PHILOSPHY DISCUSSION (NO PLAGIARISM, A++ WORK, QUALITY, ON TIME)
LAGNIAPPE
PHILOSPHY.docxFor the rough draft, please put together a minimum of at least 5 paragraphs, anywhere from 750 to 1000 words.
1. No plagiarism
1. The only approved topic is your book that we've selected earlier in the course
1. Write in plain English and in your words only
1. Observe proper mechanics and grammar
1. Indent paragraphs
1. Add white space between paragraphs
1. A title page never hurt anybody
Please follow this basic outline:
1. Intro paragraph.
0. What is the title of the book, who is the author, what's the topic?
0. Supposing the reader doesn't care about the topic, explain why they should care about the topic.
0. What problem would knowledge in this area solve, who would it help, what significance does this have in the grand scope of humanity?
0. PLEASE INCLUDE THE FOLLOWING LINE VERBATIM: "The main issue discussed in this book is ____________ and it is relevant to Philosophy because ____________" (blanks may be filled in by you)
0.
1. Discuss the facts of the situation from a general perspective. Although everyone has an opinion, there are only a certain set of facts about any given issue. Use this paragraph to explain the basic components of the issue that anyone approaching it should be familiar with, and brief us on any terminology involved. Please refrain as much as possible from including your or the author's perspective in this paragraph. Please include only objective facts that may need to be understood about the issue. THERE IS NO REQUIRED VERBATIM LINE FOR THIS PARAGRAPH, BUT I WILL MARK IT DOWN FOR ANY OPINIONATED, NORMATIVE, OR JUDGMENTAL LANGUAGE. FACTS ONLY!
1. Author's perspective. What stance is the author taking on this topic? If the book is a collection of essays or otherwise does not offer a single perspective, pick whichever is most convincing and talk about that. Be sure to represent the author's argument in its strongest form. PLEASE INCLUDE THE FOLLOWING LINE VERBATIM: "The author's perspective on (issue) can be summarized as ___________" (fill in blank with your summary, use the rest of the paragraph to add more detail)
1. Rebuttal/other perspectives. Certainly someone disagrees with what your author is saying; perhaps it's you. What arguments might directly counter what the author is suggesting? Are there any other authors or philosophers who have put forth alternative views? Be sure to also represent the rebuttal in its strongest form. Most of us are rational people and will weigh the evidence presented. PLEASE INCLUDE THE FOLLOWING LINE VERBATIM: "An alternative viewpoint on (issue) could be that _________" (fill in blank with the alternative viewpoint, and use the rest of the paragraph to go into more detail on that viewpoint)
1. Conclusion. Where do we go from here? The end of ethics is action, not analysis, even though many of us might like to analyze things forever and ever. Make a normative statement. How SHOULD we view this issue? How SHOULD we act to better align with goodness, knowledge, truth, justice, etc? PLEASE INCLUDE THE FOLLOWING LINE VERBATIM: "Based on the author's viewpoints, and after considering competing viewpoints, I believe that we should ___________" (fill in blank with what we should believe/do, use the rest of the paragraph to explain why.)
No Longer Human is a 1948 novel by Japanese author Osamu Dazai.
Summary Lannamann, Taylor. "No Longer Human Prologue." LitCharts. LitCharts LLC, 29 Jun 2022. Web. 21 Nov 2023.
An unnamed speaker describes pictures of a man later revealed to be Yozo . There are three pictures of him: one as a child, one when he’s slightly older, and one as an adult. The unnamed speaker finds each picture grotesque, saying he can hardly recognize Yozo as a human, even though he knows most people would find Yozo good-looking. But, the speaker says, there’s something deeply disturbing about Yozo, especially in the final picture, in which he stands in a run-down room while staring at the camera with a blank expression.
The novel then presents Yozo’s personal notebooks. He begins by describing his childhood, explaining that certain things about society and humanity never made much sense to him. He has never seen the point of eating big meals, for instance, but he always eats large amounts to please other people. As a young boy, he feels depressed by what he sees as “human dullness,” which is something he picks up on when he thinks about the logical, unaesthetic way people move through life. At one point, several members of his family’s waitstaff sexually abuse him, and he feels unable to tell anyone about it. The experience makes him feel “corrupted.”
Yozo feels unable or unwilling to let his “true nature” show, so he develops a technique of performing for the people in his life. He thinks of himself as a clown who’s willing to do anything to get others to laugh, and he becomes quite good at endearing himself to people. One day, though, he purposefully falls down at school, and while everyone is laughing, a quiet boy named Takeichi comes up behind him and whispers, “You did it on purpose.” Yozo is horrified to learn that Takeichi—whom he thought was unintelligent—can see right through his entire act. He decides to get as close as possible to Takeichi, hoping this will allow him to keep an eye on him. After some false starts, he manages to bring Takeichi back to his house during a rainstorm, and he gently dries his new friend, prompting Takeichi to say that women will surely go crazy for him later in life—a comment that ends up being true, though it unsettles Yozo.
One day, Takeichi shows Yozo a famous painting . Yozo recognizes it as Van Gogh’s self-portrait, but Takeichi says it’s a painting of a ghost. The comment astounds Yozo, prompting him to reconsider the way he looks at art. Many paintings, he realizes, aren’t beautiful portraits meant to be passively admired—they’re visceral depictions of life’s horror. He decides to become an artist himself and starts creating disturbing paintings that convey his “true nature,” which he otherwise keeps hidden. He only shows the paintings to Takeichi.
