Fear of human beings

Fear of human beings is the foundational condition of Yozo's life, the inescapable dread that shapes every relationship, every decision, and every collapse recorded in his notebooks. From earliest childhood, Yozo experiences human society not as a source of comfort or connection but as an arena of incomprehensible menace. This fear is so profound that it constitutes the very structure of his consciousness: he opens his account with the stark declaration that his has been "a life of much shame," and immediately confesses that he cannot even guess what it must be to live the life of a human being. The fear is not a passing anxiety but a permanent, ontological terror that makes him feel like a creature of a different species, one who has been "disqualified as a human being" from the start.

Origins and Early Manifestations

The fear takes root in Yozo's earliest memories. He describes the family dining room in his country home as a place of ritualized gloom where ten or more members of the household ate in silence, a scene that sent "chills through me." The simple act of eating three meals a day becomes a source of dread, a mysterious and oppressive ceremony. More devastatingly, Yozo is sexually abused by the maids and menservants in his home, a crime he calls "the ugliest, vilest, crudest crime a human being can commit." He endures it in silence, smiling in his weakness, because he has already learned that appealing to any human being—even his parents—would be useless. This early betrayal seals him off from the world of trust and deepens his conviction that human beings are fundamentally dangerous. The fear is compounded by his inability to understand the most basic human motivations: he cannot grasp what it means to be hungry, he is baffled by the concept of happiness as others define it, and he lies awake at night groaning under the weight of his isolation, driven "to the brink of lunacy."

The Clowning as a Defense

To survive among beings he dreads, Yozo invents his "clowning." This is not a playful choice but a desperate strategy born of mortal fear. He describes it as "the last quest for love I was to direct at human beings," a precarious performance maintained only at the cost of excruciating inner effort. He feigns an innocent optimism, perfects himself in the role of the farcical eccentric, and makes everyone laugh—his family, his teachers, his classmates, even the military drill instructor. The clowning is a shield: as long as he can make them laugh, he believes, they will not mind if he remains outside their lives. But the performance is exhausting and fragile. It can be shattered by a single person who sees through it, as when the dull-witted classmate Takeichi taps him on the back and murmurs, "You did it on purpose." That moment plunges Yozo into hell; he feels as if the world has burst into raging flames. The fear of being exposed is so intense that he considers praying for Takeichi's death rather than face the consequences of discovery.

Escalation through Drink, Women, and Drugs

As Yozo grows older, his fear of human beings does not diminish but finds new outlets. He discovers that drink, tobacco, and prostitutes offer temporary relief. In the arms of prostitutes—whom he sees as imbeciles or lunatics—he feels "absolute security" and can sleep soundly. Yet even this refuge is poisoned: his association with prostitutes gives him the atmosphere of a "lady-killer," which attracts women he cannot handle and deepens his shame. His involvement with the Marxist Reading Society appeals to him not because of its ideology but because its irrationality feels more comfortable than the logic of the "rational gentlemen" he fears. But when the movement demands too much of him, he escapes into thoughts of suicide. His relationship with Tsuneko, the waitress with whom he attempts a love suicide, is the closest he comes to genuine connection, yet even that is shadowed by fear: after their one night of liberation, he wakes and immediately resumes his clowning, afraid of being wounded by happiness itself. When Tsuneko dies and he survives, the incident only intensifies his sense of being a social outcast.

The Collapse of Trust and the Final Descent

The fear reaches its most destructive form after Yozo marries Yoshiko, a girl whose "immaculate trustfulness" he initially treasures as something clean and pure, "like a waterfall among green leaves." When Yoshiko is violated by a shopkeeper, Yozo's reaction is not anger but a paralyzing terror that goes far beyond the event itself. He is split through the forehead between the eyebrows, a wound that throbs whenever he comes in contact with a human being. The defilement of Yoshiko's trust—more than the physical act—shatters his last anchor. He begins to doubt everything: he wonders if Yoshiko has also been with Horiki, he loses all confidence in himself, and he abandons all hope. His only resort is drink, then morphine. The drug at first seems to sweep away his insecurity and fretfulness, but it quickly becomes an addiction that drives him to copy pornographic pictures, to have an affair with the crippled pharmacist, and to accumulate a frightening debt. His fear of human beings has now fully transformed into a self-destructive spiral from which he sees no escape but death.

The Institutionalization and Its Aftermath

Yozo's fear of human beings culminates in his confinement to a mental hospital. When Horiki and Flatfish come to take him away, he is so shattered by Horiki's uncharacteristically gentle smile that he weeps and obeys without resistance, like a man "bereft of all will, decision and everything else." Locked in a ward with only male lunatics and male nurses—a grotesque fulfillment of his delirious wish to go "somewhere where there aren't any women"—he realizes he has been branded a madman. Even after his release, following his father's death, he lives as a "reject" in a decaying house by the sea, cared for by an ugly old servant with whom he sometimes quarrels like a husband and wife. His hair has turned prematurely grey; most people take him for over forty though he is only twenty-seven. The fear has not left him, but it has exhausted itself: he now has "neither happiness nor unhappiness," only the quiet, desolate conviction that "everything passes."

Thematic Significance

Fear of human beings is not merely a personal affliction in No Longer Human; it is the lens through which the novel examines the impossibility of authentic social existence for a hypersensitive soul. Yozo's dread is the engine of his clowning, his addictions, his failed relationships, and his repeated attempts at self-annihilation. It is also the source of his most penetrating insights: his realization that "society" is nothing but an individual, his suspicion that trustfulness itself may be a sin, and his final, bitter acceptance that he has been disqualified from the human race. The novel's epilogue, in which the madam of the Kyobashi bar calls Yozo "an angel," offers a devastating counterpoint: the same fear that made him a clown and a wreck also made him gentle, and it is precisely that gentleness—his inability to resist, to fight back, to be fully human in the world's terms—that the world could not tolerate.