Osamu Dazai - No Longer Human review

Note: I haven't checked out the discussions about this book online and only just finished reading it today. So everything I write underneath is my own take on this book:

1. It's a weird book. Like reading 'the stranger' but Asian and more neurodivergent.

2. The main character in the book is really weird and I could both relate and not relate to him. It's like seeing the world through the eyes of someone who both does and doesn't understand how the world works.

3. I think if you are a loner, a neurodivergent person, or just a weirdo in general, this book is worth reading at least once.

4. One of the core themes of this book that completely changes how you read the entire book appears in the last sentence of the story. It changes the entire story from the idea of a weird maybe creepy maybe just strange person, to a story of how much of a gap can exist between how a person perceives themselves and how the world sees them.

5. It is a story of a man who did everything wrong without being a story of a man who is evil or cruel.

6. The main characters great sin appears to be that he is weak, and he fears judgement. He has low self esteem, is unable to understand the people around him or why they are the way they are, while being obsesses with not being treated badly by them.

7. The main character feels half real and half fictional at the same time.

8. In the end there really isn't much to say about it. It is a book so strange that you are not sure what to say about it. You come out feeling no love for the main character, or even the side characters, and pity at best for the women in the story. Whom the main character appears to outlast every time. Yet the women themselves never appear to ever grow a hatred of the man as if what he sees of himself and what he is in life are completely separate things altogether.

9. I think the best purpose this book serves is for you to be able to identity your own personal failings across the story here and there and easily recognize what things you need to overcome in yourself so as to not end up a ghost like the main character in his own eyes.

10. The book feels like a study of high int low self esteem high charisma. The main character could have easily been a successful man if only it weren't for his inability to see his own place in the world as naturally as others saw their own.

11. Maybe this is a book about self acceptance. Maybe this is a book about not deluding ourselves into being monsters we are clearly not until we become the worse versions of ourselves because it is the only one we ever believed in, or maybe it is a book about the nature of man and the difficulty in finding a place to fit in when you do not have a natural path traced before you, or maybe it's just a story, dispersed about in a haphazard enough manner that you will find whatever message you are looking for. I think that is it. Just as the main character in this story finds what he wishes to see in the world irrespective of what the world actually is, in the same manner we ourselves see what we wish to see in the story irrespective of what it is. Until it is plainly written for us, and even so we might miss the mark.

12. Intelligence without understanding. Charisma without purpose. Wealth without attainment. Many such underlying themes appear to emerge of contradictions and clashing of what is felt and what is done. A weak will easily taken wherever one wishes to throw it.

13. Part that stuck with me - What is the opposite of crime? is it law, punishment, or virtue? It felt like a very Japanese mindset to think of such things.

In the end the only thing that feels sure to me is that the main character in the book was the little child forever in need of a caretaker at heart. Not cruel by nature, simply forever lost without a guiding hand, growing disdainful for its neverending presence, but also so limited in capacity that he couldn't function without it either. He is not pitiable for he drags the world down with him, yet he is also impossible to hate for there is possibly a good nature to him that the world around him sees but he does not.

I would rate the book about a 9/10 if you are neurodivergent and need something to think on. A 7 out of 10 if you are a normie looking for something to read.