Years later, Yozo goes to college in Tokyo and studies art while living in a townhouse that his father owns. His father is a politician, so he uses the townhouse when he’s in Tokyo for legislative sessions. For the most part, Yozo hardly sees his father, instead spending his time with a classmate named Horiki , who shows him how to lead the rough-and-tumble life of a young artist. He introduces Yozo to drinking, smoking, and sleeping with sex workers. Despite their new friendship, though, Yozo doesn’t actually like Horiki, even if he appreciates having a drinking companion. Horiki also brings him to a Communist Party meeting. Although Yozo finds the people there ridiculous for thinking their Marxist beliefs actually matter, he pretends to feel the same way and eventually becomes widely popular amongst his new “comrades.”
Yozo spends all of his time drinking, smoking, and running errands for the Communist Party. He hardly attends class. Soon, though, his father decides to sell the townhouse. Until this point, Yozo has been living on a small monthly allowance, but he tends to use that up within the first few days of every month. He usually manages to buy what he needs by putting things on his father’s tab at the local stores, but that’s no longer possible. He suddenly feels what it’s like to experience poverty, but this doesn’t keep him from drinking. He becomes deeply depressed. He still fears other human beings, and all he ever wants to do is get so drunk that he can’t feel anything. One night, Yozo goes to a bar and bluntly tells the bartender that he doesn’t have much money. But she doesn’t mind—she lets him drink on the house, joining him in his glum mood. Her name is Tsuneko , and she brings him back to her apartment later that night.
Tsuneko talks to Yozo all night about how unhappy she is. Listening to her makes him feel better, as if they’re connected through their suffering. The next time they spend the night together, Tsuneko says she can’t stand the idea of continuing to live, so they decide to die together by suicide. They throw themselves into the ocean, but Yozo survives. Tsuneko dies.
Yozo is taken to the hospital. Upon waking up, he’s arrested and charged with being an “accomplice to a suicide.” He spends the night in jail, but because he’s still recovering from the incident and has a nasty cough, the authorities aren’t as harsh on him as they could be. He’s released the next day and put under the supervision of an old family friend known as Flatfish . Yozo’s father, refuses to speak to Yozo, though his older brothers send Flatfish money. Yozo has also been expelled from the university, so he spends his days doing very little at Flatfish’s house. One evening, Flatfish calls him to dinner and asks what he wants to do with his life. He tells Yozo that he'll be happy to help him, as long as Yozo comes up with some sort of plan. Yozo can tell that Flatfish wants to hear him say something very specific, but he can’t fathom what this might be. Flatfish gets angry that Yozo’s life has no direction, prompting Yozo to finally say he wants to be a painter—something that makes Flatfish laugh.
The next morning, Yozo runs away from Flatfish’s house. He leaves a note with Horiki’s address on it, but he doesn’t intend to go to Horiki’s house. And yet, once he’s out wandering the streets, he realizes he has nowhere else to go, so he actually does go to Horiki’s. Like everyone else, Horiki has heard about what happened with Tsuneko, so he greets Yozo coldly. He clearly doesn’t want him there, but he still lets him in. Eventually, a woman named Shizuko stops by to collect an illustration that Horiki has made for a magazine she works for. Yozo ends up going home with her, and she seems happy to care for him, as if she’s attracted to his sadness.
Yozo lives at Shizuko’s house, along with her daughter, Shigeko . Shizuko’s husband died several years ago, and now she’s content to provide for Yozo. But Yozo soon grows restless, so he starts doing illustrations and cartoons for the magazine Shizuko works for, using the money to buy alcohol and cigarettes. He descends even deeper into depression, at which point Shizuko meets with Horiki and Flatfish. As a group, they decide that Yozo should marry Shizuko and have no more contact with his family. However, when Shigeko makes a comment about wanting her “real” father back, Yozo decides to leave.
Yozo goes to a bar in the Kyobashi neighborhood, and the bartender lets him drink for free and stay in an upstairs apartment. During this period, he continues to drink heavily until he meets a 17-year-old woman named Yoshiko . One night, Yozo is drunk and starts thinking about how Yoshiko must be a virgin, and he suggests that they get married—wanting, it seems, to experience what it’s like to have sex with a virgin. Yoshiko agrees to marry Yozo on the condition that he stop drinking. Yozo accepts Yoshiko’s condition but breaks his promise the following day. Nonetheless, Yoshiko is extremely trusting, so she doesn’t believe he would break his promise. They end up having sex and, shortly thereafter, marrying.
Yozo and Yoshiko move into a new apartment. For a while, life is good. Yozo stops drinking and begins to wonder if he might have a chance at happiness. But then Horiki reappears in his life. Yozo starts drinking again. One night, Yozo and Horiki hang out on the roof of Yozo’s apartment. They’re extremely drunk. At one point, Horiki goes downstairs to get some food, but he quickly returns and orders Yozo to come see what’s happening. When Yozo follows, he sees a man raping Yoshiko in an adjacent room. He’s horrified by what he sees, but he doesn’t interfere. Later, Yoshiko says the man assured her nothing would happen, and Yozo thinks about how Yoshiko is too trusting.
