No Longer Human (Junji Ito)

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It is the only adaptation you will need, but it is not necessarily easier to read than the original. This was my first experience with Osamu Dazai's novel No Longer Human, which has been considered his suicide note and which is, at least in this form, a haunting and painful tale of, well, lots of things, but perhaps mostly misery and the ways in which our own misery leads us to inflict misery on others. He has trouble interacting with people and society, seeming to be one of those people incapable of understanding that people are not perfectly frank and truthful all the time, and thus he adopts "clowning" as his mode of interaction.

Anyway, tragedy follows him as an extremely ugly school friend kills himself and a girl he knocks up kills her sister after he has an affair with her. By seeing Dazai talking about this, the previous narration and plot are no longer in the same register as the novel. Oba (despicably) sees it happening and runs away, then gets all messed up about it, on his own behalf (he seems mostly unconcerned about his wife's trauma). It sticks with me even today, many months later, and I suspect I will come back to it throughout my life and reread it as I age. He alternates between living off a family allowance, being a kept man, and a life of poverty as a struggling manga artist and aspiring painter.These and various other, generalizations were products of an observation of women since boyhood days, but my conclusion was that though women appear to belong to the same species as man, they are actually quite different creatures, and these incomprehensible, insidious beings have, fantastic as it seems, always looked after me.

Apparently Dazai’s style was autobiographical fiction and I’ve never read the original book (nor ever will) so I can’t say how much of this is directly taken from the book or whether Ito added in biographical elements from Dazai’s life. To compensate he becomes a class clown and womanizer in attempts fit in with other people -- from whom he feels separate and whom he hates and fears. It's a good thing he didn't end up a twisted sociopath, though there were instances when he was teetering on the edge of that abyss. Early on, a young man and his lover commit suicide by drowning themselves in a river, something Dasai himself did five days after completing this book.In some ways, for me, that brings the author (in this case, Ito) and the character closer together and exacerbates the awfulness of the content. He later reconnects with that cousin in the mental hospital, where she is still crazy, but he goes to live with her and her son, who is drawn to look like Takeichi. Ito is known for his horror work, and I was horrified by this book but I don't think it was in the way he meant.

As far as I can tell it’s about a wretched, cowardly failure, who happens to be blessed with good looks, wandering through a directionless life, being miserable for the sake of being miserable until he finally makes a suicide attempt work. Horror manga artist Junji Ito adapts Osamu Dazai’s 1948 novel No Longer Human into comic form with mixed results. Originally I read Junji's piece first, not even knowing that it was a version of a Japanese classic book. He’s slightly responsible for both so he’s a bit of a shitty guy but still their actions are absurdly over the top! No Longer Human follows the life of Oba Yozo from childhood into an adulthood marked by womanizing, depression and substance addiction (you can read my review of the novel here, which will give a better idea of the story).The most common obsessions are with beauty, long hair, and beautiful girls, especially in his Tomie and Flesh-Colored Horror comic collections.

It's a naturalistic and "literary" story compared to Junji Ito's usual supernatural horror fare - painful and sad where those stories are often shocking and funny and, yes, sometimes painful and sad. The suicide is immediately followed by a recollection of childhood, and one just assumes the man in the first chapter is the older representation of the narrator. Junji Ito tackled heavy, mature themes for this one, and departed from his usual scare tactics to introduce us to the deep storytelling and psychological strain characteristic of the important novelist. I haven't read the original novel, but my understanding is that Ito has taken many liberties, including the insertion of original author Osamu Dazai as an actual character. Oba is himself haunted by ghosts in his daily life, so he draws mostly ghosts, so you can see the attraction to the supernatural for Ito.Ito's adaptation offers less of a distancing element, but conversely also removes the I-Novel association. The wide eyes and open mouth of surprise and/or horror are so overused and stiff as to be annoying rather than moving.