Reviews

No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai

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ipsita's review against another edition

4.0

I think I’ll need several days or weeks to recover from what in the god’s name this book was cause I’m completely shook and also very much concerned about my mind?!!!! I can’t help find the character Yozo very relatable but also very foreign and detestable at some parts, but maybe that’s how we see parts of us too?!! This book made me question so many things and maybe that’s what unsettled me a bit. It also made me feel confused about what I was feeling all the through the book; I was sceptical, concerned, very much alarmed, enraged, sympathetic, cautionary curious and finally downhearted. It felt so raw, dark and twisted to read the author’s words but at the same time I kept thinking what the author himself must be going through to write such a story. I had to sit down for a hot moment and Google all about the author and what he might have gone through to draw such horrifyingly transparent image of the society and its expectations and how it molds a person’s existence in ways. I might not be well versed enough to explain this well but this book was overall an experience, an experience that changed how my mind works after reading it. It changed my perspective entirely.
And I’m still not sure how to rate this, I’m not ready. But for now, I’m giving it a 3.5 stars. All cause it made me think, and wonder about life, and honestly books that makes you rethink and change your views are the ones that affect our life entirely and the ones we can never forget. And I’m convinced this book was one of them.

Some of my favourite lines from the book,

“If you’ve slept soundly at night the morning is exhilarating, I suppose.”
“Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness. Everything passes. That is the one and only thing that I have thought resembled a truth in the society of human beings where I have dwelled up to now as in a burning hell. Everything passes.”
“I could believe in hell, but it was impossible for me to believe in the existence of heaven.”