Yozo starts drinking even more. Upon coming home drunk one night, he finds a box of sleeping pills and takes them all, hoping they’ll kill him. He wakes up three days later, at which point Flatfish gives him some money to go recover at some hot springs. Yozo goes, but he spends the entire trip drinking. By the time he returns to Tokyo, he’s in a worse condition than before, frequently coughing blood and stumbling home drunk. He goes to a pharmacy to get medicine for his condition, and he instantly feels a strange connection with the elderly pharmacist. He can tell she’s another unhappy soul, and she seems to recognize the same thing in him. She tells him to stop drinking, giving him morphine instead. It isn’t long before Yozo is fully addicted to the morphine and constantly hectoring the pharmacist for higher doses. He starts having an affair with her to get more of the drug.
Once again, Yozo decides to kill himself. Before he can do so, though, Horiki and Flatfish take him to a psychiatric ward, where he feels like a “reject” and thinks he has been “disqualified as a human being.” Upon his release, one of his brothers sends him to the countryside, where he lives with an older maid who watches over him. His notebooks end with him saying that he has been in the countryside for three years and that, even though he’s only 27, he now looks like a much older man.
The novel’s final section returns to the unnamed speaker, who explains that the bartender from Kyobashi gave him Yozo’s notebooks, which Yozo seems to have sent her 10 years ago. The speaker came across the bartender while traveling in the country, and she thought he might be able to turn the notebooks into a novel. Instead, the speaker has decided to simply present the notebooks as they are, without changing anything.
Summary Lannamann, Taylor. "No Longer Human The Second Notebook." LitCharts. LitCharts LLC, 29 Jun 2022. Web. 21 Nov 2023.
An unnamed speaker describes three pictures of someone he simply refers to as “the man.” The first picture is from the man’s childhood, and though many people might think he looks extraordinarily cute, the speaker insists that the boy in the picture is “ugly.” The speaker is certain that if people studied the picture closely, they’d soon realize that the smiling boy in it isn’t actually smiling at all. His fists are balled tightly, and there’s something deeply unnatural about his facial expression, even if it seems happy and cute at first.
The second picture is from when the man was either a high school or college student. Again, his face makes him look like he’s a “living human being,” but the speaker insists that his supposedly smiling face is actually lacking in “substance” and the “solidity of human life.” There’s an emptiness to the face, and though the young man in the picture is objectively handsome, the speaker can’t even find the slightest sense of humanity in him.
The third picture is the worst of all. It’s of the man as an adult. He’s in a dirty room, and this time he has no expression on his face at all—it’s so blank, in fact, that it would be impossible to remember the image of his face even a mere moment after looking at the picture. There is nothing unique or individual about the expression. The entire thought of the picture creeps the speaker out, making him feel extremely uncomfortable, but he can’t say exactly why—there’s just something indescribable and unknowable that makes looking at it a very unpleasant experience. Never before has the speaker seen a more unsettling, unfamiliar look on a human being.
Analysis
Although it’s not yet clear who the unnamed speaker is describing (or, for that matter, who the unnamed speaker is), it’s reasonable to assume that the person in the three pictures is a central figure of No Longer Human. The fact that this person is presented in such disconcerting terms sets the stage for the novel’s exploration of what it means to be human. There’s an unsettling hint in the opening of the novel that simply existing as a human being doesn’t necessarily mean people are entitled to a sense of humanity or personhood. Rather, the subject of the pictures is somehow different from the average person, as if something about his nature has cut him off from humanity and turned him into something else entirely.
The prologue of No Longer Human taps into the fact that it’s possible for some people to move through life wearing a mask of sorts—a mask that hides their true nature. The subject of these pictures, it seems, is nothing like the person he appears to be. Although he might seem handsome and vivacious, for instance, the unnamed speaker insists that he’s hardly even a human being, ultimately suggesting that there’s something deeply unrelatable about his fundamental nature.
Summary
A new narrative voice declares that he has lived a shameful life. He doesn’t even know, he claims, what it’s like to be human. Ordinary things seem foreign and strange to him. When he was a child, for example, it took him a long time to grasp the purpose of a small bridge connecting one train platform to another—he thought the bridge was simply there for people to climb, and he found this very “elegant” in and of itself. He lost interest in it when he realized what it was really for. Similarly, he used to think pillowcases were purely decorative, but when he realized they have an actual purpose, he felt deeply depressed by what he saw as “human dullness.”
The writer of this notebook is named Yozo . He continues to write about how he has never understood human feelings. As a child, for instance, he was never hungry—he ate, but only because he understood that this was something he was supposed to do. In fact, he always stuffed himself to make his parents happy when he came home from school, doing whatever he could to please them. But he never felt a physical need to eat. He has also never understood human happiness, which he himself has never experienced. It’s mystifying to him that other people manage to find pleasure in life and take interest in mundane things. Yozo, for his part, has felt burdened and tormented by the mere fact of his own existence since he was a young boy, and this makes it impossible for him to appreciate life in any way whatsoever.
