No Longer Human
New Directions · first published 1948 · 192 pages
A young man tells, through his notebooks, how he has felt unable to understand other people since childhood.
Confessional and close, with a dark humor that keeps the voice from sinking into self-pity.
For a night when the city feels too crowded.
About this book
Ōba Yōzō has always been afraid of other people, and since boyhood he has hidden behind the part of the clown. His notebooks follow him through school and art classes in Tokyo, through drinking, debts, and the women who look after him. The book is framed by a stranger who comes upon the notebooks years later. What stays is the voice itself: candid, wounded, and strangely funny about its own failures.