No Longer Human

Portraying himself as a failure, the protagonist of Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human narrates a seemingly normal life even while he feels himself incapable of understanding human beings. Oba Yozo's attempts to reconcile himself to the world around him begin in early childhood, continue through high school, where he becomes a "clown" to mask his alienation, and eventually lead to a failed suicide attempt as an adult. Without sentimentality, he records the casual cruelties of life and its fleeting moments of human connection and tenderness. Source: New Directions

Manga version of the novel Ningen Shikkaku by Osamu Dazai.

Manga based on the original classic novel by Dazai Osamu. Illustrated by Yasunori Ninose, it depicts human beings' negative emotion and sexual intercourse as tentacles, which have enthralled Ninose since he was five years old.

*Mine has been a life of much shame.* *I can’t even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.* Plagued by a maddening anxiety, the terrible disconnect between his own concept of happiness and the joy of the rest of the world, Yozo Oba plays the clown in his dissolute life, holding up a mask for those around him as he spirals ever downward, locked arm-in-arm with death. Osamu Dazai’s immortal—and supposedly autobiographical—work of Japanese literature, is perfectly adapted here into a manga by Junji Itou. The imagery wrenches open the text of the novel one line at a time to sublimate Yozo’s mental landscape into something even more delicate and grotesque. This is the ultimate in art by Itou, proof that nothing can surpass the terror of the human psyche. (Source: VIZ Media)