Can someone who's smarter than me explain what this book is about? I read it in the original language so maybe that hinders my comprehension of it but he's just a failed artist who drinks a lot, tries to get into a relationship, and joins a communist party, and then he gets sent to a mental institution and that's it? What's the point? Is it supposed to be about how life ruins people and makes them incapable of realizing their passions?
I ask this with as much sincerity as I can muster -- if you didn't immediately get what this book was about, why are you on /lit/? Not in a "you're retarded" way, more in a "how did this book not touch your soul if you post on this website" way
>>25282619>t. plotfag
>>25282624I guess some of it was pretty relatable, but he's too successful with women
>>25282619There's nothing to get, Dazai is just a hack (and should be called ダサい). Mishima ridicules his schtick in the Immoral Education Course
>>25282696But Dazai is much better than Mishima and less of a larper and also wasn't a homosexual
>>25282624Seconding OP here, the book is fucking infuriating because he constantly talks about how he's adored by every woman he meets and stumbles into romance after romance against all reasonHe's the polar opposite of 4chan, he's like some self-described "femcel" on Crystalcafe who actually has sex and relationships all the time
>>25282619It's just a badly written suicide note
>>25282619he's a fucking loser with no self accountability, it's obvious why people find it relatable in current year. It's this weird romanticized nihilism that is completely artificial and self induced. Ignore this anon >>25282624
>>25283284>>25283122>>25282696The ntr scene saves it atleast in the manga its hawt
>>25283122I knew that Dazai drowned himself to death with his partner and honestly the book felt like way too much of a self insert. I honestly loved the prose (especially in the 2nd quarter of the book), and some of it was pretty relatable. I can't in good faith say it was a bad book. But it wasn't all that to me
>>25282619>Can someone who's smarter than me explain what this book is about?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizoid_personality_disorder
>>25283310it seems a lot more like BPD
>>25282619Also guys should I watch that anime "Bungou Stray Dogs?" Is it as good as the book?
>>25283312>>25283310Retards its antisocial behaviour the real kindNot the anxious introvert faggy type
>>25282619the book is about a man who has been performing humanity since age six and finally runs out of performances. that's it. yozo is not a failed artist. he is a successful clown who got tired. the communist party is a costume he wears for nine pages. the woman is a costume. the asylum is the costume coming off. you read it in the original and missed the mask because the mask is the prose. the question you asked is the question yozo would have asked. which is the joke.
>>25283444This is a LLM
>>25283451>>25283444These are the same poster
>>25283456Meds
It's crazy how incels focus solely on the fact he got women as if that didn't just fuck up his life even more.
>>25283466Yeah they dumb
>>25283444Is that what お道化 means?
the 4 episode anime is better than both the book and the manga
>>25283304>a semibiographical work felt like a self insertThe state of /lit/jeets.
>>25282619It's pretty fucking explicit in book 1, but I'll take the bait. The character is suffering from either lifelong mental illness, trauma from being molested in youth, or (literal) autism. He struggles to enjoy what others do, to understand them, and to overcome his own passivity or lack of motivation. He cannot recognize his own internal signals like hunger and ends up playing a clown to earn social credit because that method doesn't require him to follow conventions to succeed socially. In adulthood he chases contentment using traditional methods (alcohol, sex, relationships) and eventually succumbs to addiction. Any women he bags along the way fail to satisfy him because he is unable to experience forms of happiness, eventually developing self-sabotage habits for fear of others seeing his assumed awful self. The only woman he claims to have truly love is also the only one he can't have, and he doesn't develop that love until she's dead, implying he is only attracted because he subconsciously creates his own suffering. The ending is a refutation of Yozo's point. Even though he carried a negative image of himself, he was viewed positively by those around him (especially considering his circumstances) and was actually a normal, if unfortunate, human. Personally I reject this as a literal interpretation because Dazai fucking killed himself a week later, so I choose to believe the authorial intent is to either satirize the normal humans' ignorance of his illness or argue that introspection is constant suffering under assumptions of alienation. He's not exactly an incel like Dostoevsky's Underground Man or Ignatius Reilly. Yozo is more like a Salinger character who is struggling despite inheriting wealth, intelligence or sensitivity. Regardless, the two are adjacent to each other because the ability to have sex is not the point. Incels blame a lack of sex for their misery but generally it's their emotional and mental state that leads to failure in society beyond sex, so it comes back to depression or autism imo. All of these types of characters are primed to think over feel, which leads to a hyperawareness of the self.
