No Longer Human

The frame narrative in the Prologue of No Longer Human provides early insight into Yozo's life, foreshadowing the contents of his notebooks. It is apparent that Yozo's true nature is captured in photographs and portraits, rather than through actions. The narrator’s three photographs echo Yozo’s paintings—his ghost portraits. While the outside world views an adult Yozo as an attractive and congenial, if clownish, man, the photographs and ghost portraits closer reflect his inner life. As a child, Yozo's clownish grin is not endearing, but instead elicits "an indescribable, unspeakable horror" due to its “unclean and nauseating” nature (14). The viewer of the photograph sees through the cheerful veneer that Yozo presents to the outside world, and echoes Yozo's sentiment when he claims, “I have always felt as if I were suffering in Hell” (25). The second photograph depicts Yozo as a handsome young man whose smile “somehow...is not the smile of a human being: it utterly lacks substance, all of what we might call the ‘heaviness of blood’ or perhaps even the ‘solidity of human life’” (15). This foreshadows Yozo's later conclusion of not only not fitting in with the rest of human society but being fundamentally disqualified as a human being; he does not meet his own standards for what he believes constitutes a human being. This disparity between his self-perception and the way in which he is perceived is one of his flaws and leads to his undoing—as evidenced by the final photograph, where he is depicted as an utterly forgettable man of an indeterminate age. The final notebook reveals that he is only 27, yet he has physically aged to the point of looking like a gray-haired man of 40. As a whole, the three photographs trace the course of Yozo's life as depicted in his autobiographical notebooks.

Yozo's behavior as a child sets the stage for his life as an adult. Reflecting on his childhood, Yozo notes “I can't guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being” (21). From this point on, Yozo initiates the reader into his mindset: He has been, and will forever be, at odds with society. His childhood—as well as most of his adult life—is spent in a painstaking effort to avoid reproach and scorn by any means possible. However, unlike protagonists in most “man versus society” stories, Yozo internalizes conflict. While his later foray into Communist politics may be seen as his one rebellion against society, it is, in truth, rooted in one of his flaws as a child: his inability to say “no” to people. In addition to his inability to refuse, Yozo is neither able to speak on his own account or state his own desires. Part of this may be learned helplessness: Yozo cryptically mentions that he was a victim of a “loathsome crime perpetrated on me by the servants” (38). While he does not go into the details of this “crime,” him freezing upon seeing his wife raped in the third notebook and his nonchalant attitude toward his own violation at the hands of his servant Tetsu at the end of the novel suggests that the servants violated him as a child. This underscores his unhealthy sexual relationships with the many women in his life. Yozo is under the impression that women could “instinctively sniff out this loneliness,” which later is “one of the causes of [his] being taken advantage of in so many ways” (38).