Recommendations
Books Like No Longer Human
Best books to read after No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai
No Longer Human is one of the most widely read and most disturbing confessional novels in world literature — Yōzō's memoir of spending his life performing the role of human being without genuine understanding of or connection with others. If the novel's devastating honesty and its portrait of fundamental alienation moved you, these books share its concern with the consciousness that cannot fit into ordinary social life, its interest in what it feels like to inhabit a self that doesn't work, and its willingness to describe self-destruction from the inside.
- 1Buy
The Setting Sun
by Osamu Dazai
The essential companion — the decline of an aristocratic Japanese family in postwar Japan; slightly lighter in tone than No Longer Human but addressing the same themes of dissolution and the impossibility of belonging to the new postwar world; essential for readers who want more Dazai after No Longer Human
- 2Buy
Notes from Underground
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The essential predecessor in the tradition of the confessional first person who cannot fit into ordinary social life — the Underground Man's magnificent self-contradictory account of his own consciousness; Dazai was deeply influenced by Dostoevsky, and No Longer Human is a Japanese reimagining of the Underground Man's predicament in the context of twentieth-century Japan
- 3Buy
The Stranger
by Albert Camus
The essential existentialist parallel — Meursault's radical detachment from the emotions that social life expects of him; where Dazai's Yōzō performs emotions he doesn't feel to avoid detection, Camus's Meursault is simply unable to perform the emotions that are expected of him; both are organized around the person who is fundamentally outside the social consensus about what a human being feels
- 4Buy
Kokoro
by Natsume Sōseki
The essential Meiji-era predecessor in the Japanese tradition of the alienated intellectual who cannot survive in his world — Sōseki's Sensei; where No Longer Human is organized around fundamental self-alienation (Yōzō has never understood human beings), Kokoro is organized around the alienation produced by a specific moral failure; together they trace the genealogy of the alienated Japanese intellectual in modern fiction
- 5Buy
Steppenwolf
by Hermann Hesse
Hesse's novel about Harry Haller's inability to live by the available social identities — the essential German parallel to No Longer Human's portrait of a consciousness that cannot fit into ordinary life; where Dazai's Yōzō has never understood human beings and drinks to cover his incomprehension, Hesse's Haller understands human beings too well and suffers from his own multiplicity
- 6Buy
Snow Country
by Yasunari Kawabata
The essential aesthetic counterpart in postwar Japanese fiction — Kawabata's beauty versus Dazai's despair; reading No Longer Human and Snow Country together gives the two poles of what Japanese literary fiction made of the postwar experience: Dazai's self-destructive honesty and Kawabata's aestheticizing melancholy
- 7Buy
The Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath
Plath's novel about Esther Greenwood's breakdown and hospitalization — the essential American parallel to No Longer Human in the tradition of the literary account of mental illness and the inability to participate in ordinary social life; both are organized around the gap between the social performance the narrator manages and the inner reality that performance conceals
- 8Buy
Norwegian Wood
by Haruki Murakami
The essential modern Japanese companion — Toru Watanabe's love for the mentally ill Naoko; where Dazai's Yōzō destroys himself, Murakami's Naoko is the one who cannot survive, and Murakami's Toru must find a way to go on living; Norwegian Wood is in explicit dialogue with the tradition of Japanese literary self-destruction that No Longer Human represents
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