Monster

In Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human, the Monster is not a single entity but a pervasive mode of perception that defines Yozo's relationship with the world. It is the terrifying, inhuman essence he detects lurking beneath the surface of ordinary human life, a presence that manifests in sudden flashes of anger, in the ghostly self-portraits he paints, and in the dread that paralyzes him before the simplest social encounters. This concept of the Monster is the lens through which Yozo experiences his alienation, and it ultimately becomes the metaphor for his own identity as someone disqualified from the human race.

The Monster in Human Beings

Yozo's earliest and most formative encounters with the Monster occur not in nightmares but in the faces of ordinary people. He describes seeing in the face of a human being raging at him "a wild animal in its true colors, one more horrible than any lion, crocodile or dragon." This revelation strikes him with a fear that makes his hair stand on end, and he comes to believe that this monstrous nature is a prerequisite for survival as a human being. The horror is not that people are occasionally angry, but that their anger reveals a fundamental, bestial truth that they normally keep hidden. This perception is so acute that even the front door of another person's house terrifies him more than "the gate of Inferno in the Divine Comedy," as he can detect within it the presence of a "horrible dragon-like monster writhing there with a dank, raw smell." The Monster, for Yozo, is the hidden, violent core of human society itself.

The Monster as Artistic Vision

Yozo's understanding of the Monster is also the key to his artistic awakening. When his schoolmate Takeichi shows him a reproduction of a van Gogh self-portrait and calls it a "picture of a ghost," Yozo is startled into a new understanding of art. He realizes that certain painters, after being repeatedly wounded by the apparitions called human beings, come to believe in phantasms and "plainly saw monsters in broad daylight, in the midst of nature." These artists, he believes, did not fob people off with clowning; they dared to depict these monsters exactly as they appeared. This revelation leads Yozo to paint his own "ghost pictures"—self-portraits so heart-rending they stupefy even himself. These pictures represent the true self he had so desperately hidden behind his clowning, a harrowing reality he secretly affirms but dares not show to anyone except Takeichi. The Monster, in this context, becomes the subject of a truthful, terrifying art that stands in direct opposition to the pretty, conventional paintings he produces for school and for his later career as a cartoonist.

The Monster as Identity: The Reject

Ultimately, the Monster ceases to be something Yozo merely perceives in others and becomes the defining category of his own existence. After being committed to a mental hospital, he concludes, "I had now ceased utterly to be a human being." He is branded with the word "madman" or, perhaps, "reject." This final state is the culmination of a life spent feeling like a "social outcast" from the moment of birth. The Monster, which he once saw in the faces of others, has now fully colonized his own identity. In his final years, living as a recluse in a dilapidated house by the sea, he reflects that he has neither happiness nor unhappiness, and that everything passes. The only truth he has learned in the society of human beings, which he has experienced as a burning hell, is this passive, monstrous acceptance. The Monster is no longer a terrifying external force but the very condition of his being—a state of being disqualified as a human being.