Yozo continues to write about his childhood. Because he’s unable to feel the same things as other people, he invents a way of tricking others into thinking he’s just like everyone else. He starts “clowning,” or figuring out how to make people laugh and give them joy. He himself derives no happiness from this behavior, but he becomes remarkably good at getting others to laugh at him. The idea of people criticizing him in any way horrifies Yozo—in fact, humans in general horrify him, which is why he decides to do whatever he can to make them laugh. If they laugh at him, he figures, then they might pose less of a threat.
Yozo ’s “clowning” isn’t just something he does at school or in public. He also does it at home, thereby deceiving his family members into thinking he’s a lighthearted, funny boy. Once, though, when his father is about to leave on a business trip, Yozo finds it difficult to please him. His father gathers Yozo and his siblings and asks them each what they want him to bring back as a present, writing their answers in a notebook. When it’s his turn, Yozo can’t think of anything—there’s nothing he could possibly want. His father suggests a lion’s mask, but Yozo still can’t respond, and it becomes clear that this annoys his father.
Yozo ’s brother interjects on Yozo’s behalf, telling his father that he should get him a book. His father seems disappointed and angry. Later that night, Yozo realizes that he should have just said he wanted the lion mask—his father clearly wanted to give it to him. He thus sneaks downstairs, finds his father’s notebook, and writes “LION MASK” in it. When his father returns from the trip, Yozo hears him talking to his mother, happily telling her how surprised he was to find “LION MASK” written in his notebook. In a satisfied tone, he says that young Yozo must have wanted the lion mask so badly that he was too shy to say anything.
Although he doesn’t think of it in the moment, Yozo manages to please his father in the end by making him think that he desperately wanted the lion’s mask. In a way, then, the lion’s mask itself comes to represent the great lengths Yozo will go to in order to satisfy others—a tendency that stems from his general discomfort around other people.
In school, Yozo is extremely successful at getting his classmates to laugh. He can even get his teachers to crack a smile, even when he’s misbehaving. He often draws funny cartoons, which greatly please his peers. For homework assignments, he writes outlandish stories that, although they don’t align with what he’s supposed to write about, ultimately succeed in making his teacher chuckle.
Nobody in Yozo’s life would know how detached and alienated he feels from the surrounding society. Because he’s so successful at pleasing others and acting happy, though, he ultimately isolates himself all the more, making it impossible for anyone to authentically connect with him.
Of course, Yozo ’s “clowning” doesn’t reflect how he feels internally. He’s like an actor who’s constantly performing, even for his family and their many servants. He thus feels like his “true nature” is at odds with his jovial outward demeanor, especially after the family’s servants begin to sexually abuse him. This makes him feel as if he has been “corrupted.” To do this to a child, he writes in his notebook, is the most horrific and vile thing a person can do. At the time, though, he doesn’t say anything, instead “endur[ing]” the abuse and allowing it to inform his overall conception of humanity.
Yozo feels alienated from his own parents, so he doesn’t think to tell them about what the servants have been doing to him. And because he feels like he doesn’t understand other humans, the idea of telling someone about being sexually abused seems impossible, since he has no idea how they would react. In the ensuing years, he notices that women tend to seek him out, and he posits that this is because they see him as “a man who [can] keep a love secret.”
Analysis
It's reasonable to conclude that the new narrative voice belongs to the man in the pictures, whom the unnamed speaker described in the prologue. This section, it seems, is drawn from the personal notebooks of the person from the photographs. The unnamed speaker found this person unsettling and somehow unhuman, but now it becomes clear that the subject himself feels somewhat estranged from human life—he doesn’t understand the things that make people tick, and when he does grasp common aspects of human nature, he finds it all so “dull[]” that it depresses him. There is, then, something to the speaker’s idea that this person is fundamentally at odds with the rest of humanity. From the very beginning of his life, it seems, Yozo has been unhappy. Yozo himself doesn’t necessarily clarify why this is the case, nor does the novel as a whole—but that’s not the point of No Longer Human, which doesn’t purport to explain anything about depression or alienation. Rather, the novel simply puts these things on display by sweeping readers up in Yozo’s feelings of despair and isolation.
Summary Lannamann, Taylor. "No Longer Human The Third Notebook: Part One." LitCharts. LitCharts LLC, 29 Jun 2022. Web. 21 Nov 2023.
Yozo attends high school on the coast while living with a relative. He likes being away from his immediate family, since it’s easier to carry out his “clowning” around people who don’t know him very well. In this new environment, he manages to win over his peers and teachers by making them laugh. One day, though, he finds himself deeply unsettled by an unsuspecting boy named Takeichi . It’s during a physical training exercise at school. Yozo purposefully fails a physical challenge in a humorous, slapstick way that makes everyone laugh. But then Takeichi, whom Yozo sees as an unintelligent onlooker, taps him on the shoulder and says, “You did it on purpose.”
Yozo is horrified by Takeichi ’s words, which make him feel suddenly as if his entire world has gone up in flames. In the coming days, he feels certain that Takeichi can see right through him, even as Yozo fools everyone else into laughing at his antics. Fearing that Takeichi will tell everyone that he’s a fraud, Yozo resolves to endear himself to him by becoming his close friend, but this is more difficult than he would have thought. He wants to keep a constant watch over Takeichi to make sure he doesn’t say anything, determined to convince him that he’s not, in fact, pretending to be a clown. If this doesn’t work, he realizes, he will have no other choice but to pray for Takeichi’s death—but he wouldn’t kill him, since he has never wanted to murder anyone.
