osamu dazai autism compilation (1080p)

25 Dec, 2025

last modified 3 months, 2 weeks ago

Merry Christmas! Have a longpost.

This post discusses a really dark book, and therefore, incurs a ton of content warnings.

Please take care of yourself, both in the present and in the future.

Recently, I joined a discord server populated by other fine Bearblog folks, among them those running the the Grizzly Gazette blog. They run a monthly book club. I found out and thought it might be fun to participate! My new years' resolution for 2025 was, after all, to finish two books each month, so it was harmonious. (Rotten resolution, by the way, don't do it, it'll stress you out).

The book for november turned out to be Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human. Exciting: I'd been meaning to read it! Last year, I had the idea of reading a bunch of depressing books throughout summer. I didn't do this? But I nicknamed the concept "Bummer Summer", which is too good to languish in obscurity. So you're free to steal the idea. Well, anyway: I read No Longer Human. And I came away with: a lot of thoughts!

Part of the joy of the book club is to post a review of the book read. Future ones, if I participate again (we'll see!) will try to be shorter. Because I had a lot of thoughts about No Longer Human, and I'm going to try to make my way through most of them in this post. And I write very slowly! So this has been a little bit of a herculean task. Umm, forgive my prose sucking ass, but it always does, so it's fine.

I really liked No Longer Human, but I also concluded it wasn't for everyone. I don't think everyone will read this book and see anything resembling what I see. I have sort of a weird brain at the best of times! Nevertheless, I still want to try to... "explain" what I saw in the book.

This is mostly because of my (very well-documented) compulsion to try and explain my thoughts throughout the medium of this blog; I have this stubborn irrational belief (or better yet, delusion) that, someday, I will produce not just a comprehensible sentence (already a pipe dream), but an outright decent argument, and others will be convinced by the way I think and adopt it.

...The purpose of "Psycheoma" as a thing that exists online might very well be to disprove Gorgias's old statement that "no thing in reality can be known, or if it can be known, then it cannot be communicated". (In this way, I am just like Socrates fr fr).

Well. No segue, let's just get into my thoughts, shall we?

There's a particular type of novel that has a certain kind of narrator that I have, in the past, enjoyed.

It's a type of narrator that that I wouldn't exactly describe as "unsympathetic", exactly? I mean, they usually are unsympathetic. However, this is not the primary reason a reader might dislike them. Or (better said), they are unsympathetic in a specific way, and I think this way sets them apart from other unsympathetic narrators. I'd describe these narrators as grating.

For many english readers, I think the best example would be Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye. These "grating narrators" are usually childish, selfish, heavily traumatized, and extremely self-centered. They often give themselves airs of superiority while actually being very petty and difficult to respect.

In my eyes, these narrators are defined by the fact that they demand emotional engagement from the reader to not make their story a complete fucking slog: they demand unconditional patience and compassion. To read the book and get something out of it, the reader must attempt to put themselves in the narrator's shoes and restrain themselves from judging the narrator too harshly...

Yozo is one of these "grating narrators". He's self-absorbed, childish, weak, cowardly, petty, snobby, ruled by his own emotions and impulses, a poor communicator, misanthropic, desperate, hypocritical, and someone who compulsively intellectualizes everything that's wrong with him. I really, really liked him as a character, and could relate to a lot of his flaws.

This is a "me" thing, mind. I generally tend to find these "grating narrators" super compelling. First of all, I am an ontologically annoying person¹, so they're usually Just Like Me For Real. I'm also one of those hyper-empathetic type of autists, so it's incredibly easy for me to feel bad for people and fictional characters. I'm not even empathetic in an accurate way, I get it wrong all the time; it's more like, I chronically overthink how others might be feeling, if I were them, all the time...

These two characteristics —the unfounded belief that I'm a highly flawed person, and the debilitating preoccupation with how others are feeling near me— combine to make me a devastating weapon on the field of, uh, sincerely relating to people and characters that anyone who cares about me would consider "far beneath me".

