No Longer Human

It's a small book, not taking much time to read, but it trades lack of time for its impact size. Boy, this one'll stick for a minute. It's ambiguous in spots to make you think, it's interesting and oh man is it depressing at times. Not so much sad, but more-so just... it's not so fun. However, it is a good read, and I think it's a worthwhile one for some alternative perspective on things.

This is a good book. I am researching about borderline personality disorder and this a good book for learning about it. Osamu dazai is good at talking philosophically without making it too boring or hard to understand. It was a short book but it was worth reading. A quick, depressing read

A great book! Got this recommended to me by a friend and I can say I really relate to a lot of paragraphs inside the book. If you’re not in too much of a depressive state I would strongly recommend, because the book itself is very depressing, definitely gave me an alternative look at life.

I stumbled across this in a Jacob Geller video essay (if you haven’t watched his essays, you should; in my opinion he’s the best horror-centric video essayist out there), and so I was immediately interested because of how Geller pitched it; he gave the viewer a pretty intense trigger-warning, insinuating that this was going to be an intense, very bleak novel (the way he described it made me think it was going to in the vein of Murakami). Apparently Geller has never read Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, or Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory, or anything written by Kristopher Triana, but I digress. Published in 1975, it’s a very introspective, quasi-autobiographical novel—also one of the ten best-selling novels in Japan (I find this kind of surprising, but I suppose it captured the country’s zeitgeist at the time of publication)—exploring the liminal cultural spaces spanning from post-war Japan and a technology-driven postmodernism through the perspective of a very lonely, aimless, depressed MC who keeps on doing self-destructive things and to which bad things continually keep happening. It is bleak but not very “edgy” or graphic. And the one graphic event involved the r-word that rhymes with grape. But it mostly happened off-screen, was poetically insinuated to boot, and was more about the MC’s psychological reaction to it happening rather than a reliance on graphic details (which, again, there were none); unsettling but swallowable due to Dazai’s delicate approach. I liked this book but didn’t love it—partially because I wished there was a bit more Japanese culture interwoven throughout, partially because it was slightly overhyped. It is a very readable, well-paced book with great translated prose, but it didn’t quite scratch any of my genre, narrative, or prose itches. I kind of recommend it, though.

Nice book and WONDERFUL piece of literature! Not spoiling anything but it is a required read for all lovers of literature!

There was no errors with the condition of the book when it arrived. The book itself is very deep and good to think.

awesome book one of my favorites

My favorite book tbh. Dazai writes shame in the most beautiful manner. It’s sad and engaging.