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the-demon-prodigy · 7 months ago

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oba yozo and warped perception

ok heres an absolutely giant analysis (its 2k words ermm) that i wrote in an essay format! i cant rlly say im proud of its strength as an essay but i do like the concepts i brought up here so i might eventually redo but it took me literally a week so i cant not post it

yozo is my little guy i want to put him under a microscope and study him like a bug/aff

its under the cut :]

TW: su1cide, s3xual a$sault, misogyny (all mentioned, not depicted)

Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human, a Japanese literary classic, is told through the writings of the protagonist, Oba Yozo. Yozo is a deeply traumatized and alienated human being, and his perception of both himself and others is distorted by his traumatic experiences.

Yozo makes the judgement very early on in his life that he lacks what constitutes humanity. He separates himself from humans because of this, but unable to renounce their society as he is, he instead opts to display a public facade of light-heartedness and, on occasion, foolishness. Yozo feared that which he did not understand, and he therefore feared people, finding them and their society riddled with unspoken societal guidelines, utterly incomprehensible. (It’s likely that Yozo only feared the unknown so much and only came to this conclusion due to his intelligence, which he is mentioned to have, at least academically. Generally, it would be extremely unlikely that Yozo is an unintelligent character, seeing as how often he pokes and prods at the philosophical and existential.)

Yozo finds himself inhuman, due to how he fails to understand that which humans seem to be born into this world understanding. Additionally, he lacks something in his nature that he believes to be absolutely inherent to humans: a deep, animalistic anger. Yozo never describes being angry throughout the book; he only fears, and fears, and fears some more, until he fears every last thing in this world. It’s likely that this immense fear came only as a result of the life he led. Even in his teenage and adult years, he gauges himself to not be seen as a friend or even a person to some of the people he knew, thus determining that he had never made a friend. And, having been sexually assaulted at a very young age, it’s only natural that Yozo would believe human beings to be cruel and animalistic by nature, hence justifying his fear.

The childhood trauma that Yozo suffered also caused further complications in his life, outside of the obvious feelings of needing to please in order to be ‘safe’. Yozo seems to have difficulty processing/facing outright his emotions and traumatic events, his flowery style of writing carefully dancing around describing exactly what happened to him. I doubt that Yozo has truly suppressed the memories of his childhood, but he at least doesn’t process them correctly. Yozo also does this in regards to things that remind him of his trauma or, in other words, trigger him.

It’s important to note that the presentation of No Longer Human is inherently biased. There is not a single scene told from objective reality, even in the prologue and epilogue which aren’t told in Yozo’s perspective. While the unreliable narration is pivotal to exploring the recesses of the human mind, it’s impossible to grasp exactly what actually happened at any given point. Had Yozo outright lied about certain things? Were there times when he had forgotten important memories that eventually constituted his personality? Yozo himself even admits to having a side of him that exaggerates for effect, not even to his benefit, and it leads a reader to wonder just how much was affected by that trait of his.

In the epilogue, one of Yozo’s acquaintances says that the way that his life turned out was due to his father: “it’s his father’s fault.” However, Yozo barely talked about his father in the book, save for mentioning his fear of being reprimanded, which was par for the course for anyone that Yozo spoke to. Although his father did affect the way that Yozo lived, with the information that Yozo gave, it would be impossible to say accurately that it was his father’s fault.

Although it’s tempting to instead say that Yozo’s unfortunate circumstances only worsened because of him, it’s important to note that Yozo demonizes himself endlessly. Yozo feared humans to the point of decreeing all on his own that he was disqualified from their race, but he still sought out love from human beings. He still wished for connection, but because of Yozo’s deep-seated self-hatred which came only as a result of seeing the most distasteful parts of humanity as a young child and feeling alienated from that, Yozo ended up separating himself. However, Yozo states over and over again that he fakes things, that he has a facade, that he only plays the clown and is not one, but it’s impossible to tell whether Yozo was truly the faker he thought that he was or if that was truly his personality and he simply didn’t know it.

No Longer Human also has misogynistic themes, at times. While Yozo states that this is because he finds women to be boring, it’s possible that he is, once again, being unreliable, and the true reason that he has an aversion to women is because he experienced sexual assault at the hands of women from a young age and, many times throughout his life, he has experienced love with women that failed to come to proper fruition, hence causing his aversion to women and becoming attached to them.

Yozo spends the majority of the book fairly lost, not understanding humans, not understanding himself. So who is to say that Yozo was truly a liar, or that he simply thought that he was? It’s possible that Yozo only internalized the concept that he was a calculating, deceptive young man in order to make the thought that humans would never love him easier to swallow.

Yozo being the intelligent and alienated sort of person that he is, he comes across as slightly conceited at times, seeing as he’s rather opinionated, and internally refers to one of his acquaintances as an utter fool completely lacking in artistry, for example. With this acquaintance, he plays two word games, and his opinions can tell us quite a bit about him. The first game is about tragic versus comic nouns. Yozo believes that, just as pronouns can be divided between masculine, feminine, and neutral, nouns can be divided between tragic and comic. It’s primarily a game of connotation (for example: steamship and steam engine are tragic, while bus and streetcar and comic).