(In the process of writing this post, I wrote in and then cut out an anecdote to express this part of me. I ended up making it into its own post, which you can read here...)

Point is: I feel a lot of compassion for these insufferable dipshits! I liked Catcher in the Rye, and I judge people who didn't! (only a little bit) I liked Yozo and could relate to him. And I hope that, if I can somewhat explain why, maybe someone else can see him in a more positive way.

In terms of my position regarding what the book "is" and who Yozo "is"... well. Regardless of Dazai's intentions over what the book should communicate to its audience (which, uh... context makes them look pretty bleak²!) I don't think Yozo is a very good person at all. (I especially take issue with the whole "marrying a seventeen year old" thing... that's real bad... you should not do that?)

But I still ultimately empathize with and feel strongly for Yozo, because the circumstances of his life, and especially the way the novel ends, are more than tragedies to me, they're horror stories.

I think Yozo is a victim of neglect so severe it becomes abuse. He's a victim of other things as well: he mentions casually having been molested as a child, at the beginning of the novel, for one. And, without making any grand sweeping statements, I'd also characterize Yozo's relationships with his family and with Horiki as denigrating and humiliating for Yozo himself. (Seriously, I went through the entire novel being equally angry at and terrified of Horiki's almost supernatural ability to both augur tragedy in Yozo's life and influence him away from positive habits or connection with others...) But I think the most important thing, here, to me, is the neglect.

There's many concrete things I could point to as examples of the neglect Yozo suffers. There's three blatant examples: his childhood, steeped in fear and isolation; his family disinheriting him after his first suicide attempt, leaving a broken and depressed man to drift into poverty alone; and the end of the novel, where Yozo's family, no longer content with simply abandoning Yozo to the wider world, decide to put him in Embarrassment-To-The-Family Jail in buttfuck nowhere with a "caretaker" who sexually abuses him.

(The ending makes me so mad and upset, it really does. Yozo has no mouth and he can't scream, actual fate worse than death...)

Ahem. But beyond those examples, I think the greatest example of how Yozo is neglected is actually related to the book's title.

The "title drop" occurs at the end of the novel. While explaining how his life has ended, Yozo states that he considers himself "no longer human"; that is, he considers himself "disqualified" from humanity.

I'd like to go ahead and tell you that when Yozo says "human", he means "person", because I know many of us are specfic³-pilled. Yozo is saying that he's been disqualified from being a person.

The definition of "a person" is, and has always been, one of the most fraught and polemic subjects humans have thought about, period, throughout more or less the entire history of humanity. I'd say it's a fraught subject in philosophy or in politics or in culture, but the thing is, the nature of "personhood" is fraught everywhere. You can go outside and meet people who claim to dislike politics or philosophy or cultural studies or ethics or religion, who nonetheless have staked huge parts of their lives over fighting about who gets to be a person, and who define themselves —their own "personhood"— according to their definition of "a person"; both in the sense that they follow the mold of what they think a "person" is, and in the sense that their most fundamental beliefs, the load-bearing pillars of their super-ego, are centered about which other people they think should be granted "personhood". In fact, you likely have a very strong opinion about who should get to be a person (like, "every human being, of course, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a monster").

Most people never really examine this within themselves. That is, there are uncountable numbers of people who think of themselves as "separate" from others they call people, and in that way they are thinking about "personhood" and "who is a person" and "who isn't a person"; but they never stop to think about how there are different "degrees" of personhood, even in their own mind, and to whom those "degrees" are available.

For example: would you let a newborn vote in a democratic election? Or a human who's technically alive, but completely braindead and on life support? No, right? You wouldn't let a newborn pay taxes, or hold a job, or be financially independent; you don't think a newborn capable of these things. What about an old person with dementia? What about a young person with early-onset Alzheimer's? What about an adult human with high needs autism? What about a nine-year-old? What about a nine-year-old with high needs autism? What about your annoying conspiracy theorist coworker who watches AI-generated short-form videos about aliens building the pyramids? What about a human who experiences delusions? What about a perfectly mentally sound human with a physical disability so severe that they can't leave their home? What about someone from a different country who just moved to your own and wants to engage in your country's politics? And so on, and so on forth.

