I did so and it definitely payed off - I don't think I would have appreciated this manga as much as I do now. One gets kind of sick of the facial expressions, not sick like sick with horror, but sick like sick with boredom.

I decided to read this manga because it sounded more interesting, with less gore and more existential concerns. But overall, I didn't LOVE this and had a lot of issues of the portrayal of women and the use of women as "demons" and the cause of all men's woes and troubles. Like when Oba, as a defence mechanism, becomes the class clown, purposely making an ass of himself for the amusement of his classmates. The art in this book is absolutely stunning, with dark ink illustrations that fluidly shift from reality to viscous interpersonal hellscapes in the span of a single frame. He embellishes the darkness and grotesque within this piece and really adds an element to the sad story at hand.Growing up in an oppressive household, experiencing sexual trauma at a young age, a boy becomes a clown as a means of hiding all that is within him. 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. 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.

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. Originally I read Junji's piece first, not even knowing that it was a version of a Japanese classic book. 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?

In some ways, for me, that brings the author (in this case, Ito) and the character closer together and exacerbates the awfulness of the content. Many of his views might be considered old-fashioned today, but the deep understanding of some of the fundamental aspects of humanity can still be widely appreciated.

Junji Ito tackled heavy, mature themes for this one, and departed from his usual scare tactics to introduce us to the deep storytelling and psychological strain characteristic of the important novelist. Well, I had the same reaction to this as I do to all Ito: why the fuck did I read that, NEVER AGAIN, thank god it's over and simultaneously omg I love it I cannot WAIT to reread I need to own this and put it on a very tall shelf jk my Ito collection is front and center OMG it's brilliant MOAR PLZ. It's a naturalistic and "literary" story compared to Junji Ito's usual supernatural horror fare - painful and sad where those stories are often shocking and funny and, yes, sometimes painful and sad. Junji Ito appears to have taken the subject seriously and set out to craft a nuanced, complex portrait of a man, surrounded by the mostly well-meaning women, through which he discovers the appetites and weaknesses in himself, that lead to his ruin. Nick Smith from ICv2 praised the work, stating the story was unpleasant but riveting, with great artwork.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. Let the record show that this is a book that demands some form of self-blitzing (read: weed) to be even bearable, especially if you're a queerdo with complicated lady feelings, because Ito loves a booby and I do, too, but he also loves charring that booby and drawing the emaciated toothy corpse or drowning it and drawing it bloated and tongue-slugged, so. If he had only made choices, if he had only followed through with anything, so much of his troubled life would have been better, and those moments of misfortune could be reflected upon through a lens of comedy. Anyway, tragedy follows him as an extremely ugly school friend kills himself and a girl he knocks up kills her sister after he has an affair with her.

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. Horror manga artist Junji Ito adapts Osamu Dazai’s 1948 novel No Longer Human into comic form with mixed results. This is not a work for children, and perhaps young adults will also have to struggle to detach themselves from the surface level lust, grit and angst of the graphic novel. A box of sleeping pills Oba uses to overdose on, is, in the novel, one he hid from her in case he wanted to use them.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 personally am not a fan of sexual depictions, but thankfully this wasn't the focus of the story - and keeping in mind his usual demographic and the one targeted with this adaptation I do get the choices he made. It is more vibrant when you see the artwork attached to the text, and I think that is why this is probably my favorite of all Junji Ito's pieces as well.