56 pages • 1 hour read
Osamu DazaiNo Longer Human
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1948A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Part 3 and EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3, Chapter 1 Summary: “The Third Notebook: Part One”
Expelled from university over his suicide pact, Yozo makes his living as a cartoonist. He has become a man whom women fall for, but not a famous artist, as Takeichi predicted. Disowned by his family, Yozo lives with Flatfish in the quarters above his antique shop, on a secret allowance that they send to Flatfish directly. Yozo lives under Flatfish’s angry scrutiny, as if he were going to commit suicide at any moment. Confined to a small room, Yozo has no energy for anything. Yozo’s only correspondent is a 17-year-old boy, Flatfish’s illegitimate son, who lectures him as if he were incompetent.
One evening, at dinner, Flatfish questions Yozo about the future. He offers Yozo help—if Yozo takes the initiative to change his life. Unable to comprehend Flatfish’s guarded offer, Yozo fails to realize that he would be offered financial support were he to do something productive, such as reenroll in school. Yozo suspects that this would have changed his life for the better.
The next day, Yozo runs away. He leaves a note telling Flatfish that he is visiting a friend to think things over, and he will return the next day. He visits Horiki. Horiki exhibits a new side of his character: Despite his extravagant lifestyle, he is a devoted son and very possessive of his home. Horiki tries to cut Yozo’s visit short when a woman from a magazine (Horiki’s current employer) arrives for an appointment. Shortly after, a telegram from Flatfish arrives. Yozo leaves with the woman, whose office is near Flatfish’s house.
Yozo moves in with the woman, Shizuko, and her daughter, Shigeko. He becomes a kept man, relying on Shizuko for money and taking care of Shigeko while she is away. He spends his days staring at a kite caught in the tree outside his window. He pines for his ghost portraits, which were lost in one of his moves. Yozo thinks that if he could show the world his paintings, they would recognize his worth—an artistry that far exceeds Horiki’s. Through Shizuko, Yozo becomes a freelance cartoonist for a popular children's magazine published by her company.
Yozo, Shizuko, Flatfish, and Horiki meet and agree to cut ties between Yozo and his family; Yozo and Shizuko will live together as husband and wife. Despite this arrangement and his career bringing in enough money to buy liquor and cigarettes, Yozo falls deeper into depression—eased somewhat by Shigeko, who now calls him “daddy.”
Horiki visits Yozo, acting like a benefactor despite how he behaved when the latter visited his house. He warns Yozo to stop womanizing, as society will punish him for it. This causes Yozo to conclude that society is an individual, and he becomes somewhat bolder and more self-centered. He relapses into nightly bouts of drinking, wilder than before his suicide attempt. A year after moving in with Shizuko, Yozo steals some of her clothes to pawn and goes on a multi-day bender. Remorseful, he sneaks back into the home and overhears Shizuko comforting Shigeko about his behavior. He leaves and does not return.
Yozo moves in with the madame of a bar in Kyobashi. He becomes a familiar, well-liked fixture of the bar and begins to become more comfortable with the world. However, deep down, Yozo’s fear of humanity remains, and he drinks to cope. Above all, he “craved desperately for some great savage joy, no matter how immense the suffering that might ensue” (128).
A year later, Yozo largely lives the same life. In addition to the children’s magazine, he publishes lewd cartoons in pornographic publications. Yoshiko, a 17-year-old girl who works at a tobacco shop near the bar, pleads with Yozo to give up drinking. He flirts with her and dodges her entreaties, until he drunkenly falls in a manhole one night, and she helps him out. Yozo tells her that he will give up drinking and asks her to marry him if he does. Though this was meant as a joke, Yoshiko takes him seriously and agrees. The next day, Yozo gets drunk. When he sees Yoshiko, she believes he is faking intoxication. They get married soon after.
Part 3, Chapter 2 Summary: “The Third Notebook: Part Two”
The madame of the bar arranges an apartment for Yozo and Yoshiko. They live in relative happiness, until one day, Horiki comes to visit. Yozo has continued his destructive friendship with Horiki, despite their mutual dislike. Horiki carries a message from the madame: She would like Yozo to visit occasionally. Shame floods Yozo’s mind, shattering his newfound happiness.
Another day, Horiki visits to borrow money. Yozo sends Yoshiko to pawn some of her clothes, and he has her buy gin with the leftover money. The men sit on Yozo’s roof, playing a word game that they invented. Eventually, Horiki becomes testy from a joke that Yozo made at his expense and snaps, “‘I for one have never been tied up like a common criminal the way you have’” (144). Yozo is taken aback and realizes that, despite their similarities, Horiki looks down on him. They continue their word game, trying to find a proper poetic antonym for “crime,” until Horiki complains about being hungry. In an uncharacteristic rage, Yozo tells him to get some beans that Yoshiko cooked. Horiki drunkenly jokes that he might commit a crime with Yoshiko.