Finally, after multiple attempts to befriend Takeichi , Yozo succeeds by ushering him to his house after school. It’s raining heavily, so it’s easy for him to sweep Takeichi up with the suggestion that they take shelter in his house. In Yozo’s room, Takeichi complains that his ears hurt, so Yozo gently examines them. He sees that there’s pus oozing from Takeichi’s ears, so he carefully wipes it away while soothingly apologizing for taking Takeichi into the rain. He speaks in a voice that he normally associates with women, trying hard to act like a caretaker. Eventually, Takeichi appreciatively comments that many women will surely “fall” for Yozo.
Yozo feels somewhat unsettled by Takeichi ’s comment about women falling for him. In retrospect, he now sees that Takeichi’s words were oddly prophetic. Throughout his life, attention from women has made him uncomfortable, partially because he finds women even harder to understand than men. And yet, women tend to be drawn to Yozo. While living in his relative’s house in high school, for instance, his two female cousins (who live there too) frequently pay him visits in his room, and though he never wants to talk to them, he never protests—to the contrary, he does whatever he can to make them laugh and engage them in conversation.
One day, Takeichi comes over to Yozo ’s house and shows him a reproduction print of a painting that Yozo recognizes as Van Gogh’s self-portrait. Takeichi, however, says that the painting is of a ghost. Yozo is astonished and deeply moved by this strange comment. He starts to think about how some people view the world with a horrified gaze, seeing human beings as terrifying “monsters.” One way of dealing with this is by constantly “clowning” around in an attempt to fit in with these “monsters.” This, of course, is what Yozo has been doing, but he now realizes that some people, like many of the world’s most famous painters, have responded to the horror and strangeness of humanity not by cowering from it, but by unflinchingly depicting it in art. He decides right then and there that he will become a painter .
Yozo has always drawn cartoons, but now he decides to bravely paint the grotesque side of humanity that he sees on a daily basis. The paintings he makes are—to his estimation—horrifying, but they accurately represent his truest self. He only shows them to Takeichi . If he showed them to other people, they might fail to recognize in the paintings Yozo’s true nature, and this would be mortifying.
Takeichi , for his part, thinks Yozo will become a great painter . Upon finishing high school, Yozo wants to attend art school, but his father sends him to a traditional college in Tokyo instead. At first, he lives in the dorms. But Yozo hates being surrounded by his peers, so he moves into a nearby townhouse that his father uses when he comes to Tokyo for work. His father is a government representative, so he has to come fairly often, though only when the legislative body is in session.
Eventually, a fellow art student named Horiki introduces himself to Yozo . Horiki likes to think of himself as something of a rebel, and he insists on taking Yozo out drinking. Yozo is skeptical of him, but he deeply enjoys getting drunk for the first time, so the two young men start spending more time together. Yozo still dislikes Horiki, who constantly borrows money from him, but he figures that he's better than the average person—plus, he helps Yozo make his way through life in Tokyo, which has, until now, frightened him.
Another reason Yozo comes to like Horiki is that the belligerent young man doesn’t seem to care what other people have to say, making it easy for Yozo to sit back in silence as Horiki rambles on. As they spend more and more time together, Yozo develops certain habits. He starts to like drinking, smoking, and sleeping with sex workers—activities that give him a certain feeling of “escape.” He views the sex workers he sleeps with rather scornfully, having trouble thinking of them as human beings. And yet, he feels completely at peace when he’s sleeping in their arms, safe from his many fears. He even starts to feel like he and the sex workers are “kindred” souls. When Horiki points out that women tend to like Yozo, though, the comment disgusts him so much that he loses interest in visiting sex workers.
Horiki takes Yozo to a meeting of the Communist Party. Yozo thinks everyone at the meeting is ridiculous and self-important, but he also enjoys watching the members of the Party speak with such absurd seriousness. He finds this entertaining, mostly because he can’t imagine how they could possibly think the things they’re discussing are such dire matters. He starts attending the meetings regularly. To dissolve some of the tension in the room, he acts like the same sort of “clown” he used to be in school, and this makes him very popular.
Yozo eventually realizes that he likes the Communist Party so much because he enjoys the “irrationality” of its members. In contrast, he hates the rest of society’s orderly commitment to logic. Of course, Yozo is only tricking his comrades in the Communist Party into thinking he actually believes the same things they do, but he likes doing this because it helps him feel a little less isolated in society, in which he otherwise feels like an outcast. He doesn’t care about communism, but he does like the feeling of participating in a secret, subversive movement. He thus doesn’t hesitate to carry out secret jobs for the Communist Party, and though he knows that some of these jobs could get him arrested, he doesn’t mind, since the idea of spending his life in prison doesn’t seem so bad.
Yozo’s father decides to sell the house in Tokyo, since his political term is about to end. As a result of no longer living with his father, Yozo realizes that he won’t have much money at his disposal. His father has always given him a monthly allowance, but he tends to spend that on alcohol and cigarettes within a couple days. When his father still lived in the city, Yozo could just put anything he wanted to buy on his father’s account at the local shops. Now, though, he can’t do that. Upon moving to his own place, he burns through his monthly allowance and then feels terrified by his lack of funds. He starts selling things at pawnshops, but he still never seems to have enough money.
