Osamu Dazai: No Longer Human

Bought this at a secondhand book shop on Rathdowne Street in Carlton, in between buying $2 classical records from the video shop nearby. I'd read Dazai's first novel The Setting Sun and enjoyed it, and this was better: utterly cynical, a study in misanthropy. Given the title I was concerned that it may resemble Kobo Abe's Face of Another, but fortunately it was less absurd and more... hate-filled.

Not sure whether humour was Dazai's intention, but so extreme was his hatred of Japan, humanity and existence that one can't help chuckle, particularly at passages like this:

The night I returned to Tokyo the snow was falling heavily. I drunkenly wandered along the rows of saloons behind the Ginza, singing ti myself over and over again, so softly it was only a whisper, "From here it's hundreds of miles to home... from here it's hundreds of miles to home." I walked along kicking with the point of my shoes the snow which was accumulating. Suddenly I vomited. This was the first time I had brought up blood. It formed a big rising sun flag in the snow. I squatted there for a while. Then with both hands I scooped up snow form places which were still clean and washed my face. I wept.

Weeping occurs frequently, which seems odd given the protagonist's general detachment from human emotion. Dazai's language is bare, his sentences short, meaning tersely conveyed, and his characters have a particularly abject understanding of society. This seems a particularly Japanese way of writing, and thinking, different to the "purity" of Kawabata, but present in Mishima (to a degree), Oe, Tanizaki and Keizo Hino, but none so spare and direct as Dazai here.

The prologue offers a unique and enticing introduction, a first person narration describing three photographs of the protagonist, from youth to middle-age. Here he is on his childhood:

Indeed, the more carefully you examine the child's smiling face the more you feel an indescribable, unspeakable horror creeping over you. You see that it is actually not a smiling face at all. The boy has not a suggestion of a smile. Look at his tightly clenched fists if you want proof. No human being can smile with his fists doubled like that. It is a monkey. A grinning monkey-face. The smile is nothing more than a puckering of ugly wrinkles. The photograph produces an expression so freakish, and at the time so unclean and even nauseating, that your impulse is to say, "What a wizened, hideous little boy!" I have never seen a child with such an unaccountable expression.

The narrative follows the character in the photograph through his life, as he steadily grows more detached from society and normality. Childhood is marked by clowning, adulthood by bohemianism, alcohol and prostitutes, and suicide attempts. The passage in which the protagonist attempts suicide by drowning is touching, given Dazai's own suicide by drowning. Fortunately this knowledge fails to dampen the enjoyment of this original, funny, depressing novel.