Oba Yozo confesses, in three notebooks, a life spent hiding terror of other people behind a clown's grin. From school-boy comic to drinking, doomed love affairs, morphine and an asylum, he slides toward the verdict that he is no longer human. A frame narrator finds the notebooks in a Kyobashi bar.
Books mentioned in No Longer Human (2)
I Am a Cat by Natsume Sōseki: “I picked Soseki's I Am a Cat from the bookshelf and gave it to her. [auto-translated]”
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky: “Crime and Punishment. Dostoevsky. It grazed a corner of my mind, and I gasped: what if Dostoevsky had not treated crime and punishment as synonyms, but set them side by side as antonyms? [auto-translated]”