![]() ![]() He then discovered a talent for writing novels and began growing in stature. An alcoholic, addict and womanizer, Dazai attempted suicide twice, once with a woman who died while he survived. ![]() Widely touted as Japan’s second best-selling novel, No Longer Human also serves as a semi-autobiographical chronicle of a writer’s life etched with self-loathing and despair. ![]() So unfolds Ito’s stunning 600-page illustrated ode to misanthropy, self-destruction and malaise, based on the 1948 novel of the same name by Osamu Dazai. “It put me at ease,” he reflects, “because the most dreadful thing in the world for me was human beings.” ![]() But in Yōzō’s twisted worldview, human society is the nightmare the insects, instead, are a soothing balm. If this was a typical Ito tale, this scene might end with the narrator slowly backing away from the bugs, his mouth gaping in madness and terror. Yōzō isn’t really a joiner type, and he contemptuously imagines the activists morphing into a cluster of giant cockroaches with twitching antennae and black glistening eyes. During a pivotal scene in horror manga artist Junji Ito’s latest book, No Longer Human, the protagonist/antihero Ōba Yōzō is invited to a Marxist group meeting in 1950s-era Tokyo. ![]()
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