Horse

In Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human, the horse functions as a persistent, shape-shifting symbol of monstrous otherness, artistic aspiration, and the final erasure of human identity. It first appears as a casual comparison, then becomes a private artistic goal, and finally crystallizes into the central image of Yozo's dehumanization: a human body with a horse's head, an effigy so devoid of recognizable life that it suggests not a person but a creature from another order of being.

The Horse Out of Hell: Takeichi's Revelation

The horse enters the narrative through Takeichi, the half-wit schoolmate who first sees through Yozo's clowning. When Yozo shows Takeichi a volume of Modigliani reproductions, Takeichi's eyes widen in admiration. Pointing to the familiar nudes with skin the color of burnished copper, he declares, "This one looks like a horse out of hell." Yozo, electrified by this perception, immediately grasps that Takeichi has identified something essential: these painters, after repeated wounds and intimidations at the hands of human beings, had dared to depict the monsters they saw in broad daylight. "They really are ghosts then, aren't they?" Yozo asks, and Takeichi replies, "I wish I could paint pictures of ghosts like that." In that moment, the horse becomes Yozo's artistic ideal—a creature of hell, a ghost, a monster that the true artist must learn to render. "I'm going to paint too," Yozo whispers to Takeichi. "I'm going to paint pictures of ghosts and devils and horses out of hell."

The Horse's Head: The Final Photograph

The horse image reaches its most devastating form in the prologue, before Yozo's story even begins. The third photograph of Yozo, the most monstrous of the three, shows a face that fails to leave any memory. The narrator describes it as suggesting "nothing so much as a human body to which a horse's head has been attached." This effigy, unlike a death mask, holds no expression, no individuality, no trace of a living human being. The horse's head here is not a ghost or a devil but something worse: a complete absence of the human. It is the final destination of Yozo's trajectory—a face that cannot be remembered, a person who has become a reject, disqualified as a human being.

The Horse and the Asylum: The Prophecy Fulfilled

The horse image recurs in the novel's final movement, when Yozo is committed to a mental hospital. His delirious cry after swallowing an overdose of sleeping pills—that he would go somewhere without women—has materialized in a "truly uncanny way": his ward holds only male lunatics, and the nurses are men. The horse, which began as an artistic aspiration and became a symbol of dehumanization, now finds its institutional counterpart. Yozo is no longer a criminal but a lunatic, and he reflects that even if released, he will be forever branded on the forehead with the word "madman" or "reject." The horse's head, once a metaphor for the inscrutable face in the photograph, has become a social reality: he is now a creature set apart from humanity, a being whose very existence is defined by his exclusion.

The Horse as a Comic Noun: The Final Irony

In the novel's closing pages, Yozo, now living in a dilapidated house by the sea with the old servant Tetsu, accidentally takes a laxative instead of sleeping pills. Lying on his bed with a hot water bottle on his stomach, he bursts out laughing. "I think 'reject' must be a comic noun," he reflects. The horse, which began as a "horse out of hell" and became a symbol of horror, has now been absorbed into the absurdity of Yozo's existence. Everything passes, he concludes. The horse, like everything else, is just another noun in a world where the distinction between tragic and comic has collapsed. The creature that once represented the terrifying otherness of art and the final erasure of identity has become, in the end, just another joke.