No Longer Human (Junji Ito)

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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.

No Longer Human ( Japanese: 人間失格, Hepburn: Ningen Shikkaku) is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Junji Ito; it is an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Osamu Dazai. It was serialized in Big Comic Original from May 2017 to April 2018 and published in three volumes. Originally I read Junji's piece first, not even knowing that it was a version of a Japanese classic book. After finishing it, I decided to read the original and give Dazai his dues. I would also suggest reading into Osamu Dazai's biography as well to get a better picture of what exactly all these pieces mean. And we get a child posed in a monkey-ish way, but instead of a nauseating feeling one just see a stupid looking pose. I didn't like the character. I despised him. I felt sorry for him, though. I continuously hoped he would change, but eventually I realized he couldn't. His longest work, the three-volume Uzumaki, is about a town's obsession with spirals: people become variously fascinated with, terrified of, and consumed by the countless occurrences of the spiral in nature. Apart from the ghastly, convincingly-drawn deaths, the book projects an effective atmosphere of creeping fear as the town's inhabitants become less and less human, and more and more bizarre things begin to happen.Once again I am convinced that Mr. Ito has been drawing his home life all along through his career... It happens with Oba's wife later in the story, in another change from the novel. In the novel Oba's wife Yoshiko is, it is heavily implied, raped by a casual acquaintance. Oba (despicably) sees it happening and runs away, then gets all messed up about it, on his own behalf (he seems mostly unconcerned about his wife's trauma). In the manga, the scene he observes is much more heavily implied to be an affair (at least it is not at all implied it is not consensual) without any logic, but then the wife, you guessed it, goes crazy (cue bulging eyes and darkened forehead). Still I can't help but root for him. If you've undergone a spiritual malaise just like our lead, you'd understand the prodigious effort it takes to rise from all that weakness and pain. There's one point where it seems like he really had a chance. Question is - will his Beatrice be able to save her Dante?

After a conversation with a GR friend, I decided to read this Junji Ito's adaptation, though I really am not a fan of Dazai Osamu's writing! 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. I think it’s great as an adaptation not because it's a literal scene-by-scene rendering of the novel (though it is fairly accurate) but because it captures the bleak, nihilistic atmosphere of the original in its own medium. Whereas Dazai uses tortured internal monologues to express the protagonist's despair, Ito externalizes this despair through images. Ressler, Karen (January 19, 2017). "Junji Ito's No Longer Human Manga Ends on April 20". Anime News Network. Archived from the original on July 27, 2023 . Retrieved December 25, 2021. 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.Early on, a young man and his lover commit suicide by drowning themselves in a river, something Dasai himself did five days after completing this book. Ito is a man driven to creating horror comics, and he here is attracted to every day psychic horror. The books are in translation, too. How are we expected to find the heart and soul of Dasai, or Ito, or ourselves in this hall of mirrors about a man who people find to be a clown, a man wearing a mask of humor as he heads daily into greater and greater darkness? Who is Oba/Sadai/Ito, really?! To start with an early example (and yes, I am going to start spoiling the story a bit). As a child Oba goes to high school and ends up living with some cousins, including two younger women (slightly older than he). He also meets this classmate, Takeichi, a social outcast, who one infers had some kind of mental illness. Takeichi sees Oba clowning around, purposefully failing at some gym activity to get laughs, and tells Oba that he knows he did it on purpose. Oba is horrified by this (as if he thinks no one else could imagine that his clowning is a put-on), and then tries to win the boy over so he won't expose Oba to their classmates. No Longer Human is told in the form of notebooks left by one Ōba Yōzō (大庭葉蔵), a troubled man incapable of revealing his true self to others, and who, instead, maintains a facade of hollow jocularity. The work is made up of three chapters, or "memoranda", which chronicle the life of Ōba from his early childhood to his late twenties.