“No Longer Human” by Osamu Dazai (pseudonym of Shūji Tsushima): Renowned Japanese “I-novel” has unacknowledged multiple personality

“I-novel is a literary genre in Japanese literature used to describe a type of confessional literature where the events in the story correspond to events in the author’s life.” Although the author typically uses first-person, “there are some instances where the author uses third-person or a named main character, such as Yozo in No Longer Human” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-novel).

Prologue

So far, I have read the Prologue, Epilogue, and first half of the novel. The prologue and epilogue are written by a man who hadn’t known Yozo, but had come into possession of three photographs taken of, and three Notebooks written by, Yozo, whom he describes as handsome, smirking, baffling, inhuman, monstrous, lacking in individuality, and inscrutable.

Epilogue

Speaking to the woman who gave him the photographs and notebooks, the man from the Prologue says, “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.” To which the woman replies, “The Yozo we knew…was a good boy, an angel.”

First Notebook (beginning)

First two lines: “Mine has been a life of much shame. I can’t even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being” (1, p.21).

“I have been sickly ever since I was a child and have frequently been confined to bed” (1, p. 22).

When his mealtime would come, his family would “fuss over me” and say “You must be hungry”…“but what they meant by feeling hungry completely escaped me” even though “I do eat a great deal all the same” (1, p. 23).

“…I still have no understanding of what makes human beings tick”…“I wonder if I have [ever] actually been happy”…“I simply don’t understand” (1, pp. 24-25).

“I have always shook with fright before human beings…I gradually perfected myself in the role of farcical eccentric” (1, p. 28).

First Notebook (continued)

“I acquired my reputation at school less because I was the son of a rich family than because, in the vulgar parlance, I had ‘brains.’ Being a sickly child, I often missed school for a month or two or even a whole year at a stretch. Nevertheless, when I…took the examinations at the end of the year, I was always first in my class, thanks to my ‘brains.’ I never studied, even when I was well”…“My report card was all A’s except for deportment (1, pp. 33-35). (Did he really never study, or did he have memory gaps for studying?)

“My true nature, however, was one diametrically opposed to the role of mischievous imp. Already by that time I had been taught a lamentable thing by the maids and menservants; I was being corrupted” (1, p. 35). He says he experienced “torments of hell every night…I did not tell anyone about that loathsome crime perpetrated on me by the servants” (1, p. 38).

Second Notebook (beginning)

Yozo’s role as “farcical eccentric” (see above) seems designed by his ample brains (see above) to fool his fellow students and teachers. But one fellow student, Takeichi, observing Yozo’s alleged mistakes and buffoonery, catches on and says, “You did it on purpose” (1, p. 44).

However, when Takeichi is caught in the rain and gets a serious ear infection, with both ears “bursting with pus, I [Yozo] simulated an exaggerated concern…Then, in the gentle tones a woman might use, I apologized, ‘I’m so sorry I dragged you out in all this rain.’ ” Then Yozo “painstakingly swabbed his ears. Even Takeichi seemed not to be aware of the hypocrisy, the scheming, behind my actions” (1, pp. 46-47).

Comments

Was Yozo “corrupted” by maids and menservants? Did he experience “torments of hell every night”? Did he have the kind and extent of child abuse that would cause him to develop multiple personality?

In the first half of the novel, Yozo appears to have three or four personalities:

First, is the personality who feels inhuman, who can’t understand what makes people tick, and isn’t even aware of ever feeling hungry. (Does he have a hidden personality, whose job it is to deal with bodily sensations, such as those of his stomach, possibly related to his childhood illnesses?) For him, odd behavior is a genuine aspect of his inhuman feelings.

Second, is a brainy schemer whose buffoonery is calculated to fool people, or at least is recognized by Yozo as doing so.

Third, it is possible that the clownish behavior is due to a clownish personality, since Yozo sometimes makes third-person reference to “the clown” (1, p. 50).

Fourth, there was Yozo’s caring behavior for his friend's infected ears. Yozo was cynical about it, but if the behavior’s apparent sincerity was convincing to his perceptive friend, it might indicate the presence of an empathetic, caring personality, which pulled Yozo’s strings from behind-the-scenes. That might explain why, in the last words of the novel, someone who knew Yozo describes him as “a good boy, an angel” (1, p. 177).

1. Osamu Dazai. No Longer Human [1948]. Translated from the Japanese by Donald Keene, 1958. New York, New Directions Paperback, 1973.