The idea of a "person", from its inception, has been highly tied to the idea of "citizen", of "member of society". There are, generally speaking, humans considered "non-membership persons" and humans considered "membership persons". There is such an idea as a "great web of society", and participating in this web in a socially-approved and empirical way grants you certain perks that change the reality of your "personhood". By "socially approved and empirical", I mean that there must be "tangible evidence" of your participation, however this is judged, and the judgement criteria changes with society itself. For example: "having a job" is a way of "participating in society" (the way, nowadays).

There are humans who "participate" enough in society to be granted a greater personhood: adults, citizens, able-minded people. There are other humans, though, who are unfit or are deemed unfit to participate in society in these socially-approved and empirical ways. Humans like children, illegal immigrants, those who are mentally disabled⁴, or (until recently) women — these are humans who are broadly agreed to be "people", but "not people enough" (so to speak) to be allowed certain things, like "voting" or "going places unsupervised".

Yozo is one of these people. When Yozo says that he is "no longer human", he means that he has been disqualified from society.

I think the most surface-level read of this is that Yozo thinks he's "no longer human" because of his inability to connect with and empathize with other people.

This inability to connect with people is a reocurring thing throughout the book. It's spoken of more clearly at the beginning, when Yozo's laying out the circumstances of his life and childhood, but it rears its head repeatedly throughout the rest of his life. What Yozo describes is an inability to understand what other people are thinking or feeling, and how to deduce those thoughts and feelings from others' words and actions.

Yozo finds the ways others act and the things they say to be incomprehensible things, byzantine and unintuitive; people say one thing and mean a different one, and Yozo misinterprets them. For most of the novel, the assumption for most readers (I presume) is that this disconnect is what the title refers to.

But the title isn't "Not Human", it's "No Longer Human". Right? And this is because the disconnect alone doesn't disqualify Yozo. The title derives from the ending of the novel, and the state in which Yozo is ultimately left. And this is a state of denied personhood through his family's neglect.

What ultimately disqualifies Yozo from humanity isn't that he's a little weird. It's that his family becomes too embarrassed of Yozo's repeated suicide attempts and other visible mental health struggles —not concerned, embarrassed of being related to him while he tarnishes their name. And so, they buy Yozo a house away from other people and essentially lock him in there, denying him the ability to earn money or make choices about his own life, and having him taken care of by a woman who sexually assaults him.

And Yozo, in this state — well, he had previously given up on life, and he says as much; but because he's no longer allowed to die, either, now Yozo has also given up on death. He can't live, because he can't control his own life nor pursue happiness, but he can't die — and he can't die because he isn't considered enough of a person to be allowed to make choices about his life—including ending it⁵.

To quote Wikipedia's "Themes" section of this book's article, one of the major themes of the novel is how...

...identity closely correlates with social identity, i.e. the way individuals define themselves and others in relation to their social group; with the failure to achieve this leading to alienation from oneself, from others, and from society at large.

Yozo has been denied personhood so completely, that he has been disqualified from the human species; not by himself, but by others. The fact that he's barred from taking part of society, and the fact that he is neither living nor dead but merely an animal carcass piloted by inertia, are why Yozo is No Longer Human. And both of these conditions were inflicted onto Yozo. Sure, Yozo makes bad choices, but these conditions are absolutely not born out of those bad choices, he doesn't self-sabotage himself into this situation: his family chooses to disinherit him after his first suicide attempt, and then they choose to imprison him after his second and third.

And I don't think writing to his father was a self-sabotaging choice on Yozo's part! Because like, that was the one thing Yozo did that got him taken to a mental hospital, and later imprisoned: asking for help. And I feel like that's the opposite of self sabotage. The one time he tries improving his life, he's imprisoned. Doesn't that sit wrong with you...?

