No Longer Human

The master of horror turns inward in his manga adaptation of Osamu Daza’s haunting novel. Just because the terror isn’t tangible, doesn’t mean that it isn’t still, well, terrifying. Join Ito and dig deep into the dark recesses of the human mind. The places you try so hard not to go on your own.

Nothing can surpass the terror of the human psyche.

Mine has been a life of much shame.

I can’t even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.

Plagued by a maddening anxiety, the terrible disconnect between his own concept of happiness and the joy of the rest of the world, Yozo Oba plays the clown in his dissolute life, holding up a mask for those around him as he spirals ever downward, locked arm-in-arm with death.

Osamu Dazai’s immortal-and supposedly autobiographical-work of Japanese literature, is perfectly adapted here into a manga by Junji Ito. The imagery wrenches open the text of the novel one line at a time to sublimate Yozo’s mental landscape into something even more delicate and grotesque. This is the ultimate in art by Ito, proof that nothing can surpass the terror of the human psyche.

Editorial Reviews

*12/01/2019

As a boy, Yozo Oba adopts a clownish persona to disguise the severe anxiety he feels while interacting with other people. His buffoonery results in several tragic deaths, transforming his fear into full-blown terror and sending him down a path of compulsively self-destructive behavior that typically leads to others suffering the horrible–and frequently fatal–consequences of his actions. After an misguided adventure as a member of a Marxist group and a failed suicide attempt, he meets and marries a young woman who naively dotes on him, providing a small window of stability in which his work as a manga artist thrives, until his paranoia, cowardice, and innate selfishness send him spiraling into darkness, addiction, and insanity. VERDICT If the internationally acclaimed master of horror Ito (Smashed: Junji Ito Story Collection) seems at first a strange choice to adapt Dazai’s 1948 novel, his skill for stories mixing existential dread, body horror, and nightmarishly surreal imagery quickly prove him matched to the material. This unsparingly intense vision of life as a journey through hell, reminiscent of Dostoyevsky and Kafka, just might be Ito’s magnum opus.–TB
– Library Journal