During this period, Yozo spends the vast majority of his time either meeting with the Communist Party or drinking with Horiki . His schoolwork and painting suffer, but he doesn’t care—and then, he says, he becomes embroiled in a “love suicide” with a married woman. He hasn’t been to class for a long time, and when his family finds out, they reprimand him in a strongly worded letter. Still, Yozo doesn’t concentrate on his studies. But his work with the Communist Party no longer amuses him. All he wants to do these days is drink until he’s completely numb to the world, but he doesn’t even have enough money to do this. Wanting to “escape” from everything, then, he decides to kill himself.
Yozo’s alienation and depression intensify in this period, as he seemingly transitions from an unhappy childhood to an even unhappier adulthood. Previously, his feelings of isolation were pronounced, but he was still quite young and could depend on others to support him. Now, though, he has to worry about money and keeping up with his schoolwork, all while leading an unmoored and joyless life. With nothing to keep him invested in his own life, then, he gravitates toward suicide.
Feeling depressed and overwhelmed by life, Yozo finds relief at a large café, where he tries to blend into the crowd—he hopes to completely lose himself in the chaos of the scene. But he doesn’t have much money to spend. As soon as he sits down, he tells the waitress how little money he has, but she tells him not to worry, pouring him liquor and making him feel like he doesn’t have to think about money. For some reason, he doesn’t feel obligated to perform in front of her the way he usually does in public.
In retrospect, Yozo can’t even remember the name of the waitress, even though they tried to kill themselves together. This sort of forgetfulness isn’t unusual for him. He does, however, remember the poor quality of the sushi he was eating while waiting for her to get off her shift. He thinks her name was Tsuneko , and he remembers lying in her rented apartment and drinking tea while she tells him about her husband, who’s in jail for conning someone
As Yozo lies in her apartment, Tsuneko goes on at length about her life and her many problems. He’s hardly listening, but he comes to attention when she says that she’s desperately unhappy. Suddenly, he feels at peace as he lies next to her, no longer experiencing a perpetual state of fear and discomfort. He even feels a sense of freedom and happiness (though he notes that this is most likely the only time that the word “happiness” will appear in his notebooks). When he wakes in the morning, though, the feeling is gone, and he once again feels like a “shallow poseur of a clown.”
In the coming days, Yozo feels uncomfortable about the fact that Tsuneko paid for him to drink at the café. He worries that she is like the other women who have expressed interest in him and that he will feel overwhelmed by her affection. Thinking this way, he regrets letting his guard down and becoming intimate with her. One night, though, he and Horiki are out drinking and run out of money. Because Horiki wants to keep drinking, Yozo takes him to the café where Tsuneko works, since he knows she’ll give them free drinks.
On the way to the café, Horiki talks about how he’s going to kiss whoever serves them, saying that he’s “starved for a woman.” When they arrive, a waitress Yozo doesn’t know sits next to him while Tsuneko sits next to Horiki. For a moment, Yozo is struck by the uncomfortable fact that he’s going to have to watch Horiki kiss Tsuneko, though it’s not that he’s afraid of losing her—he doesn’t feel possessive—it’s because he feels sorry for Tsuneko. He knows she’ll have to let Horiki kiss her while he (Yozo) watches. And this, he assumes, will make her think she has to cut things off with Yozo.
Yozo braces, waiting for Horiki to kiss Tsuneko . But then Horiki says he would never kiss someone who looks so “poverty-stricken.” Hearing this, Yozo has the overwhelming urge to drown himself in liquor, so he tells Tsuneko to fetch some. He’s embarrassed that even a drunk, ridiculous man like Horiki wouldn’t kiss Tsuneko. He looks at Tsuneko and realizes that Horiki has a point: she looks extremely impoverished and sad. But this just makes Yozo feel for her all the more, as if she’s a kindred soul. For the first time in his entire life, he feels as if he’s in love. He reacts to this feeling by throwing up and passing out.
When Yozo wakes up, he’s in Tsuneko ’s apartment. She lies down next to him and talks about how unhappy she is. He resonates with her feeling of being too tired to go on in life. He himself feels like he couldn’t possibly continue to live, so he quickly agrees when she suggests that they both should kill themselves.
That day, Yozo and Tsuneko wander the city. Although he has agreed to die alongside Tsuneko, Yozo hasn’t fully grasped the idea that his life will soon be over. But when he goes to pay for a glass of milk and realizes he only has three coins, he’s struck by the horror of his life. He also thinks about how his only other possessions are the coat and kimono that he’s currently wearing, and it’s at this point that he understands that he really can’t continue to live—he must, he thinks, die. That night, he and Tsuneko throw themselves into the sea. Yozo survives, but Tsuneko does not.
The news of Yozo ’s failed suicide sweeps through Japan, since his father is a prominent politician. He’s taken to a hospital, where a relative visits him and tells him that his father and the rest of his immediate family are so angry that they might disown him. But Yozo doesn’t care—he’s too busy mourning the loss of Tsuneko , realizing that she’s the only person he has ever loved.