I have a lot of other thoughts about the novel, but I'm not sure any of them are worthy of wrangling into coherency for this post. It's already, like, two weeks late. This shit has been haunting me for two weeks. Absolutely unacceptable.

I'll try to rapid-fire some things. The first one is Yozo's internalized ableism and self-hatred and how it relates to his misanthropy and the shitty way he treats people.

At one point, Yozo blames the character Flatfish for speaking in a certain way — saying that if he'd spoken in a more clear way, Yozo wouldn't have made certain choices in his life. Putting the blame on others for choices one made is ridiculous, obviously, but I think that Yozo is a little bit frustrated with himself, too. And very self-deprecating.

See, when Yozo bemoans Flatfish's actions, the way I read his words is thus: he's lamenting that Flatfish was treating Yozo like he could understand what Flatfish meant with his words, and that Flatfish was wrong to do this, because Yozo isn't capable of such a thing. I don't think Yozo is lamenting that Flatfish "lead him astray", but rather, that Flatfish "overestimated him". (Real "please be patient, I have autism" vibes here...)

There's other things, too... Like his intense game of "clowning" (which I fully think is very clearly autistic masking), derived his fear of anybody finding out what Yozo is "really like", because Yozo considers himself so repulsive that if his "real self" were to be exposed, he'd immediately be cast off from society in a way I can only compare to mutilation. (Yozo's childhood self-portraits always depict him as a demon or a monster). And this fear and self-loathing, the reflection of this fear and self-loathing and how Yozo projects it onto others, is why he mistreats Takeichi. Yozo's lashing out at a perceived (imaginary) threat. That's why he treats Takeichi like shit.

Similarly, he abandons Shizuko and her daughter Shigeko because he can't see himself being a good thing in their lives. His cruelty to himself is expressed in the form of cruelty to other people. And, conversely, there's the way he treats Yoshiko. Yozo considers himself someone who's been broken into cynicism — more about that later — and Yoshiko hasn't, yet, and this is part of what Yozo treasures about her.

Also, the incredibly unsubtle passage about how he fucking hates his neighbours, because, even though they go through things much worse than Yozo's own struggles, they're still not suicidally depressed, and Yozo is. Therefore, Yozo logically concludes that there's something wrong with himself, something broken and rotten, that those neighbours don't share; and thus Yozo bitterly envies his neighbours their wholesomeness, and hates them for having it, because he wants it too and he doesn't know how to have it.

Even the photographs: Yozo has been trained, all his life (by his family and his surroundings) to treat himself with an immense and irrational cruelty. The only forms of interaction he knows are cruelty and neglect. Monkey see, monkey do: Yozo, then, treats everyone in his life with some measure of cruelty and neglect seeping through the cracks, because the common denominator with everyone who meets Yozo is that they're interacting willingly with the thing Yozo hates the most, which is himself. Toxicity has a radius.

I guess the lesson from that, if you can call such a thing a lesson, is that if you think you care about the people around you, you should be treating yourself with kindness first, so as to not hurt something that those people like. But I think there's many cases where saying this isn't enough, because the person who treats themselves cruelly doesn't actually care about the people around them, because who would willingly orbit them? Idiots and villains and people with bad taste, clearly.

There's a separation: to use Freudian terms (SORRY), your "super-ego" hates the rest of you so fucking bad that anybody that dares to like you, the entirety of you, loses worth in the eyes of your super-ego. This is the same mechanism through which, for example, you'd dismiss someone as a bad person for wanting an evil thing to continue. If there's a rhetorical solution to such a thing, I don't think I've found it yet; the only way out of this hole is a complicated dance of simultaneous self-improvement and self-forgiveness, where if one outpaces the other, the whole thing gets fucked in the ass.

Uh, and there's also the whole sexual and gender thing, about which I have less to say... A lot of Yozo's trauma is derived from being abused as a child, and the fact that this abuse was apparently carried out by women (Yozo singles out a particular unnamed maid as the "ringleader") doesn't mix very well with Yozo's misogynistic values (drawn from his social and historical context).

