No Longer Human

I finished Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human - or rather a translation made by Juliet Winters Carpenter. I cant knock Carpenters translation for obvious reasons, but the book itself was fine. I feel like I had started reading a few books in the past year and had three failed completions, so this felt good. I will say I got like three-fourths of the way done on most (I say this in desperation to make myself feel good)

No Longer Human follows this character named Yozo Oba, whom the author- real name Shuji Tushima is essentially writing his own life in through. It talks about Oba, second youngest of eleven kids and how he feels like he's never fit in and his outlook on life and him feeling different. The story is essentially a written rendition of Tushima's life but through this character. It follows his life from a kid to his twenties and writes about his attempted suicide when he made a pact with this girl he was fucking to jump into the sea and kill themselves together. She ends up succeeding and well, he doesn't. He loses it, gets cut off from his family, I think his "best friend" and him hate each-other, low-key. He's an alcoholic and an addict and wants to die but then meets this girl who he ends up marrying because her sense of innocence calmed the"monsters" of the real world (he was an addict and an alcoholic like of course you have demons lol) She worked at the stand where he would go and buy cigarettes from and she was a virgin when they met and he essentially says that he felt as if her veil of innocence would somehow balance out his shit life but at the end his wife literally gets raped and his friend walks in and doesn't do anything and then HE walks in and doesn't do anything and then he somehow just decides to make it worse for her and drink and treat her bad because he now has to live with the shame and humiliation of knowing that he 1.) not only didn't do anything but stand there but 2) she knows that he's a coward and and didn't do anything but JUST STAND THERE. WHAT. I'm sorry if that's a whirl wind but I dont get paid to not write run-on sentences. Just read the book if you have to. Anyways Tushima, the author, apparently goes on with his life and at thrity-nine years old makes another suicide pact with this other woman to jump into a "rain-swollen" stream. My suspicions are on his second attempt choice. Water? Again? They both succeeded.

The reason why I'm writing about this in the first place is because I came upon something written in the book that the character Yozo says which is this,

"When poverty comes in at the door, love flies out at the window, they say, but the popular interpretation is all wrong. The proverb doesn't mean that when your money's gone, your woman will walk out."

And as I read it I thought, yes his life was pretty shit but maybe he was a little stupid because I thought this was common knowledge.

Song of the Week: Invincible (ft. Daniel Caesar) x Omar Apollo