No Longer Human (Junji Ito)

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Oba is himself haunted by ghosts in his daily life, so he draws mostly ghosts, so you can see the attraction to the supernatural for Ito. Oba/Dasai was derided by his father throughout his life. He was told he was a failure for doing manga and told the honorable thing he should do would be to commit suicide, which in fact he/Dasai attempted a few times.

There are some people whose dread of human beings is so morbid that they reach a point where they yearn to see with their own eyes monsters of ever more horrible shapes... Painters who have had this mentality, after repeated wounds and intimidations at the hands of the apparitions called human beings, have often come to believe in phantasms — they plainly saw monsters in broad daylight, in the midst of nature...These, I thought, would be my friends in the future. I was so excited I could have wept." - Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human It's a good thing he didn't end up a twisted sociopath, though there were instances when he was teetering on the edge of that abyss. He did become dissipated, profligate, and keen to keep bad company - vices that only worsened as time went by.

I never read the original, so can't say for myself who Dasai is in this work, but the story is of Yozo, an artist, rendering his soul on canvas such as other tortured artists like Van Gogh or Munch, though most of the time Oba draws manga. He plays the clown but is profoundly depressed. He is handsome and popular with many women, but he has fears and social anxiety about people. Oba, like Dasai, was sexually assaulted by male and female servants. He had a childhood friend commit suicide that seems to have haunted him all his life. This is not a pleasant story. It is about heartbreak and depression, sexual abuse and addiction, and a whole range of topics that are more raw and human and, sometimes, more grotesque than the terrors conjured by horror fiction.

By the end, reading this manga was just a slog. Ito is known for his horror work, and I was horrified by this book but I don't think it was in the way he meant. Dazai's stand-in, Yozo Oba, seems to suffer from trauma and impostor syndrome due to childhood molestation and daddy issues. To compensate he becomes a class clown and womanizer in attempts fit in with other people -- from whom he feels separate and whom he hates and fears. He carves his way through the lives of others leaving suicide and murder in his wake, periodically attempting suicide himself. He alternates between living off a family allowance, being a kept man, and a life of poverty as a struggling manga artist and aspiring painter. He dabbles in Marxism and relationships but tends to betray everyone, really only committing to alcohol and drugs. And this is how women are portrayed in the novel and the manga. In the novel there is some small room for distance between the narrator and the author, as the novel is offered as a series of notebooks by Oba, with a preface and afterword by an unnamed narrator who came into possession of the notebooks along with a few photos of Oba. Dazai inserted someone between Oba and himself, though, in the end, it is generally seen as an example of the so called I-Novel genre, a naturalist novel written in the first person, where there is assumed to be a connection between the protagonist/narrator's life and the novel's author. Many consider No Longer Human to be a form of suicide note. The protagonist attempts suicide multiple times, and Dazai killed himself (a double suicide with his lover) shortly after the novel's publication. The fourth misfortune [of his "ten misfortunes"] was woman. Human women. More than difficult, these incomprehensible, insidious beings. The ones who always drew near and looked after me for some reason. [...] Women have no sense of moderation. They always asked for more of me. Their demands are insatiable. They sap me of all my energy.

Mateo, Alex (January 13, 2020). "My Hero Academia Ranks #3 on U.S. Monthly Bookscan December List". Anime News Network. Archived from the original on July 7, 2022 . Retrieved December 25, 2021. While I appreciated Ito's ability to make this spooky without any monsters, I found that this reflected the source material a little too closely, so to speak - my god, the misogyny! Why take responsibility when you can blame a woman, right? Junji Ito is an absolute master when it comes to his artwork and graphic novels. If you pair this with No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai, you have the perfect piece. Ito’s art though is wonderfully gruesome. I may never have understood what Oba’s problem was but I definitely felt his fear with Ito’s parade of bloated talking corpses, vengeful ghosts and insect people. The nightmare imagery from the suicide attempt on the beach in Chapter 7 (which also really happened to Dazai) was really terrifying. In this version, Yōzō meets Osamu Dazai himself during an asylum recovery, thus giving him permission to tell his story in his next book. The manga includes a retelling of Dazai's suicide from Ōba's perspective.