The Story Archive

No Longer Human

Osamu Dazai · 1948 CE · Novel · Japanese · Contemporary

A stranger is passed three photographs of a man he never met along with three notebooks in the man's hand, and the notebooks run from a wealthy northern childhood to a Tokyo art school and the drinking bars of the late thirties. Ōba Yōzō has been frightened of people since he was small and cannot guess what they want from him, so he works out that clowning will pass for a personality and keeps it up through school, cartooning, drink, morphine and a run of women who take him in. Published a month after Dazai's death at thirty-eight, and it has outsold everything else he wrote.

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Attributes

Genre
PsychologicalTragedy
Theme
Isolation & AlienationIdentity & SelfGuilt & ConscienceAppearance vs Reality
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
Anti-HeroScapegoat
Plot structure
Frame NarrativeConfessionUnreliable Narrator
Symbol / motif
The MaskThe PortraitThe Mirror
Conflict
vs Selfvs Society
Mode / tone
RealistIronicTragic
Culture / tradition
Japanese

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