Reading No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai back-to-back with Lonely Woman by Takako Takahashi was a pretty decent unintended-by-me route to experience these older acclaimed works which have really strong parallels and contrasts about loneliness, alienation and disconnection, and misogynist vs feminist perspectives.
I feel like a lot of Tumblr might really enjoy the first 50 pages of No Longer Human but the character's misogyny does get very blatant and persistent as from an unreliable narrator after that point on, but it's considered a classic novella and it's pretty brisk. (I don't know how I feel about it yet really and there is a lot of context with it.)
The epilogue of No Longer Human is very fascinating to me and elevated the whole novella for me, because the real world parallel and questions become so very distinct and potent there.
Because the parallel is our protagonist who has struggled with emotional isolation and various other difficulties who has a history of suicide attempts sent his journals to a friend and then is never heard from again; this parallels the author having written this very personal novella, leaving it for the world, and then killing himself. And the epilogue is the madam character's reaction to this and also a stranger's reaction but also perhaps what Osamu Dazai was pondering aloud of his thoughts of what others would think of him and his suicide, at least in some capacity.
And there's a lot to wonder in the madam's thoughts on the protagonist in the end.
Did the character understand he was loved by the people he knew in spite of everything? Is this the full awareness of how his inside didn't match what other people saw of him or wanted to see of him? Does it feel like even in death this woman would never see Yozo for who he really was and insist he was just good? Is this a desire to be seen as good and to have left some positive impact even in the disconnect and judgements? Is this the truth of an unreliable narrator: that he was a good man to his pals even though he felt he was not a human being? Is this a dearly desired thought, that his friends loved him and would miss him? Leaving the journals, perhaps like leaving this novella, was a desire to be remembered and possibly reach out after being gone. And of course, Osamu Dazai was just a person. People are complex beings and feelings are complex things and it's not grand or divine. It's human.
The novella also has the context of Japan being in the midst of intense societal changes when this story was published in 1948 which factors in to the miasma that came to speak to many readers who made it a classic.
