and the impact of Western ideas.

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.

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. His 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.

Still one of the ten bestselling books in Japan, No Longer Human is an important and unforgettable modern classic: “The struggle of the individual to fit into a normalizing society remains just as relevant today as it was at the time of writing.” (The Japan Times)

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811204811
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	01/17/1973
Series:	New Directions Book.
Edition description:	Revised ed.
Pages:	176
Sales rank:	3,345
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.50(d)
Lexile:	1070L (what's this?)

About the Author

Osamu Dazai was born in 1909 into a powerful landowning family of northern Japan. A brilliant student, he entered the French department of Tokyo University in 1930, but later boasted that in the five years before he left without a degree, he had never attended a lecture. Dazai was famous for confronting head-on the social and moral crises of postwar Japan before he committed suicide by throwing himself into Tokyo’s Tamagawa Aqueduct. His body was found on what would have been his 39th birthday.

Donald Keene, the author of dozens of books in both English and Japanese as well as the famed translator of Dazai, Kawabata, and Mishima, was the first non-Japanese to receive the Yomiuri Prize for Literature.

Editorial Reviews

"No Longer Human is his masterpiece, though all his work is worthy. Dazai was an aristocratic tramp, a self described delinquent, yet he wrote with the forbearance of a fasting scribe. "

Patti Smith

"Dazai’s brand of egoistic pessimism dovetails organically with the emo chic of this cultural moment."

Book Review - The New York Times - Andrew Martin

"What I despise about Dazai is that he exposes precisely those things in myself that I most want to hide."

Yukio Mishima

"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.'"

The Atlantic - Jane Yong Kim

"Dazai offers something permanent and beautiful."

The New York Times - Book Review

"Dazai offers something permanent and beautiful."

The New York Times Book Review

"No Longer Human is his masterpiece, though all his work is worthy. Dazai was an aristocratic tramp, a self described delinquent, yet he wrote with the forbearance of a fasting scribe."

Patit Smith

"From the point of view of wholesome common sense, Dazai’s writings may be regarded as the soliloquies of a deviant."

Yasunari Kawabata

The novel has a timeless quality: The struggle of the individual to fit into a normalizing society remains just as relevant today as it was at the time of writing.”

Japan Times

"Today, such a writer might be castigated, condemned and turned into an instant pariah: Perhaps his books would be taken from bookshops. Yet when Osamu Dazai's short, electrifying novel, "Ningen Shikkaku" (No Longer Human) was published in 1948, it triggered a huge "Dazai Boom."…" —Damian Flanagan, The Japan Times: "A journey to hell with Osamu Dazai, Japan's ultimate bad boy novelist"

"Dazai's brand of egoistic pessimism dovetails organically with the emo chic of this cultural moment…and with the inner lives of teenagers of all eras." — Andrew Martin, The New York Times

The Cult Classic That Captures the Stress of Social Alienation… The Japanese novelist Osamu Dazai wrote, better than almost anyone, about the thin line between isolation and belonging." —Jane Yong Kim, The Atlantic

"[No Longer Human] is remarkable…What makes it so in part is its utterly beguiling frankness, a frankness that somehow avoids bitterness and self-pity while not lacking in rancor or humor." —Peter Selgin, award-winning author and illustrator, for Craft Literary magazine

"This contemporary translation will be welcomed by all fans of modern Japanese literature as well as by readers familiar with Dazai." — Rafu Shimpo

"Since about the time of Osamu Dazai's death in 1948, the publishing firm of Tuttle has been instrumental in bringing translations of Japanese literature and culture into forms suitable for the English-speaking audience." —ICv2

From the Publisher