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.
Symbols & Motifs
Ghost Portraits
Takeichi introduces Yozo to the idea of “ghost paintings” through a Vincent Van Gough print when they were in high school. Until this point, Yozo had no aspirations for the future. However, after perusing a picture book of Amedeo Modigliani prints, he begins to find kinship with tormented artists and desires to become a painter himself. He paints a series of “ghost portraits” in high school, which he regards as his “lost masterpieces,” his “only really worthwhile pictures” (124). Yozo’s life is steeped in deception, with his personality lacking authenticity. What he is unable to communicate through other means he pours into his ghost portraits. The portraits are a symbol of his inner self, his one means of expressing his inner turmoil.
Yozo’s paintings are unique. Dissatisfied with copybooks and teachers’ examples, he recalls, “I was obliged to experiment for myself entirely without direction, using every method of expression which came to me” (55). However, his paintings remain flat and lifeless until Takeichi’s revelation. Yozo immediately resonates with the idea that artistic expression can come from within, rather than derive from outside sources. He is inspired by painters like Van Gogh and Modigliani, who “did not fob people off with clowning,” but rather “after repeated wounds and intimidations at the hands of the apparitions called human beings...did their best to depict these monsters just as they had appeared” (54). In his eyes, he has done what other famous painters of ghost paintings have done: captured a true sense of their terror of the world. However, his vision is too accurate. Yozo hides the paintings away from everyone but Takeichi—whom he believes has already glimpsed his true nature—to avoid being scrutinized by larger society.
Yozo is deeply bitter at the loss of his paintings. Not only were they the only true expression of his inner self, but they were also the best examples of his artistic talent. The cartoons he draws for children’s magazines and pornographic publications pale in comparison. Without his paintings, he has nothing to back up his claims that Horiki is an inferior artist, and so he must defer to Horiki—further wounding his already scarred sense of self-worth.
The Ox and the Horsefly
The joint symbol of the ox and the horsefly is one that Yozo returns to several times to illustrate his fear of humanity. One of Yozo’s character flaws is his inability to understand human emotions or motivations. He knows enough to realize that other people do not base all their actions on an abject fear of other people like he does—but beyond this, they remain inscrutable. This flaw manifests itself as a tremendous fear of anger and retaliation. Observing anger in others, Yozo concludes, “People normally seem to be hiding this true nature, but an occasion will arise...when anger makes them reveal in flesh human nature in all its horror” (28). He believes human nature is fundamentally animalistic, likening this threat of violence to “when an ox sedately ensconced in a grassy meadow suddenly lashes out with its tail to kill the horsefly on its flank” (28). This simile demonstrates that Yozo views humans as wild animals when they criticize him, and he fears their retaliation for his imagined transgressions. Naturally, he sees himself as the horsefly, an abject pest of a creature despised by all. Yozo wonders if “this nature might be one of the prerequisites for survival as a human being,” bringing him close to utter despair at times (28). To avoid retaliation, he hides within himself and adopts a clownish outward personality.
Yozo uses the joint symbol to illustrate his fear when Shigeko, Shizuko’s young daughter (to whom he becomes a surrogate father), appears to reject him. Yozo asks Shigeko what she would ask God to do if she could. The girl replies that she would like to have her real father back. This reply destroys Yozo: He begins to see Shigeko as “A stranger, an incomprehensible stranger, a stranger full of secrets” (118). He sees her not as a child, but “another frightening grown-up who would intimidate me” (117). He reflects that Shizuko is safe, but “she too was like the ox which suddenly lashes out with its tail to kill the horsefly on its flank” (118). While Shigeko’s response was not intended as an attack, it reminds Yozo that he can never fully fathom what goes on inside another person’s head. This realization renders the little girl an enemy, eliciting the same fear that he would feel from another adult’s violence. He is infantilized in his fear, terrified of a child.
“Love Flies Out the Window”
A common motif relating to Yozo’s relationship with money and women is introduced when he spends his first night with Tsuneko, the bar waitress with whom he attempts to die by suicide. Yozo tells Tsuneko, “‘They say that love flies out the window when poverty comes in the door, but people generally get that backwards’” (81). He fixates on this aphorism, though he interprets its common meaning differently. Yozo’s feelings toward his poverty are rooted in shame; he believes his inability to relate to the world is the core of his failure. While the aphorism implies that a woman will leave a man due to him falling on (financially) hard times, Yozo’s definition inverts it: He believes that “‘when a man becomes half-mad, he will shake and shake until he’s free of a woman’” (81). Though he intends this as a joke, he does attempt to escape nearly every woman in his life.
