In an age without a world, spreading meaningless love.
No Longer Human is the requiem Dazai wrote for himself, the kind of “contented death” Kafka spoke of. Dazai might have thought to himself: Once I have finished this book, I can finally go with my mind at ease.
Before turning to No Longer Human itself, I want to look first at a work by another great Japanese writer: Mishima Yukio’s Patriotism. The story’s account of Takeyama’s suicide foreshadows Mishima’s own. As Yu Hua puts it: “In the end, it was no longer Mishima Yukio narrating Patriotism, but Patriotism narrating Mishima Yukio.” Both write about death, but there is a subtle and important difference between them. Mishima emphasizes the process of dying; Dazai, the aftermath of death.
For Dazai, by contrast, death itself is not important. Fundamentally, then, No Longer Human offers him a particular viewpoint—or rather, an “impossible gaze,” what psychoanalysis calls fundamental fantasy: how others would see me when I do not exist (before a person’s birth or after their death).
In The Setting Sun, which preceded No Longer Human, Dazai distributes his personality among different characters. No Longer Human does precisely the opposite: there is only one personality (only the one individual, Yōzō), but different characters see him from wholly different perspectives—a plurality of viewpoints.
The Dazai of The Setting Sun seems to be a Deleuzian schizophrenic subject. This is schizophrenia in the strictly Deleuzian sense: there is something positive in it. Dazai can transform himself into (become) a mother, a daughter, a painter, a son. But Lacan would say that behind this apparent diversity lies the same fundamental impasse. It is in No Longer Human that Dazai makes the transition from Deleuze’s postmodernism to Lacan’s fundamental trauma. We could say that Dazai wears many masks in The Setting Sun. Only in No Longer Human is the essence of the mask itself revealed: the masks appear in order to conceal an indescribable fear in Yōzō himself.
Here I have to raise what I personally consider a very serious problem in Chinese translations of No Longer Human. It is not the question of whether to translate the title as “no longer qualified to be human,” but something subtler. The Japanese text has two clearly distinct narrators: one is the author of the notebooks himself; the other, observing those notebooks, is a neutral gaze representing society. They correspond respectively to the first-person pronouns 自分 (jibun) and 私 (watashi). Chinese translations collapse these two different pronouns into 我, “I.” Katō Norihiro points out that the phrase “the Yō-chan we knew” at the novel’s end is crucial: it marks the passage from the private “I” to the social “I” and then to the plural “we,” through which Dazai reaches a compromise with the “gaze” fixed on him.1 I do not know why so many Chinese translations render 私たち (watashitachi) in 私たちの知っている葉ちゃん as “I,” when it so clearly means “we.” I find this utterly baffling.
By Dazai Osamu.
Let me say it again: if Mishima’s focus is how others see me while I am dying, Dazai’s is how others see me after I am dead. For Mishima, his death is a ritual enacted in public, a ritual that will be watched repeatedly and therefore requires a serious rehearsal beforehand. Dazai’s suicide, by contrast, is a purely private act. The act itself will not be watched by society. But to carry out this private act, Dazai needs the approval of society’s gaze. His transition in No Longer Human from the social “I” to the social “we” is an absolute reversal. For this transition is not continuous: in fact, the gaze the social “we” turns on Yōzō negates that of the social “I.” The social “I” regards Yōzō as a strange person; the social “we,” by contrast, says he is actually “a good boy.” This negation is absolute: a negation of negation, not a simple affirmation but a doubling of negation. For it negates not only the view held by the social “I” but society itself, splitting society into individual “I”s. And these “I”s are themselves negated by society. These gazes are women’s gazes. Here I must mention another unusual piece of context that has not been conveyed in Chinese translation: Dazai writes all the women in No Longer Human in katakana. Katakana is an informal way of writing, one that represents not society at large but a plurality of small societies.2 Under these women’s gazes, Dazai attained a contented death.
In its narrative details, too, No Longer Human clearly works to relativize “inherent” values. Take the guessing game between Yōzō and Horiki. At the start, Yōzō can still distinguish “comic nouns” from “tragic nouns.” As the game proceeds, however, the boundary between synonyms and antonyms begins to blur. It is precisely during the game that Yōzō realizes Horiki, who on the “surface” has so much “in common” with him, does not see him “as a human being” at all. It is this very game, in which seemingly anything goes, that becomes central to Yōzō’s destruction. Through the game, he discerns an essence of some kind. The game also corresponds exactly to Yōzō’s later reality: “I can’t call myself happy now, much less unhappy.” Yōzō swallows a laxative in order to sleep; at twenty-seven (I am twenty-seven this year too), his hair is entirely white. In this new world of his, everything has been relativized. Values float in the air like white afternoon clouds, while Dazai’s flesh moves toward the earth, precisely to grip the unbearable lightness of being.
At the end of the novel, Yōzō says this twice: But everything has passed.
