Description
Ōba Yōzō learns early that the safest way to live among human beings is to make them laugh. If they are laughing, they are not looking. If they are not looking, they cannot see what he is, or is not.
His confession arrives as a set of notebooks found by a stranger. In them, he traces a life spent in disguise: the clown act perfected in childhood, the drinking and the women and the politics that filled the empty hours in Tokyo, the double suicide that killed the wrong person, the morphine that made the mask bearable, and the asylum where the mask finally came off, leaving nothing recognisable underneath.
Written in 1948, weeks before Osamu Dazai drowned himself in a Tokyo canal, No Longer Human remains one of the bestselling novels in Japanese history. It has never been published in English with annotation, until now.
This Time Warp Editions hardcover presents a new translation from the original Japanese, with section-by-section endnotes that illuminate the world behind Yōzō’s words: the rigid family system, the political suppression, the codes of shame, and the ancient weight carried by a Japanese double suicide. An editor’s introduction, chronology, glossary of Japanese terms and curated further reading complete an edition built for readers who want to understand the book on its own terms.
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