I usually write much more about the formal qualities of comics, but I found myself unable to avoid the problematic content of this manga. And then, I was unable to avoid thinking about how much of the content was Dazai's and how much was Ito's. It feels like Ito, by bringing in his horror tropes, amplified what was already problematic, taking the subtler elements and making them all too obvious. Jones, Grant (December 16, 2019). "No Longer Human Hardcover Manga Review". The Fandom Post. Archived from the original on December 16, 2019 . Retrieved December 25, 2021. Ressler, Karen (January 19, 2017). "Junji Ito's No Longer Human Manga Ends on April 20". Anime News Network. Archived from the original on July 27, 2023 . Retrieved December 25, 2021. After a conversation with a GR friend, I decided to read this Junji Ito's adaptation, though I really am not a fan of Dazai Osamu's writing! And this is how women are portrayed in the novel and the manga. 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. Dazai inserted someone between Oba and himself, though, in the end, it is generally seen as an example of the so called I-Novel genre, a naturalist novel written in the first person, where there is assumed to be a connection between the protagonist/narrator's life and the novel's author. Many consider No Longer Human to be a form of suicide note. The protagonist attempts suicide multiple times, and Dazai killed himself (a double suicide with his lover) shortly after the novel's publication.

TW: sexual abuse, rape, graphic mature scenes and violence, suicide, depression, alcoholism, substance abuse, parental neglect, domestic cheating But Ito, apparently, did not want to really take on the challenge of the adaptation as it was. He changes the plot heavily in places, adding death, gore, more sex and ghosts (or at least visions of the dead). And more importantly, he makes the story even more misogynistic, adding plotlines for various women characters that are even more awful and prone to offensive stupid tropes than the original.However! 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. It didn’t help that almost nothing that happened was remotely interesting. In addition to being tedious, some episodes were simply baffling. Like when Oba, as a defence mechanism, becomes the class clown, purposely making an ass of himself for the amusement of his classmates. But the grotesque friend Takeichi says that he knows Oba is making a fool of himself on purpose, which is apparently a terrible secret that sends Oba on a mental spiral where he contemplates murdering Takeichi to protect this “secret” - what?!? Yeah, he’s being an ass on purpose - so what?! Maybe it’s a cultural thing or has something to do with the era but I totally failed to grasp the significance of this. Eventually the narrative is reduced to hallucinations and an extended dream sequence as Oba becomes increasingly unhinged. Powell, Nancy (December 30, 2019). "Review: Junji Ito's No Longer Human turns human folly into a haunting tale of misery and despair". Comics Beat. Archived from the original on December 24, 2021 . Retrieved December 25, 2021. in Japanese). Shogakukan. Archived from the original on December 24, 2021 . Retrieved December 25, 2021.

no longer human till this day resonated with so many people. its a story that exposed the weakness, self destruction, honesty to the point it hurts, no rationalization for all bad decision and actions and somehow we empathize with the character. An unpleasant and unappealing semi-autobiographical iteration of the artist as a tortured soul is adapted into a quasi-horror manga by Junji Ito filled with dread and supernatural flourishes. I haven't read the original novel, but my understanding is that Ito has taken many liberties, including the insertion of original author Osamu Dazai as an actual character.It happens with Oba's wife later in the story, in another change from the novel. In the novel Oba's wife Yoshiko is, it is heavily implied, raped by a casual acquaintance. Oba (despicably) sees it happening and runs away, then gets all messed up about it, on his own behalf (he seems mostly unconcerned about his wife's trauma). In the manga, the scene he observes is much more heavily implied to be an affair (at least it is not at all implied it is not consensual) without any logic, but then the wife, you guessed it, goes crazy (cue bulging eyes and darkened forehead). Junji Ito lleva a su terreno la obra de Osamu Dazai, le da forma, la desarrolla e incluso añade elementos nuevos, como es usar al mismo Osamu Dazai como un personaje más. El mundo de pesadilla que normalmente desarrolla Junji Ito en sus ilustraciones a través del estado mental de sus personajes, está aquí perfectamente reflejado y de alguna forma y aunque sea una adaptación libre, es muy fiel a la obra de Dazai. 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. He did become dissipated, profligate, and keen to keep bad company - vices that only worsened as time went by. April (April 6, 2018). "Junji Ito's No Longer Human Manga Ends on April 20". Anime News Network. Archived from the original on July 25, 2023 . Retrieved December 25, 2021.