I think his trauma's affected the shape of his misgivings about women; Yozo indicates being terrified of women, with rare exceptions. He also believes women are playing far more complex mindgames than men, and are therefore even more difficult to understand for him than men.

Yozo only stops being afraid of women when he can trust that they're being honest with him. He's not scared of the prostitutes he hires because he knows that their relationship is transactional, and what draws him to Yoshiko is that she's so naïve and innocent that she can treat him kindly and mean it with sincerity, no matter how much Yozo pushes her...

Furthermore, I'd extend this to the little girl he briefly acted as a step-father to. She's not a sexual object for him the way the other women mentioned here are (thank god), but he still perceives her as a girl, that is, as a member of the female gender, and he cares very much for her opinion — mentioning it more than her mother's once they've settled into "family" life.

Yozo is terrified of everyone, but he's doubly terrified of women. If you can't see how being abused by a woman would lead you to these sorts of behavioral patterns when you're already an anxious, avoidant mess... I dunno. It's self-evident to me!

I also think his promiscuity makes complete sense considering his trauma. He's hypersexual! That's a response people have to sexual trauma, particularly sexual trauma over an extended period of time during formative years of one's life! And he's a man who's been sexually abused by older women, which is a situation prone to receiving responses like, "you're such a charmer, you wanted it, good for you". And Yozo does actually get told these things: that he's "such a heartbreaker", that "women love him", that he's lucky in this regard.

Many women in Yozo's life are older, experienced, world-weary; they make the choices for him. The platonic ideal of these women would probably be Tsuneko, but there's elements of this archetype in the prostitutes he frequents, in Shizuko, in the pharmacist, in the bartender from Kyobashi who receives his notebooks... There's parallels in all of these relationships: some level of romantic or sexual pursuit, the women "teaching" something to Yozo or "taking care of him" in some way, etcetera.

I think Yozo could easily gravitate to these women and these relationships because he's trying to reenact his trauma in a "safe" way. A "re-do", so that he won't be hurt like he was last time (and therefore operating under the belief that he had power in the original situation, that he "could've stopped it" somehow, that it was "his mistake"; and of course he's wrong, but this is easier for him to grasp than the idea that something horrible was done to him and it wasn't his fault, which is something no one's ever told him, isn't it?) Like, as an example, Yozo treats the sex workers he hires as objects, but he simultaneously says that they "were like the virgin Mary" to him, like saints who held him comfortingly in his arms. I wouldn't be surprised if Yozo felt this way because they offered him this "redemption" that he wanted. To "do it right this time".

And this intersects with his misogyny. Yes, Yozo gravitates towards experienced, older, cynical, world-weary women, and he simultaneously treats them worse because they're experienced and older and cynical and world-weary, which are all "anti-feminine" qualities. Look at how he idolizes Yoshiko, who is a feminine ideal in Yozo's eyes...

But also, like, Yozo gravitates towards those women because he sees himself in them, he relates to them. "One in five women in the United States experienced completed or attempted rape during their lifetime." So has Yozo. Likely, so did the women who abused Yozo when he was a child. Yozo has his trauma in common with his own abusers. And Yozo later seeks out relationships where they both can commiserate over their shared ills: women who have suffered neglect, interpersonal violence, and sexual abuse, like Yozo himself has.

Yozo, himself, fulfills the role of the older, cynical, world-weary, decision-making partner for Yoshiko. He is to Yoshiko what people like Shizuko and the bartender were to him. In a very real way, I think something Yozo treasures about Yoshiko, even beyond Yoshiko's kindness and forgiveness of Yozo, is that he can project onto Yoshiko a "better version" of himself, who still maintains a certain hope and innocence. That's what he finds hope-inspiring in Yoshiko: the fact that she's like how Yozo would be if he hadn't been mistreated.

