Books: Japanese Nihilist

NO LONGER HUMAN (177 pp.)—Osamu Dazai—New Directions ($3.50).

One day in 1948, aged 38, Japanese Novelist Osamu Dazai committed suicide by jumping into Tokyo’s Tamagawa Reservoir. It was Dazai’s fifth attempt, but he had long courted self-destruction in alcoholism and morphine addiction. The son of a rich landowning family, Novelist Dazai was deeply, perhaps disastrously, Westernized. The title of his first novel, The Setting Sun, provided a tag line (“people of the setting sun”) for postwar Japanese disillusionment and class disintegration. Spare, evocative and heavily autobiographical, Dazai’s novels are monochromes of despair. Their only affirmation is the fact that the author took the trouble to write them—and write them well.

The sole emotion the hero of No Longer Human feels is a horror of other humans. As a boy, Yozo has merely to watch the rest of the family of ten devour its food to lose his own appetite. When his father asks Yozo what present he wants from Tokyo, his first impulse is to answer: “Nothing.” (“The thought went through my mind that it didn’t make any difference.”) To mask his apartness, the youngster feels that he must play the clown, wins from his schoolmates the title of “Harold Lloyd of Northeast Japan.”

At college in Tokyo, a coarse painter friend introduces Yozo to “the mysteries of drink, cigarettes, prostitutes, pawnshops and left-wing thought.” For a young man whose will is as weak as his life drive, this strange combination paves the road to the lower depths. Yozo has an affair with a waitress, but fluffs his end of their suicide pact. Scrabbling for a living as a second-rate cartoonist, he is kept, for a time, by a woman journalist. To keep himself in cheap gin, the cartoonist sinks to pornography. Toward novel’s end, Yozo is even ready to make love to a monstrously crippled female druggist in return for morphine.

Out of these squalid though sometimes cruelly moving episodes, Yozo emerges with a stoic creed—”Everything passes.” Almost alone among recent Japanese literary imports, No Longer Human is strikingly free of cherry-blossom reveries and puzzling Oriental character motivations. If the author’s identity were unknown, this novel might easily be taken for the work of a U.S. Southern decadent who had lingered long at the café tables of the French existentialists.