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studenison 's review for:
No Longer Human
by Osamu Dazai
Weird and bleak, with a strange layer of irony that I'm not sure how strongly to believe in (especially while reading in translation). The narrator seems to veer from the pathetic to the comic with equally disastrous results, and we get treated to his car-crash-like dissolution, despite a ream of secondary characters queuing up to offer help, notably the various women who come into his life and take care of him.
It's hard to place this novel, like a lot of postwar Japanese stuff, but it has a gripping interiority which sucks the reader in and makes the world of the story somehow magnificent in its squalour. Not for everyone, and plenty of potentially triggering stuff around emotionally neglectful power dynamics. Wonderful prose, though.
It's hard to place this novel, like a lot of postwar Japanese stuff, but it has a gripping interiority which sucks the reader in and makes the world of the story somehow magnificent in its squalour. Not for everyone, and plenty of potentially triggering stuff around emotionally neglectful power dynamics. Wonderful prose, though.