Horiki returns a moment later, telling Yozo “‘Extraordinary beans you’ve got there. Come have a look’” (147). He leads Yozo to a small window looking into Yozo’s bedroom. Looking in, Yozo sees Yoshiko being raped by a shopkeeper who lives nearby. Yozo watches in terror, doing nothing to help her. Horiki leaves, telling Yozo that he will not be coming back. Yozo’s hair turns prematurely gray. Succumbing to doubt and anxiety, he enters a downward spiral of alcoholism.
One night, Yozo finds a bottle of sleeping pills hidden in his kitchen and downs the contents with gin, resolving to die by suicide. However, he awakens three days later to the sound of Flatfish discussing his behavior with the madame of the bar. Yozo tells them that he wants away from Yoshiko; he wants to go somewhere where there are no women.
Returning home to Tokyo after failed recuperation at a hot spring resort, Yozo vomits blood in the snow. He visits a pharmacy for medicine and advice. The female pharmacist says he needs to give up drinking. She prescribes a variety of medicines and vitamins, including morphine for intense alcohol withdrawals.
Yozo quickly becomes dependent on morphine. The pharmacist tries to get him to cut back, to no avail. By the time he realizes that “drugs were abominable, as foul—no, fouler—than gin, [he] had become an out-and-out addict” (163). He begins an affair with the pharmacist.
The very day that Yozo plans to overdose and jump into a river, Flatfish and Horiki visit. Yozo surrenders himself to them (and Yoshiko). He is taken to what he thinks is a sanatorium for his tuberculosis. Before the group leaves, Yoshiko offers Yozo a syringe and the rest of his morphine. For the first time in his life, Yozo refuses something offered to him. After the group leaves, the door is locked, and Yozo realizes he is in a mental ward. Branded a madman, he reflects, “I had now ceased utterly to be a human being” (167).
When Yozo is released the next summer, his brothers (and Flatfish) inform him of their father’s death. Yozo is devastated. They arrange for Yozo to live in a small house near the coast, south of his hometown. He is attended by Tetsu, an older woman. After three years, he has “several times been violated in a curious way by the old servant” (168-69). One day, Yozo sends Tetsu to buy sleeping pills, intending to die by suicide. When Yozo takes the pills, he discovers they were laxatives.
By the end of the third and final notebook, Yozo is 27 years old, but he appears to be a man of 40.
Epilogue Summary
The unnamed narrator explains that he received Yozo’s notebooks from the madame of the bar in Kyobashi in 1935. He and the madame recognized each other from a decade prior and caught up. She asked if he had ever met Yozo; he had not. She gave him Yozo’s notebooks to serve as material for a novel. The narrator nearly refused but became fascinated by the three photographs of Yozo. He stayed up all night reading the notebooks.
The next day, the narrator receives the madame’s permission to borrow the notebooks. The madame does not know if Yozo is still alive or not; she received the parcel of notebooks without a return address. The narrator remarks that the madame must have suffered greatly because of Yozo. She blames Yozo’s hardships on his father, telling the narrator “‘The Yozo we knew was so easy-going and amusing...he was a good boy, an angel” (177).
Part 3 and Epilogue Analysis
The third and final notebook traces Yozo’s tragic marriage with Yoshiko to his stay at (and release from) a psychiatric hospital. Yoshiko’s rape is a pivotal moment in Yozo’s life. Because Yozo is so misaligned with humanity, he is unable to trust. Trust involves some degree of understanding human nature—which he lacks. Yoshiko’s key characteristic is being too trusting: She believes everything told to her, from Yozo’s jokes to her rapist’s lie that he was not going to do anything to her when she invited him inside. This trust belies a lack of understanding human nature as well; however, this is due to naivete and inexperience. Through Yoshiko, Yozo was able to trust by proxy, seeing something good in humanity for once. When Yoshiko’s trust is shattered, Yozo is once again unmoored, and he drifts back into self-destruction—culminating in two more attempts to die by suicide, which seem to be the only form of agency that he can grasp.
Yozo has suppressed his desires and relinquished agency at every turn in his life. It is appropriate that, by the end of the novel, his is a situation where he no longer has any say in his fate—nor does he want a say. Geographically, he has been driven to the very edge of Japan, no longer welcome in his hometown and no longer fit to live in Tokyo. By the end of his narrative, he embodies ultimate passivity: The one truth he has learned is “Everything passes” (169). This quality is reflected in the third photograph from the Prologue, where Yozo is aged beyond his years and utterly forgettable. In the Epilogue, it is evident that his fate is unknown. To society, he has passively faded from existence.
The madame’s assessment of Yozo’s character at the end of the novel inverts the Yozo from the notebooks. He is ultimately unfairly self-critical, portraying himself as an irredeemable person, rejected by society, when this is not how he is seen by those who knew him. There are many glimpses of this disparity throughout the narrative, but because the novel is written from the perspective of an unreliable narrator, it is not until the very end where the unnamed narrator, a character completely unrelated to Yozo, provides a more objective picture of him. Yozo is a good man, albeit a tortured one who refused to see his own goodness and destroyed himself because of it.
