No Longer Human

1948 novel by Osamu Dazai

No Longer Human (人間失格), also translated as A Shameful Life, is a 1948 novel by Japanese author Osamu Dazai. It tells the story of a troubled man incapable of revealing his true self to others, and who, instead, maintains a facade of hollow jocularity, later turning to a life of alcoholism and drug abuse before his final disappearance. The original title translates as "Disqualified as a human being" or "A failed human". The book was published one month after Dazai's suicide at the age of 38. and Dazai's masterpiece. It enjoys considerable popularity among younger readers and ranks as the second best selling novel by publishing house Shinchōsha, behind Sōseki Natsume's Kokoro. Much like the protagonist Yōzō, Dazai attempted suicide a total of five times in his lifetime, with consorts, until ultimately succeeding in taking his own life with his lover at the time, a woman named Tomie Yamazaki.

In his 2014 review of No Longer Human, William Bradbury of The Japan Times called it a timeless novel, saying that the "struggle of the individual to fit into a normalizing society remains just as relevant today as it was at the time of writing." He also pointed out that the "blunt" style distanced the book from the tone of an actual autobiography, despite the similarities to Dazai's own personal life. Serdar Yegulalp of Genji Press noted (in 2007) the strength of Dazai in portraying the situation of the protagonist, describing the novel as "bleak in a way that is both extreme and yet also strangely unforced". One modern analyst, Naoko Miyaji, has proposed Dazai was suffering from complex post traumatic stress disorder when he wrote the book.

The novel was first translated into English by Donald Keene as No Longer Human, published 1958 by New Directions in Norfolk, Connecticut. This translation was published in the UK by Peter Owen Publishers in 1959. The novel received another English translation in 2018 by Mark Gibeau as A Shameful Life, published by Stone Bridge Press. For 2024, Tuttle Publishing announced a new translation by Juliet Winters Carpenter.

2019: Ningen Shikkaku (dir. Mika Ninagawa)
2019: Human Lost (dir. Fuminori Kizaki)

2021: No Longer Human stage musical adaptation with music by Frank Wildhorn, English lyrics by Tracy Miller and Carly Robyn Green, orchestrations by Kim Scharnberg, directed and choreographed by Ney Hasegawa and Xu Chongye, written by Ya Wen and Mingzhu Zhang, and produced by Ranspace. World premiere took place in December 2021 at the Shanghai Grand Theatre.