After his stint in the hospital, Yozo is charged with having been an “accomplice to a suicide.” He’s taken to the police station, but because his lungs are still affected by his efforts to kill himself, they don’t put him in a cell with other criminals. In the middle of the night, an old guard brings him out of the cell and tries to interrogate him, but Yozo quickly recognizes that the man has no true power—he’s clearly bored and trying to pass the time. Yozo thus decides to play along, giving a detailed but inaccurate confession about what happened. This, he sees, greatly satisfies the guard.
The next day, Yozo meets with the police chief, who’s a lot less intense than the guard was. He comments on how handsome Yozo is and then tells him that the district attorney will decide whether or not to press charges. In the meantime, he tells him to take good care of his health, since Yozo has a bad cough. At one point, Yozo coughs into a handkerchief that is already stained by blood from a pimple. The chief thinks he's coughing blood, and Yozo leans into this assumption, letting the chief think he’s in worse shape than he really is.
Yozo’s tendency to perform for others now plays to his benefit, as he effortlessly capitalizes on the chief’s mistaken assumption that he’s coughing blood—for once, then, his history of “clowning” and deceiving people actually comes in handy in a more practical way.
The police chief tells Yozo to contact somebody who can act as a “guarantor,” so Yozo reaches out to a man from his hometown—a man he and his father used to call Flatfish . Flatfish agrees to meet him in the nearby city of Yokohama, where the district attorney examines him. Yozo underestimates the district attorney, thinking that he’s a straightforward, simple man. He thus plays up his cough in the same way that he emphasized it in front of the police chief, but the district attorney catches him off guard by smiling and asking, “Was that real?” Suddenly, Yozo is transported back to the day Takeichi accused him of falling on purpose at school.
Yozo feels as if he’d rather spend 10 years in prison than have to endure the kind of interaction he just had with the district attorney. Still, the district attorney drops the charges, but it doesn’t bring Yozo any happiness.
Analysis
After trying to die by suicide, Yozo ends up leading a life of isolation—something he’s actually rather used to, considering that he has always felt isolated and alienated from society. The only difference now, though, is that he’s literally kept from most aspects of life, whereas his previous isolation was more self-imposed.
It’s somewhat ironic that Yozo can’t think of what to say when Flatfish asks him what he wants to do with his life—after all, Yozo wants to please Flatfish by saying whatever would please him, and this (pleasing people) is normally something he’s quite good at. And yet, he can’t fathom what Flatfish could possibly want for him, perhaps because he himself has no idea what would make sense for him to do with his life. He is, in other words, at loose ends and doesn’t know where to look for guidance.
Summary Lannamann, Taylor. "No Longer Human The Third Notebook: Part Two." LitCharts. LitCharts LLC, 29 Jun 2022. Web. 21 Nov 2023.
Yozo and Yoshiko move into an apartment together, and Yozo stops drinking. He enjoys spending time with his new bride, and he even begins to hope that he’ll find happiness and learn how to lead a normal life. But then Horiki reappears in his life. He says—in front of Yoshiko—that Shizuko has asked him to tell Yozo to come visit her. Yozo suddenly feels deeply ashamed about his past and how he abandoned Shizuko. Distressed, he suggests that he and Horiki should go out for a drink. From this point on, he and Horiki periodically go to the bar in Kyobashi, get drunk, and then visit Shizuko, sometimes even spending the night at her apartment.
One night, Horiki comes over and asks to borrow some money. Yozo sends Yoshiko to the pawnshop to pawn some of her clothes, and then he tells her to use a portion of the money to buy gin, which he and Horiki spend the evening drinking while lounging on the roof. As they get progressively drunker, they talk about crime, and Horiki makes offensive comments about how, unlike Yozo, he has never been arrested and imprisoned. Nor, he says, does he want women to die. Yozo recognizes this as a rude comment about what happened between him and Tsuneko . He feels an impulse to defend himself by saying that he didn’t want Tsuneko to die, but he doesn’t say anything because he’s so accustomed to seeing himself as “evil.”
At one point, Horiki drunkenly announces that he’s starving, so he gets up and descends from the roof, going downstairs to look for food. He quickly returns, though, and Yozo can see by his face that something strange is happening downstairs. Horiki tells him to come take a look. Yozo follows him and then sees a man raping Yoshiko in an adjacent room. Yozo is deeply troubled by this, but he doesn’t do anything to help Yoshiko. Instead, he tries to tell himself that this sort of thing is simply “another aspect of the behavior of human beings.” Horiki, for his part, announces that he's leaving, at which point Yozo retreats and continues to drink gin and cry until Yoshiko appears and offers him some food, explaining that the man who raped her had promised he wouldn’t do anything.
Yozo tells Yoshiko not to talk about getting raped. Before he left, Horiki told Yozo to “forgive” her, but now he feels as if he neither forgives Yoshiko nor holds the rape against her. What mostly bothers him isn’t necessarily that she herself was violated, but that she was taken advantage of because she tends to trust people. In the coming days and weeks, Yoshiko becomes jumpy and nervous around Yozo, constantly worrying about how he feels. In response, he plunges into his drinking habit.
