No Longer Human (Junji Ito)

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Born in Gifu Prefecture in 1963, he was inspired from a young age by his older sister's drawing and Kazuo Umezu's comics and thus took an interest in drawing horror comics himself. Nevertheless, upon graduation he trained as a dental technician, and until the early 1990s he juggled his dental career with his increasingly successful hobby — even after being selected as the winner of the prestigious Umezu prize for horror manga. Apparently Dazai’s style was autobiographical fiction and I’ve never read the original book (nor ever will) so I can’t say how much of this is directly taken from the book or whether Ito added in biographical elements from Dazai’s life. But the book opens with an alcoholic writer and his young girlfriend committing suicide by drowning, which is really how Dazai died. It didn’t help that almost nothing that happened was remotely interesting. In addition to being tedious, some episodes were simply baffling. Like when Oba, as a defence mechanism, becomes the class clown, purposely making an ass of himself for the amusement of his classmates. But the grotesque friend Takeichi says that he knows Oba is making a fool of himself on purpose, which is apparently a terrible secret that sends Oba on a mental spiral where he contemplates murdering Takeichi to protect this “secret” - what?!? Yeah, he’s being an ass on purpose - so what?! Maybe it’s a cultural thing or has something to do with the era but I totally failed to grasp the significance of this.

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. Ito takes this idea of fear and shame artistically manifesting as real monsters and runs with it, creating a brilliant graphic adaption of Dazai's novel. a b 人間失格 ３ (in Japanese). Shogakukan. Archived from the original on June 19, 2023 . Retrieved December 25, 2021. Later on he gets involved with the communists, continues to jump from woman to woman, becomes an alcoholic, attempts suicide, and that’s it. I’ve no clue what the point was - all I saw was gratuitously gloomy people being sad over their depressing lives. I didn’t understand why Oba doesn’t feel human or what we were meant to think about that. 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 HumanTantimedh, Ali (December 10, 2019). "Review: Junji Ito Adapts "No Longer Human" into a Masterpiece of Existential Horror". Bleeding Cool. Archived from the original on December 24, 2021 . Retrieved December 25, 2021. Then the cousins both fall in love with Oba and sleep with him. The younger one goes crazy upon seeing Oba with the older one (and you know someone has gone crazy in this manga because their face is draw in closeup with their often bloodshot eyes opened wide, their upper face is stroked with hatching), murders the older one, and then has Oba's baby. He later reconnects with that cousin in the mental hospital, where she is still crazy, but he goes to live with her and her son, who is drawn to look like Takeichi. But Ito, apparently, did not want to really take on the challenge of the adaptation as it was. He changes the plot heavily in places, adding death, gore, more sex and ghosts (or at least visions of the dead). And more importantly, he makes the story even more misogynistic, adding plotlines for various women characters that are even more awful and prone to offensive stupid tropes than the original. in Japanese). Shogakukan. Archived from the original on December 24, 2021 . Retrieved December 25, 2021.

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 For fans of Dazai, or newcomers to the narrative, Junji Ito’s No Longer Human is a truly engaging and unnerving experience. 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: 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?What a bizarre and boring book! Horror manga artist Junji Ito adapts Osamu Dazai’s 1948 novel No Longer Human into comic form with mixed results. Ito’s art is fantastic as always but the story, etc.? Yeah, all of that is utter rubbish! 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. 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. I can't help but feel for Yozo. As a kid, he had an uneasy, pessimistic streak that he tried to hide under a buffoonish exterior, a mask that he soon regarded as tiresome but which he felt he can never take off. The abuse he suffered from lecherous servants must have cemented in his mind how untrustworthy and scary people generally are. Creator and invention, life and fiction, meld as Dazai and Yōzō cross paths in a lunatic asylum and commiserate over their mutual tragedies.