I can't help but feel for Yozo. As a kid, he had an uneasy, pessimistic streak that he tried to hide under a buffoonish exterior, a mask that he soon regarded as tiresome but which he felt he can never take off. The abuse he suffered from lecherous servants must have cemented in his mind how untrustworthy and scary people generally are. No Longer Human is told in the form of notebooks left by one Ōba Yōzō (大庭葉蔵), a troubled man incapable of revealing his true self to others, and who, instead, maintains a facade of hollow jocularity. The work is made up of three chapters, or "memoranda", which chronicle the life of Ōba from his early childhood to his late twenties. Ito’s art though is wonderfully gruesome. I may never have understood what Oba’s problem was but I definitely felt his fear with Ito’s parade of bloated talking corpses, vengeful ghosts and insect people. The nightmare imagery from the suicide attempt on the beach in Chapter 7 (which also really happened to Dazai) was really terrifying. His longest work, the three-volume Uzumaki, is about a town's obsession with spirals: people become variously fascinated with, terrified of, and consumed by the countless occurrences of the spiral in nature. Apart from the ghastly, convincingly-drawn deaths, the book projects an effective atmosphere of creeping fear as the town's inhabitants become less and less human, and more and more bizarre things begin to happen. The fourth misfortune [of his "ten misfortunes"] was woman. Human women. More than difficult, these incomprehensible, insidious beings. The ones who always drew near and looked after me for some reason. [...] Women have no sense of moderation. They always asked for more of me. Their demands are insatiable. They sap me of all my energy.This is a massive manga adaptation of Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human. I mean it is chunky. And I feel so guilty that this adaptation is… getting 5 stars, while the original got 4. Seriously, Junji Ito has this way of capturing sheer terror in one or two drawings, in his characters’ eyes – they remain with you when you turn the lights off right before you take the five or six steps to your bed. Mateo, Alex (January 13, 2020). "My Hero Academia Ranks #3 on U.S. Monthly Bookscan December List". Anime News Network. Archived from the original on July 7, 2022 . Retrieved December 25, 2021. Ressler, Karen (February 11, 2019). "Viz Licenses Junji Ito's No Longer Human Manga". Anime News Network. Archived from the original on December 25, 2021 . Retrieved December 25, 2021. Then the cousins both fall in love with Oba and sleep with him. The younger one goes crazy upon seeing Oba with the older one (and you know someone has gone crazy in this manga because their face is draw in closeup with their often bloodshot eyes opened wide, their upper face is stroked with hatching), murders the older one, and then has Oba's baby. He later reconnects with that cousin in the mental hospital, where she is still crazy, but he goes to live with her and her son, who is drawn to look like Takeichi. The latter part was different from the novel with the appearance of Dazai as a character, I think its unique. It gave me sadness as i read this part, i was emotional because of it.

Oba is himself haunted by ghosts in his daily life, so he draws mostly ghosts, so you can see the attraction to the supernatural for Ito. Oba/Dasai was derided by his father throughout his life. He was told he was a failure for doing manga and told the honorable thing he should do would be to commit suicide, which in fact he/Dasai attempted a few times. Later on he gets involved with the communists, continues to jump from woman to woman, becomes an alcoholic, attempts suicide, and that’s it. I’ve no clue what the point was - all I saw was gratuitously gloomy people being sad over their depressing lives. I didn’t understand why Oba doesn’t feel human or what we were meant to think about that. Tantimedh, Ali (December 10, 2019). "Review: Junji Ito Adapts "No Longer Human" into a Masterpiece of Existential Horror". Bleeding Cool. Archived from the original on December 24, 2021 . Retrieved December 25, 2021.

In this version, Yōzō meets Osamu Dazai himself during an asylum recovery, thus giving him permission to tell his story in his next book. The manga includes a retelling of Dazai's suicide from Ōba's perspective. In the novel, Takeichi basically serves as a soothsayer. He prophecizes to Oba that women will fall for him and that he will become a great painter. These two statements haunt him. Takeichi disappears from the story when Oba goes to college.