>>25282748His character (which was based on his image) just look at his wife being raped, that's next level cuckery, not to mention the guy is just bing wala hoo "no my life is SOO BADD" in the entire novel
>>25282619Should I read this book just to see this insufferable, self-pitying, moaning autist of an MC get cucked in the end?
>>25283888I regretted not reading the manga first since it isn't any different
>What, I wondered, did he mean by “society”? The plural of human beings? Where was the substance of this thing called “society”? I had spent my whole life thinking that society must certainly be something powerful, harsh and severe, but to hear Horiki talk made the words “Don’t you mean yourself?” come to the tip of my tongue. But I held the words back, reluctant to anger him.>‘Society won’t stand for it.’>‘It’s not society. You’re the one who won’t stand for it - right?’>‘If you do such a thing society will make you suffer for it’>‘It’s not society. It’s you, isn’t it?’>‘Before you know it, you’ll be ostracized by society.’>‘It’s not society. You’re going to do the ostracizing, aren’t you?’>Words, words of every kind went flitting through my head. “Know thy particular fearsomeness, thy knavery, cunning and witchcraft!” What I said, however, as I wiped the perspiration from my face with a handkerchief was merely, “You’ve put me in a cold sweat!” I smiled.>From then on, however, I came to hold, almost as a philosophical conviction, the belief: What is society but an individual?
>>25282619No. I haven't read it yet, but I am smarter than you.
books are experiments in consciousness and perception, not vehicles for moralistic messages.
>>25283714Insane ESL on display here
>>25283571No one told me it was an autobiography
>>25283310this
>>25282619>I A LE SAD BECAUSE...................I HAVE LE TOO MUCH SEXThat's the novel.
>>25282619Why would reading it in the original language hinder your comprehension of it? The fuck?
>>25283600Cool analysis, made me want to read the book. Might pick it up one day, sounds better than Dostoyevskys "Sin into God" or whatever that pasta is. I tried reading Crime and Punishment and its stupid. The ending makes it doubly stupid and renders everything before stupid except the guilt, which is worthwhile as an experience, but not a problem, because Christianity saves all, so its stupid.
Last month someone recommended a book that was better than No Longer Human in terms of writing and the main character wasn't a guy who cried about how much sex he had.I believe the title was only one single word, though I can't recall the title at this moment.Anyone remember?
>>25282619it's about how sexual abuse in childhood ruins a man's life /threadThe "hopeless artistic tortured poet" idea pisses me off. All of yozo's thoughts, behaviors can be traced back to childhood sexual trauma. Sure, his misanthropy, which he is most vocal about, is relatable to people of all kinds, the misogyny even more so to people here, and that's why the novel is so popular. But just because he's too ashamed to expand on it for entire chapters like women do, doesn't mean being repeatedly raped as a child was a minor inconvenience in his life. Similar to Vaslav Nijinsky, of who you can find little sources for the sexual abuse that, however, likely caused his eventual psychotic break.>>25286462I trust you've checked warosu since the chances of someone remembering this are low
>>25287164This is pretty much how I saw the book. He only barely brushes over what happened, doesn't even name it explicitly. But I recognize what happened. And I recognize a lot of the thoughts about not knowing what people's intentions are, feeling hostile to people, even friends, but always giving them a submissive smile. I see it as people pleasing at the highest level. I also recognize the feeling of relating to other ugly people, despite being attractive. Gravitating towards fucked up people, cripples and so on. This books steps out the insidious effects of this type of trauma in childhood (which I can't even name also out of shame).
>>25282680A common experience with a lot of men, is that you'll feel it's easier to get women when you're in a relationship. It's not that you're more physically attractive, or that women automatically know you're taken and want you as a result, but that you're not thinking about women's attention and perception all the time, so you're more calm and amiable when speaking to them. Hence, it's easier to be successful with them, even if you don't mean to be.For the protagonist of No Longer Human, he is a person who does not feel like a person. He doesn't feel the same wants, desires, or social inclinations as other people, and has been playing a "part" for as long as he can remember. Because of that, combined with the fact that Osamu was a wealthy and handsome man from a good family, it only makes sense that the character and artist were both very popular with women.Regarding his descent into drunkeness and addiction, he put on the trappings of a drunk, a womanizer, a communist, all these identities that gave him some semblance of personhood, that let him feel like a normal person. But, if you keep doing anything, even as a joke, you'll just end up becoming that thing eventually. Think about all the anons on here that started out making racist jokes, and over the years have become literal white supremecists
