COMMENTARY: No Longer Human (1948)
The following are thoughts and reactions I had while reading No Longer Human (1948) by Osamu Daiza. They do not reflect my overall post-reading opinion of the work. For self-study purposes, there may also be extensive summaries of the plot in these notes. In short…
⚠️ MAJOR SPOILER ALERTS AHEAD ⚠️
- Two chapters in. No major thoughts yet. It’s very “literary” in the sense that it’s a character study wherein moments exemplify, amplify, and sketches out how the protagonist thinks and feels about situations. This guy is obviously somewhere on the spectrum or something.
- Done the second “note”, which I guess is like chapters here. I’m realizing reading Dazai’s Wikipedia entry was a terrible, horrible, no good idea because this book is basically an autobiography isn’t it? I mean, sure he changed a few things, but the broad strokes are all here. So now I’m just getting a character study of Dazai?
- Pg. 124 - “Society. I felt as though even I were beginning at last to acquire some vague notion of what it meant. It is the struggle between one individual and another, a then-and-there struggle, in which the immediate triumph is everything. Human beings never submit to human beings. Even slaves practice their mean re-taliations. Human beings cannot conceive of any means of survival except in terms of a single then-and-there contest. They speak of duty to one’s country and suchlike things, but the object of their efforts is invariably the individual, and, even once the individual’s needs have been met, again the individual comes in. The incomprehensibility of society is the incomprehensibility of the individual. The ocean is not society; it is individuals. This was how I managed to gain a modicum of freedom from my terror at the illusion of the ocean called the world. I learned to behave rather aggressively, without the endless anxious worrying I knew before, responding as it were to the needs of the moment.