Well and to tell the truth, I started getting myself into all this contemporary Japanese literature stuff after reading the Bungo Stray Dogs manga series. LOL In February 2019, Viz Media announced they licensed the series for English publication. [5] They released the entire series in one hardcover book. [6] Volumes [ edit ] No. The most common obsessions are with beauty, long hair, and beautiful girls, especially in his Tomie and Flesh-Colored Horror comic collections. For example: A girl's hair rebels against being cut off and runs off with her head; Girls deliberately catch a disease that makes them beautiful but then murder each other; a woman treats her skin with lotion so she can take it off and look at her muscles, but the skin dissolves and she tries to steal her sister's skin, etc. Jones, Grant (December 16, 2019). "No Longer Human Hardcover Manga Review". The Fandom Post. Archived from the original on December 16, 2019 . 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.

Ressler, Karen (February 11, 2019). "Viz Licenses Junji Ito's No Longer Human Manga". Anime News Network. Archived from the original on December 25, 2021 . Retrieved December 25, 2021. One can almost immediately see that Dazai has the advantage in being able to describe the look on the boy's face without having to show it. He can make us understand the effect of the image. In adapting this to a visual medium, the artist must instead make us see this effect. And when Ito shows us this smile (as part of the story, not as a photo) he resorts to: 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!

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. He inadvertently(?) caused the demise of a few people, whose ghosts haunt him at the most inopportune times. It seemed like death and the love of women came to him easily, like a song that broke the monotonous buzz of despair and dread that continually consumed him. With such a fair face, he can't help being a lady's man. It may have served his women better if they took a more critical peek at his art, if only to see the demons he was harboring within. This is one of the exceedingly few works I've read that deal with a Grade A homme fatal. The novel is one of existential horror. Oba cannot survive in the face of society. It is also not a novel with an excess of dialogue or scenes. It is presented as notebooks and thus it is very much a novel narrating thoughts and feelings. Add in that the horror is one of, one assumes, mental illness and (charitably) societal illness, and it is not at all something that sounds easy to adapt into a visual medium. This is obvious from the beginning of the novel. In the prologue, the narrator describes one of the photos he has of Oba as a child: 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. April (April 6, 2018). "Junji Ito's No Longer Human Manga Ends on April 20". Anime News Network. Archived from the original on July 25, 2023 . Retrieved December 25, 2021.

Powell, Nancy (December 30, 2019). "Review: Junji Ito's No Longer Human turns human folly into a haunting tale of misery and despair". Comics Beat. Archived from the original on December 24, 2021 . Retrieved December 25, 2021. Once again I am convinced that Mr. Ito has been drawing his home life all along through his career... tbh I had mixed feelings for the original book as well and for the exactly same reasons, I think I haven't grasped the true meaning of the book yet so I am gonna switch to the movie version. I hope I finally understand everything. 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. 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.

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. a b c d "No Longer Human". Viz Media. Archived from the original on September 6, 2021 . Retrieved December 25, 2021.