Ōba befriends him to prevent Takeichi from revealing his secret. Second Memorandum: Ōba becomes increasingly concerned over the potential penetrability of his cheerful facade by his schoolmate Takeichi, who sees through his false buffoonery.He is sexually abused by a male servant and a female servant during his childhood, but decides that reporting it would be useless. First Memorandum: Overcome by an intense feeling of alienation and otherness and finding it nearly impossible to understand those who surround him who live in egoism and bad faith, Ōba can't help but resort to buffoonery in order to establish interpersonal relationships.The work is made up of three chapters, or "memoranda", which chronicle the life of Ōba from his early childhood to his late twenties. No Longer Human is told in the form of notebooks left by one Ōba Yōzō ( 大庭葉蔵), a troubled man incapable of revealing his true self to others, and who, instead, maintains a facade of hollow jocularity. Many believe the book to have been his will, as Dazai took his own life shortly after the last part of the book (which had appeared in serial form) was published.Īs of January 1, 2019, the book is in the public domain. Much like the protagonist Yōzō, Dazai attempted suicide a total of five times in his lifetime, with consorts. The novel presents recurring themes in the author's life, including suicide, social alienation, and depression.
The novel, narrated in first person, contains several elements which portray an autobiographical basis but is in fact categorized under the semi-autobiographical genre since the characters in the book are all fictional.
The literal translation of the title, discussed by Donald Keene in his preface to the English translation, is "Disqualified From Being Human". It is considered Dazai's masterpiece and ranks as the second-best selling novel ever in Japan, behind Natsume Sōseki's Kokoro. No Longer Human ( 人間失格, Ningen Shikkaku) is a 1948 Japanese novel by Osamu Dazai.
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