And my biggest piece of evidence for this claim is the circumstances in which Yozo abandons Yoshiko: when this is no longer true, because Yoshiko has now been raped herself. Yoshiko is still meek and deferential towards Yozo, but she no longer trusts him unconditionally, she no longer has the innocence that Yozo second-hand-enjoyed, reverse-projected onto himself. Yoshiko is now like Yozo, and what Yozo most hates is himself, and so he treats Yoshiko with all the cruelty Yozo treats himself with and more. In a way, Yoshiko's assault, to Yozo, means that "nothing is allowed to be unsullied" by violence and abuse. That there was no world where Yozo didn't experience his trauma, sooner or later. This is what motivates the worst thing Yozo does in the entire book, which is (in my opinion) his abandonment of Yoshiko and making her brutal trauma "all about" himself.

Doesn't this make the ending even worse? The fact that Yozo has resigned himself to being sexually abused because it's seemingly "unavoidable"...? I dunno. It just... makes me think so much about how Yozo has returned to his childhood: stuck in a house, reliving his trauma, unable to participate in society or make his own choices or be independent of his family's money, his family's walls. Yeah, he's stuck in the worst parts of his childhood forever (or, until he's taken out of his misery, since he's not allowed to either do that himself or attempt to live a life that's not his personal torment nexus). Yozo has no mouth and he must scream, etcetera.

Uh, and this ties into the "no longer human" thing before, but I think Shizuko deserves a mention in the "removing Yozo's independence" thing... He has to argue with her to be allowed to work and earn his own money, entirely because Shizuko, with the best of intentions, doesn't think Yozo is fit to earn money. And, still with the best of intentions, she treats Yozo like a Project, like a car she has in her garage and is fixing... except she doesn't really do anything to actually help fix Yozo's internal struggles, she doesn't ask how he's doing or anything, she just kinda feeds Yozo and onboards him as a glorified nanny.

I doubt Shizuko thought he had any reason to be depressed, considering he had a romantic partner and was being fed and given a place to sleep. He was kind of a houseplant here. I don't know. I for sure felt some kind of way about how Yozo recalled a lot more conversations with Shizuko's daughter Shigeko than with Shizuko herself. Something something, emotional arrested development, Shizuko not treating him like a peer but like a dependant. And mind you, this still intersects with the misogyny thing, because I'd bet a lot that there's an element of "emasculation" in the problems Yozo has with Shizuko and their relationship.

That's kinda a life lesson lol. You won't be able to fix that man, you can't control the emotions he feels nor the conclusions he draws from things he experiences... and in this case, Yozo concluded that a child was better off without him in his life and abandoned her! Also, uh, communicate in relationships or they will end. No ifs or buts.

I said I'd make it brief and then I wrote all of this, geez. What else do I have left to type...? His family, I guess...

I'm not gonna blame his family for "enabling" the sexual abuse Yozo underwent as a child, because as far I can recall they never learned about it or anything... But I do think Yozo's family mistreated him immensely, neglected him gravely, and that these ways of treating him count as abuse on their own.

Like, okay, going back to the third suicide attempt: Yozo wrote a cry for help to a father he hadn't spoken to in years just to try, for once, to receive unconditional support and affection from his family. And he was punished for it. He was literally punished for asking for help by being stripped of his autonomy and personhood... That's abusive. I would absolutely call that abusive!

Yozo's family refuses to believe that Yozo is a person. Children aren't considered people, but rather, extensions of their parents, "their parents' joy", and when they are people (and thus complex and murky and even scary) rather than just "happy little things the parents can feel good about helping", they're punished. This happens to Yozo (cf. the scene where Yozo's father asks him what he wants as a gift, a new book or a toy).

Even in adulthood, members of a family are seen as extensions of the family as a unit, and their actions reflect upon the perceived nature of the family. And we've already been over (if briefly) how your identity in society depends on how you're perceived; Yozo isn't denied personhood by himself, but by others. In much the same way, Yozo's family would be denied "wholesomeness" by others' opinions, if the "unwholesome" Yozo were to be a part of the family. Thus, he's disinherited and rejected, regardless of what effects this has on Yozo. In fact, because his disinheritance is a punishment, the intent is for it to hurt Yozo!

