No Longer Human

This book is great. If your looking to feel something while reading, feel this. This book is rough, in a good way.

Exactly what I ordered, perfect condition and good book.

The hardcover came in perfect conditions just a tiny minor bend on one corner. Has a dust jacket and the book came in plastic wrap to indicate the new conditions of the book. Great quality.

I stumbled across this in a Jacob Geller video essay (if you haven’t watched his essays, you should; in my opinion he’s the best horror-centric video essayist out there), and so I was immediately interested because of how Geller pitched it; he gave the viewer a pretty intense trigger-warning, insinuating that this was going to be an intense, very bleak novel (the way he described it made me think it was going to in the vein of Murakami). Apparently Geller has never read Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, or Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory, or anything written by Kristopher Triana, but I digress.Published in 1975, it’s a very introspective, quasi-autobiographical novel—also one of the ten best-selling novels in Japan (I find this kind of surprising, but I suppose it captured the country’s zeitgeist at the time of publication)—exploring the liminal cultural spaces spanning from post-war Japan and a technology-driven postmodernism through the perspective of a very lonely, aimless, depressed MC who keeps on doing self-destructive things and to which bad things continually keep happening.It is bleak but not very “edgy” or graphic. And the one graphic event involved the r-word that rhymes with grape. But it mostly happened off-screen, was poetically insinuated to boot, and was more about the MC’s psychological reaction to it happening rather than a reliance on graphic details (which, again, there were none); unsettling but swallowable due to Dazai’s delicate approach.I liked this book but didn’t love it—partially because I wished there was a bit more Japanese culture interwoven throughout, partially because it was slightly overhyped. It is a very readable, well-paced book with great translated prose, but it didn’t quite scratch any of my genre, narrative, or prose itches. I kind of recommend it, though.

Incredible book that will leave you speechless

A dark and deep story that soaks into your skin and lingers in your mind. Reminiscent of Camus' The Stranger.

this book is beautifully written, loved it

seriously a great read and looks baller on a shelf 🙏🏻