I was cleaning my bookshelf when I discovered my copy of “No Longer Human” by Osamu Dazai, and I remember being incredibly impacted by this novel. I do not wish to make people uncomfortable, so I apologize if this may be too much information, (please let me know if I have shared too much and I will remove this section from the post.) but as somebody who is bedeviled with mental illness, aside from the outdated beliefs and language I found this novel unnerving due to how synonymous some of the protagonist/author’s thoughts overlapped with my own. This was one of the few novels I thought about for days after finishing. I am curious to see what other people have thought about this novel.
Thank you all for taking the time to read and reply, I hope you all have a lovely day.
I have the manga version illustrated by Junji Ito, not sure how similar it is but I’d imagine he stayed extremely close to the source material. In my opinion, it’s one of the greatest representations of mental illness in literature. It can be an uncomfortable read and it’s even more haunting once you read about Dazais life.
I didn’t like the manga. It’s overly tragic in a Junji Ito kind of way where every character goes insane or dies in an almost supernatural way.