When I engage with older work, I feel a strong pull towards the imagery of cigarettes. There wasn’t much to do those days, you know– when one was bored, one had no choice but to hit the street, smoke some cigarettes, and find trouble. The protagonist of the story I just uploaded smokes cigarettes. This Palestinian man with a gun pointed at him looks impossibly cool and nonchalant while smoking a cigarette. And naturally, the protagonist of No Longer Human smokes cigarettes.
Ever since I first read no Longer Human as a teen, it has been a work close to my heart. I hold it in high esteem, but I don’t think I was able to say “This is one of my favorite books,” out loud, to another human being, with my lips and teeth, until my early twenties, once my partner had been living with me and my parents for quite some time. It is a harrowing work, dark and relentless, about how difficult it is to live when your spirit is locked so deeply inside yourself not even you have a chance of taking it out.
Naturally, that type of depression begets an intense type of self-obsession, so I wouldn’t recommend it if that type of thing irritates you. But upon my most recent reread, I found it quite funny in some parts, and a good look at Japanese society right before World War II.
It doesn’t feel like there’s a meaningful difference between then and now.
Indeed, on this reread I was struck by how powerless the people around the protagonist are in curtailing his increasingly erratic behavior. Even his family, who have money and status, can’t do anything to meaningfully help him. They can’t understand anything outside of standardized prescribed behavior, and even if they could, they’re too enveloped in their own everyday misery and difficulties to see what’s going on. When tragedy strikes, it’s everybody’s fault, but it’s also nobody’s, because if anyone could do anything to begin with, things would have never gotten that bad.
But yes, No Longer Human is a lurid, breezy, feel-bad story, with lots of cringe and depravity. I love it! Dazai really lived that way, and I hope he has found peace in the afterlife. I would also like to think he would appreciate this pic.
That day, I left behind a barely smoked black cigarette strained with lipstick, with all the other used up butts. It felt slightly scandalous.