No Longer Human (Junji Ito) Review

Rating: 5/5

Note: I haven't read the original 1948 novel by Osamu Dazai. Therefore, I cannot draw any comparisons between it and this manga adaptation.

Synopsis: No Longer Human is a semi-autobiographical work chronicling the harrowing life and times of Oba Yozo, a literary facsimile of the author himself.

My Thoughts: Well plowing through this book was an uncanny experience which I would consider similar to riding on a train derailing into a deep abyss where everything seems to keep getting worse for our main character to no end as he becomes more and more entwined in the suffocating, thorny branches of his crippling depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, and an overflowing orgy of sexual encounters, each of which regresses him steps backward and unfold another aspect of his repressed insecurities and personal moral conflicts. Many of the events depicted here were so shocking that I had to constantly remind myself this was a part-autobiography. Junji Ito's graphically detailed macabre art made it all the more unsettling insofar as to making me gag which was further exacerbated by the fact I went through this right after reading Junji's other work Uzumaki (which was pretty heavy on the body horror) while overindulging on confectioneries. Not to veer off-topic, the artwork especially shined throughout the hallucination sequences where Oba was figuratively fighting his internal demons contributing to his self-destructive lifestyle. Oba's ties with Marxism didn't help and neither did his profession as a manga artist, something which was heavily stigmatized at the time (and still is to an extent to this day much like comics/graphic novels) due to how many people didn't see it as "a real profession". When I finished the story, it left me with a surprisingly bleak impression akin to the bloody hollowness of a bullet to the chest in a good, mature way of speaking.

Final Thoughts: In conclusion, all I can say is well-written gems like this prove that manga can be and is more profound and complex than what you see in shonen or magical girl tales. I would recommend this to anybody looking for a literary manga. A word of warning to the more sensitive readers here, the book does contain quite a handful of graphic sex scenes and violence including an early one involving child molestation (it's only a few panels long but still is heavy-handed).