Genuinely, Yozo's family are the biggest villains of this book, I hate them sooooo bad it's crazy...

Okay. Where was I going... I think (and this is maybe a conclusion) that the book's title is a little bit of a lie. Or, more accurately, the context in which Yozo says it has an element of a lie to it. And I don't just mean that I think how Yozo was treated is unfair!

Yozo says he's given up on death, and I believe that, because I think what he means by that is that death can no longer stop his suffering. He tried to kill himself like three times and people only ever treated him worse for it. The pursuit of death can no longer make Yozo happy, and is no longer a road that Yozo considers will improve his situation or ameliorate his suffering. (At least partially this is because he's clearly not allowed to die).

But he also says he had given up on life, and that I believe less. Because he asked. He asked for help, and before that he married Yoshiko, who gave him a twisted form of hope, of absolution; and before that he sought help from people like the bartender, and accepted it, if clumsily and intermittently (because the help didn't actually help, see). And before that, he thought he wanted to show others his self-portraits. Yozo, at some point, realized he wanted human connection more than he was afraid to be "pathetic"/vulnerable, the necessary precondition for human connection.

And after all that — after saying he gave up on life — he sent off his notebooks. The three notebooks are exactly the same thing Yozo sent his father: an account of his entire life, what he felt throughout it, why he did certain things. An ultimate cry for help. But, as he was trained to, Yozo aborted this cry for help: he didn't write down his own address, he only sent a message in a bottle, floating out into the ocean.

Why did Yozo do that? I think he wasn't looking for a physical solution. If Yozo has given up on life, and on death, then there's necessarily a third thing: that's what he's turning to. Yozo is a Christian, but even putting that aside, who Yozo has been physically has always been secondary to his mind and his soul: that's where his sin nests, that's the part of him that's been rejected. Yozo sends these notebooks out into the world so that his story is heard: so as to justify his actions; so as to find someone who empathizes with him.

And if someone empathizes with Yozo and thinks he wasn't a failure, or a horrible monster, or a non-person, then this actively makes Yozo into someone who isn't a failure, or a horrible person, or a non-person. By the same properties that allowed others to strip him of his personhood. Yozo doesn't want to save his physical reality or his future, he wants to rescue his history, his reputation, his perception in the eyes of others. That's the reason for the notebooks. Yozo wants someone to remember the truth about him. To "remember his name". ...I think.

I don't know. I got real bigly emotional about this book. I have big feelings. Hopefully all of this is coherent; it's my third rewrite...

I'm probably not gonna post something as big as this for future entries of the book club, if I participate in it again. I've set for myself a requirement that I finish this post before starting the next book for the club, and it's a long nonfiction thing... I'm reading it on my phone, though, so, you know...

Well, anyway. This is one of several big December projects down, so I'm feeling good about it. We're making progress!!

A funny thing I've noticed is that most of my big essays and rambles end up being about personhood in the same ways: being denied autonomy due to age, familial relationship, disability; being othered like that. The big essays I have in the works are more or less all about that. Many of the best books I read this year were about denied personhood, denied autonomy...

Wonder why that's a reocurring thing with me. Maybe I gotta talk to my therapist about it. Oh well! For now, my writing will have sweat stains.

I'm unconcerned about being overly personal. After all, this book outlines a suicide that its author later committed. Hard to outdo that. (Not that I'm planning to, I love being alive and I am full of hope about the future; also, as aforementioned in a footnote, suicide can suck my fat dick).

Also like I can delete this later if I change my mind, or post a correction, or something... people survive hating their own legacies all the time. It's heartening to know you're not alone, I guess.

Sorry to anyone from the book club who has to read this screed. My bad for inputting a vote in the poll for No Longer Human, I did not know it would lead me to write this shit. Umm, hope you enjoyed.

And, speaking of which—and as always—:

Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for reading!!

#2025 #longform #media #review #review - I fucking guess????? #✨ #✨—yes really #🌕