No Longer Human

Osamu Dazai's novel "Unworthy to Be Human" begins as a quiet but inescapable confession of a man trying to piece together his own wounded essence. Through the confession of the hero Yozo - a talented but broken young man - a story of struggle with the burden of expectations, loneliness and the inability to touch the real world without pain emerges. Art becomes a refuge, women - shadows of support, alcohol - a temporary pause, and society - a wall with which there is no common language. Against the backdrop of descriptions of interwar Japan, a tragic confession about the loss of oneself, the search for meaning and a fall with a fatal taste of foreboding unfolds. This novel reveals to the reader the author's sharp view of human vulnerability and that fragile border beyond which inner emptiness begins.