No Longer Human

The original Japanese title of No Longer Human, Ningen Shikkaku, or Disqualified From Being Human, is also one of its themes. From the very beginning, Yozo is depicted as an “effigy” of a person—that, even to look at him, “Something ineffable makes the beholder shudder in distaste” (17). His childhood grin is “nothing more than a puckering of ugly wrinkles,” and he is described by the unnamed narrator as a “‘wizened, hideous little boy’” (14). His college photograph produces “a sensation of complete artificiality. Pretense, insincerity, fatuousness—none of these words quite covers it” (15). In short, Yozo is lacking something fundamental that makes one a human being; he has been disqualified from the category from the start. However, the narrator’s observations are an outlier: The three photographs, along with Yozo’s grotesque self-portraits, are the only evidence of what lies beneath his façade. Yozo believes his façade, his “human disguise,” is complete enough to endear those around him. The madame of a bar that he frequented describes him as “‘a good boy, an angel’” (177). The discrepancies between his inner self and his outer presentation suggests that it is an internal condition that prevents him from being human: Loss of agency due to childhood trauma causes Yozo to regard himself as something less than human.

As a child, Yozo was sexually assaulted by his servants, particularly one maidservant. Details on this subject are sparse, but they indicate that the abuse was recurring, rather than a one-time event. It can be inferred that this destroyed Yozo’s trust in others. He ultimately talked himself out of telling his parents, as he “wondered if in the end I would not be argued into silence by someone in good graces with the world, by the excuses of which the world approved” (35). The result is enduring his abuse with a passivity that he will later display in nearly any circumstance where he is the victim—including when his servant, Tetsu, violates him.

Yozo believes that others’ reprimands are “without doubt voices of human truth,” and that “since I lacked the strength to act in accordance with this truth, I might already have been disqualified from living among human beings” (27). This inability to answer reprimands—or any question of personal wishes—indicates that what disqualifies him as a human is lack of agency, learned helplessness. Yozo’s stay at a psychiatric hospital (which he initially mistakes for a tuberculosis ward) appears to be the breaking point for his ego. He has never been one to stand up for himself, so he readily accepts his new label as a madman. In Yozo’s own words, he is “Disqualified as a human being” (167); passivity becomes his survival technique. By the end of the novel, he is unable to do anything in his own interest, embodying the one truth he learned from society: “Everything passes” (169).