Of the highlights of this game is that Yozo’s first opinion is that death is comic, while life is tragic. This is a reflection of his unique view on death, specifically him seeing it as a sort of cathartic relief, in comparison to life. Yozo views his own life, particularly, as shameful, making it tragic.

The second game is about antonyms. Yozo’s first example is that black is the antonym of white, but the antonym of white is red, and the antonym of red is black. In order to get a different result each time, you will need to repeatedly switch your perspective. Black and white are visually in opposition. Red is only the antonym of white figuratively, however. White is surrender while red is offense, white is purity while red is tainted. Black is the antonym of red in that red is fierce and passionate, while black is empty and void.

These also reflect Yozo’s personality. He is visually the opposite to humans, seen in how an outsider views his photos in the prologue. He is tainted, or corrupted, because of the crime that was perpetrated upon him as a child. Yozo also experiences his emotions in a complex way, sometimes void, like ‘black’, but at other times too heavily, like ‘red’.

(And you, dear reader, may ask, “Aren’t you focusing too much on Yozo’s sexual trauma?” and I’d respond, “No Longer Human is an inherently subjective work due to the lack of representation of an objective reality. Yozo may ignore his sexual trauma more often than not, but I don’t have to, as that kind of experience is part of what created the ‘Oba Yozo’ that we come to see in the novel, regardless of how often it is directly addressed.”)

It’s also important to note that this example that Yozo provides is a one-way street. Black to white, then white to red, then red to black. Red is not the antonym of white, despite the fact that white is the antonym of red, because the antonym of white is black. This disjointed yet ultimately related style of thinking is reminiscent of the way that Yozo fails to properly reconcile all the concepts that he contemplates daily and how he fails to process things that were traumatic.

A highlight of the little antonym game that Yozo and his acquaintance played was when Yozo’s acquaintance mentioned that the antonym of crime was sure to be ‘the law’. Yozo internally scoffs at the concept, and states that crime belonged to a different category. Through the following paragraphs, it becomes apparent that Yozo sees crime as being a moral concept at heart. Whether or not something is a crime is not dictated by whether it defies the law or not, but by an intrinsic judgement system that exists within the heart of all people. He also states that vice is different from crime. Vice is a societal construct in Yozo’s eyes, whilst crime is not. Crime always exists and will continue to, even if there are no people in existence to observe it. Crime may even be above morality in a sense; there exists things that are crimes even to the earth itself. To Yozo, at least.

To Yozo, punishment is the antonym of crime. Through a reflection of Dostoevsky's work, Yozo came to the conclusion that crime would only be paired with punishment if they were meant to be of completely opposite affiliation. The reason his brain works in this way is because of the unique life that Yozo has led. Because the most horrific of crimes that were perpetrated upon him were met with no punishment, it’s only natural that he would see the two as inherently disconnected concepts.

Yozo also loses plenty of people important to him; Tsuneko and his father, to name two. Although the grief that Yozo experiences is very rarely directly addressed by him, it’s crucial to take into account the effect of these events on Yozo. He spends the latter parts of the book impacted by grief, and it shapes the ‘Yozo’ that we see. There is no objective reality in No Longer Human, there is only the clouded lens that Yozo views it through, and this concept permeates the entire story, which means that if, perhaps, Yozo hadn’t lost the people that he did, the second half of the story would be different. The entire book would be different if told from the perspective of someone else; this is where the truly genius subtext of the novel lies, in the fact that almost everything that the viewer ends up consuming about the story is Yozo’s own thoughts, inseparable from the experience of reading the novel.

“He was a good boy, an angel,” is the final line of No Longer Human, said about Yozo by one of the people who knew him. The unlovable, monstrous, deceptive Yozo that he claimed himself to be for his entire life was perceived as an angel by those around him. Yozo accentuated the many ways he had been taken advantage of, the things he had to keep secret, and yet someone who barely knew him was fond of him in a way he would never process as true had he been present for that moment. One might even say that there were a number of people in this world who loved Yozo.

By existing in a world that he determined could only ever be lonely, Yozo’s perception of humans was warped by the multitude of ways that he had been broken by others, and his perception of himself was warped by his personal opposition to the definition of ‘human’ that he had crafted. This is the core of what makes No Longer Human tragic: the fact that Yozo was seeing an emptier world than all others, and he had given up on his life before it began. That Yozo will never see the world that he lived in for what it truly was.

#pls dont let this flop bro i spent a wholeass week on it/lh #☆thoughts☆#☆analysis☆#☆scheduled☆#bsd analysis #bungou stray dogs #no longer human #oba yozo #classic literature #japanese literature #osamu dazai #dazai osamu

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