no longer human
CONTENT WARNING
This post contains mentions of sensitive topics like addiction, sexual assault, self-harm and suicide. And also spoilers.
After initially not wanting to read the book for all its self-loathing and misery after being elected our book of the month—the kind of energy that I couldn’t handle while drowning in exams and deadlines—I decided to pick it up again after reading Kami’s review and setting my expectations accordingly. Let me say it this way: I’ve rarely come across a protagonist I pitied and despised as much as Yozo. He is the prime example of how a lack of parental love can fuck you up for life with no recourse.
Yozo was the last to be born to a rich family residing in the countryside of Japan in the early 1900s. From his young age, he felt lonely, misunderstood and incapable of understanding others. He hated humans and did not count himself kin to them. Aiding his loneliness was his sickly body that made him miss school for long periods, and yet that didn’t stop him from acing all his tests despite never studying. To belong, he would make jokes to bring laughter to people’s faces, and he would do this out of anxiety to fill the silence for fear of behaving the wrong way. He was very agreeable and a people pleaser, never failing at not saying no.
In fact, that is a theme that permeates the whole book. It starts with his surviving sexual assault by his parents' servant(s?) as a child which he spoke to no one. Later in his life, he watches as his wife gets raped which he blames on her “trustfulness”. He struggles with addiction to various substances from tobacco to alcohol to opioids and attempts suicide with an equally hopeless bedmate, an act which he survives while she doesn't. Clearly, he was living through hell, however, his family decided to disown him after the attempt that brought shame onto them and which would’ve otherwise landed him in prison for being an accomplice in a crime (assisting another person in their suicide), which only worsened his depression.
He goes from bad decision to another, mostly for lack of guidance or care from those around him. Maybe someone loved him, most likely all the women who he grew up with, who he refused to view as part of the same species as his. But how do you care for someone who sees through you? In a way, his fall from grace was predestined by his extreme misogyny and lack of camaraderie. Every interaction with another person prompted him to evaluate his relationship to that person in the social hierarchy. Only natural, considering the Japanese language contains nuanced suffixes to vertically describe social relations to one another. Yozo, though, does so from a slightly different vantage point: he considers how much closer a person is to being inhuman compared to him.
The story culminates in his being sent to a sanatorium psych ward for being a "lunatic" which unofficially declares him a social reject and thus not a human being like any other. There was simply no rehabilitation for him, even after his eldest brother sort of integrates him into the family again. It is that person that reflects on his childhood so judgmentally when child-Yozo was only being a cheeky kid.
All in all, I enjoyed reading this biography of a person that I hope never existed. While No Longer Human is loosely based on the author's life, and he certainly was miserable for he committed suicide a month before this book's publishing. Likewise, the character craved suicide and saw his liberation in it. It is left up to interpretation whether Yozo committed suicide as well which was up in the air for the author at the time of writing, too. However, eventually desire translated into action for the latter person.