A review by ctenophora
No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai

dark tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

This book had a strong start, in the beginning I actually identified with some of the experiences he had mentioned in the first notebook, but after that it just spirals into misogyny and it just gets unpleasant to read. Besides the whole misogony thing, after a while it got really hard to take him seriously at all, which is something I was trying really hard to do from the beginning. I even started becoming ashamed that I identified with some of his thoughts/experiences to begin with.

This book gets 0 points on character development. Yozo learns absolutely nothing from all of this. He probably still treats women the same too, he hasn’t learned anything from his time in depression and addiction, nothing about him had changed.
Yozo doesn’t even pay attention to any of the horrible things that happen to the people around him (such as his wife getting raped in front of him), he’s so invested in his own pain and misery and it’s??? So weird???? Like what was the point of the book???? If he didn’t at least learn something ????? Like drink some water man???? Idk touch some grass talk to people?????

He also just
Watches his wife get raped like that and just
What the fuck, man
Plus, he has the audacity to say that he can choose whether or not to forgive her

I can rant all day about how much I dislike this man.

The writing is good, I liked it a lot, it’s simple and death scenes or other tragic scenes don’t take up more than 1 line often, which kind of reflects how much Yozo cares about it, I guess. Overall I appreciate the simplicity of it, It was fun to read in that aspect.

The end is quite nice I think, nothing too much, but pleasant. 
I think my thoughts on the book overall were described pretty well at the ending:  “Some parts are rather exaggerated I can tell, … If everything written in these notebooks is true, I probably would have wanted to put him in an insane asylum myself if I were his friend.”