One night, Yozo comes home excruciatingly drunk. Wanting some sugared water before bed, he ends up finding a box of sleeping pills. He takes all of them and then goes to bed. He doesn’t regain consciousness for three days. The doctor treating him rules the incident an accident, so the police don’t descend on Yozo when he wakes up. Yozo’s first words upon waking up are, “I’m going home,” though he doesn’t know what this means and doesn’t remember saying it later on.
Flatfish is there when Yozo regains consciousness. He’s talking to the bartender in charge of the bar in Kyobashi, remarking that the last time Yozo tried to take his own life was also near the end of the year. Addressing the woman from the bar, Yozo asks to be taken away from Yoshiko . Then, without understanding what he means, he says that he’s going to a place where there aren’t women.
In the aftermath of Yozo ’s incident with the sleeping pills, Yoshiko thinks he tried to kill himself because he blames himself for her rape. Flatfish , for his part, gives Yozo some money, acting as if it’s a gift from him even though Yozo knows it’s really from his own brothers. Still, Yozo accepts the money and uses it to go on a solo trip to some hot springs, but the trip doesn’t do him any good—he spends the whole time drinking indoors, thinking about Yoshiko, and feeling miserable. He returns to Tokyo feeling even worse than before.
Drunkenly wandering the streets one night, Yozo throws up blood and falls into a snowbank. Pulling himself up, he decides to go to the pharmacy to get some medicine. It’s late, but the woman who runs the pharmacy is still there. When she sets eyes on Yozo, they both immediately seem to recognize each other’s suffering. They both start crying, at which point Yozo backs away and returns to his apartment. The next night, he returns to the pharmacy and tells the pharmacist about his condition. She tells him to stop drinking—her husband, she says, took years off his life by drinking. Yozo says he feels too unsettled when he’s not drunk, so she gives him some medicine to help, making him promise not to touch alcohol.
The medicine that the pharmacist gives Yozo is morphine. She tells him it’s no worse than alcohol, and at first, he thinks this is true. He’s astonished by how the morphine makes him feel optimistic and unworried. All of his anxieties seem to melt away, and he frequently experiences a state of elation. But it isn’t long before he’s taking multiple injections of morphine each day. He soon runs out of his supply and has to return to the pharmacy, and though the pharmacist is hesitant to give him more, he convinces her. This pattern repeats, and he even begins an affair with the elderly pharmacist as a means of convincing her to continue supplying him with the drug.
Yozo is already fully addicted to morphine by the time he realizes it’s no better than alcohol. He wants to die, but still he keeps going back to the pharmacy for morphine, thus racking up a huge debt. He decides to write to his father and beg for help—and if he doesn’t receive this help, he’ll kill himself. His father never writes back. On the day that Yozo plans to kill himself, though, Horiki and Flatfish show up and take him to a psychiatric ward. Yoshiko comes with them, and just before leaving Yozo at the ward, she tries to slip him some morphine, thinking he’ll need it. However, he doesn’t take it.
In the psychiatric ward, Yozo realizes that his premonition has come true: he’s now in a place where there aren’t any women. He also realizes that, even when he gets out of the ward, society will always see him as a “reject.” He has been, he thinks, “disqualified as a human being.”
After spending three months in the psychiatric ward, Yozo is released. His older brother and Flatfish come to pick him up, and his brother tells him that their father has died. The family, his brother says, will now support him financially without asking any questions about his past—if, that is, he agrees to leave Tokyo. They want him to recuperate in the countryside. Devastated by the news of his father’s death, Yozo agrees to leave Tokyo. His brother installs him in a house near a coastal hot spring.
It has now been three years since Yozo first went to the countryside. He still sometimes coughs blood, and the old servant his brother hired occasionally torments him in strange ways. For instance, he recently sent her to get some sleeping pills, but she brought back laxatives instead. He took ten of the pills and then stayed up all night with a cramping stomach. In the long run, though, he is neither unhappy nor happy. Life simply passes him by. He’s almost 27, but his hair is already graying, and most people would think he’s older than 40.
Analysis
Just when it seems that Yozo might actually manage to find some sort of contentment in life, Horiki causes him to rehash his troubling past and start drinking again. This effectively shatters the domestic happiness that Yozo has secured with Yoshiko, and though it’s certainly the case that Horiki is a bad influence, the fact that Yozo backslides so easily highlights the fragility of his brief sense of happiness—his marriage to Yoshiko is clearly a temporary solution to his longstanding struggle with depression, and it takes very little to plunge him back into a life of squalor and despair.
Horiki’s comments underscore just how little he truly cares about Yozo. He not only brings up Yozo’s painful past, but deliberately casts his friend as cold and mean-spirited, as if he wants to legitimately hurt Yozo’s feelings. Yozo, however, won’t give him a reaction, since Horiki couldn’t possibly say anything about Yozo that would be worse than what Yozo already thinks about himself.
Lannamann, Taylor. "No Longer Human Prologue." LitCharts. LitCharts LLC, 29 Jun 2022. Web. 21 Nov 2023.
Lannamann, Taylor. "No Longer Human The Third Notebook: Part One." LitCharts. LitCharts LLC, 29 Jun 2022. Web. 21 Nov 2023.
Lannamann, Taylor. "No Longer Human The Third Notebook: Part Two." LitCharts. LitCharts LLC, 29 Jun 2022. Web. 21 Nov 2023.
