Japan’s watashi (one word for “I”) novel arrived in the 20th century. In contrast, English readers have such fare dating back to at least Thomas DeQuincy's Confessions of an Opium Eater (1822). Watashi novels typically are narrated first-person, call on autobiography for realism, and relish psychology. At 177 pages, No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai is slim but succeeds on all counts.
A bright literary flame that went out at age thirty-eight, Osamu was lucky he reached that age. Several suicide attempts included a love pact in his early twenties. In Pacific waters off Kamakura, the woman drowned, but Osamu was rescued and charged in her death. Add alcoholism, tuberculosis, morphine addiction, and a youthful friend who brings him “the mysteries of drink, cigarettes, prostitutes, pawnshops and left-wing thought.” All that is in No Longer Human and lifted from the author's life and remixed in this elegant retelling.
If I had to pick one quality of Osamu's novel that raises it to the top shelf of modern Japanese literature, it is restraint. For example, the protagonist Yozo sees his wife being violated by another man through a window. But he tells us, “The light was lit and two animals were visible.” Only later does he relate the unspecified two were his wife and a shopkeeper.
I was surprised I liked this watashi novel so much. The form can be tiresome. A quick example is American watashi novel Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes. On my work lunch hour in my Tech Pubs cubicle, I had to abandon it. Its manic tone was a slog. (Consider from similar punishing psychological trauma, Robert Pirsig eked out a transcendent literary work.)
In addition to restraint, a sincere narrative voice also elevates No Longer Human. Protagonist Yozo admits he's a loser from the get-go. He levels with the reader and draws them in. Yozo can't relate to other people in any trusting, emotional way. Hence he is obligated to deceive them with clowning, prevarication, and avoidance. And yet he has to get by in life. He has to keep going. His new friend in Tokyo at university shares with him the easy path of temptation. And if that path leads to a life of ruin, we readers still share Yozo's fall and that he can never bank any social capital.
In the inevitable downward arc—from cartoonist for children's books to cartoons for pornographic magazines, Dazai-san gives us a protagonist—who but for the grace of unknown gods—could be us. Our identification with Yozo’s humanity gives No Longer Human the universality of literature.
No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai, translated by Donald Keene, New Directions, New York, 1958, 177 pp., ISBN: 41-8112-04131-21.
Image credit: goodreads.com
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