His first adult acquaintance in Tokyo was a man who drowned him in cheap liquor, prostitution, and Marxism he found him wicked yet succumbed to his miserable companionship in which that misery was their pew. The same people who smiled together whispered wicked things about one another in the wake of their absence from this, he found humans duplicitous.

Yozo, brilliant and painfully aware, examined the nature of human beings under a microscope and could not make reason for their ways. Therefore, the hopelessness that lurked within him became lost in his absurdity. He embodied the bromide, “He feared what he could not understand,” and concluded this stratagem of clowning diverted their attentions. “…but it was extremely difficult for me to explain to Shigeko how much I feared them all, and how I was cursed by the unhappy peculiarity that the more I feared people the more I was liked, and the more I was liked the more I feared them – a process which eventually compelled me to runaway from everybody.”Īs a child, Yozo masked his fearsomeness of the human species with mischief and petulant clowning, believing himself to be a thespian and spectacle among his peers, teachers, and family members.

Forlorn, morose, and loathsome, Yozo begins his life as an anomaly.

His first-person narration describes a deep-seated despondency, a skin born unto him in which he had no way of shedding. The bewildering guise of human beings comes into perspective as Yozo, a young man raised in rural Japan, experiences a series of events that question the nature of human morality and ethics.

No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai