A young man describes his torment as he struggles to reconcile the diverse influences of Western culture and the traditions of his own Japanese heritage

"A decadent novelist's autobiographical masterpiece, a perennial bestseller in Japan with fans all over the world, retold by a maverick manga author! In the first such attempt, the drawings within are not 'flipped'--a left-to-right version was prepared simultaneously by the artist with Western translations in mind. In this first of three volumes meet Yozo Oba, a youth who believes survival means clowning."--P. [4] of cover.

The poignant and fascinating story of a young man who is caught between the breakup of the traditions of a northern Japanese aristocratic family and the impact of Western ideas. Portraying himself as a failure, the protagonist of Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human narrates a seemingly normal life even while he feels himself incapable of understanding human beings. Oba Yozo's attempts to reconcile himself to the world around him begin in early childhood, continue through high school, where he becomes a "clown" to mask his alienation, and eventually lead to a failed suicide attempt as an adult. Without sentimentality, he records the casual cruelties of life and its fleeting moments of human connection and tenderness.

No Longer Human (1948, Ningen Shikkaku / A Shameful Life/ Confessions of a Faulty Man) was an attack on the traditions of Japan, capturing the postwar crisis of Japanese cultural identity. Framed by an epilogue and prologue, the story is told in the form three notebooks left by Ōba Yōzō, whose calm exterior hides his tormented soul. Osamu DAZAI was a Japanese author who is considered one of the foremost fiction writers of 20th-century Japan. A number of his most popular works, such as Shayō (The Setting Sun) and Ningen Shikkaku (No Longer Human), are considered modern-day classics in Japan. Japanese novelist and a master storyteller, who became at the end of World War II the literary voice and literary hero of his generation. Dazai's life ended in double-suicide with his married mistress. In many books Dazai used biographical material from his own family background, and made his self-destructive life the subject of his books.

Nothing can surpass the terror of the human psyche. Mine has been a life of much shame. I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being. Plagued by a maddening anxiety, the terrible disconnect between his own concept of happiness and the joy of the rest of the world, Yozo Oba plays the clown in his dissolute life, holding up a mask for those around him as he spirals ever downward, locked arm-in-arm with death. Osamu Dazai’s immortal—and supposedly autobiographical—work of Japanese literature, is perfectly adapted here into a manga by Junji Ito. The imagery wrenches open the text of the novel one line at a time to sublimate Yozo’s mental landscape into something even more delicate and grotesque. This is the ultimate in art by Ito, proof that nothing can surpass the terror of the human psyche.

Dazai Osamu wrote The Fairy Tale Book (Otogizoshi) in the last months of the Pacific War. The traditional tales upon which Dazai's retellings are based are well known to every Japanese schoolchild, but this is no children's book. In Dazai's hands such stock characters as the kindhearted Oji-san to Oba-san ("Grandmother and Grandfather"), the mischievous tanuki badger, the fearsome Oni ogres, the greedy old man, the "tongue-cut" sparrow, and of course Urashima Taro (the Japanese Rip van Winkle) become complex individuals facing difficult and nuanced moral dilemmas. The resulting stories are thought-provoking, slyly subversive, and often hilarious. In spite of the "gloom and doom" atmosphere always cited in reviews of The Setting Sun and the later No Longer Human, though, Dazai's cutting wit and rich humor are evident in the entire body of his work. His literature depicts the human condition in painfully blunt and realistic terms, but, like life itself, is often accompanied by a smile.

Human No Longer, a vampire novel by Kathryn Meyer Griffith: Jenny and Jeff Sanders become victims of a bizarre crime; leaving Jeff dead and Jenny in a temporary coma. She returns to her children. With Jeff’s death she must move back to her childhood home, a haunted farmhouse, in Summer Haven, Florida, where once they destroyed a family of vampires. Jenny has no appetite. She’s edgy. Her eyes hurt. She thinks it could be trauma or grief. Until one night she can’t resist the night woods or the overpowering urge to drink warm animals’ blood–and accepts the truth. Her attackers were vampires. Now she’s becoming what she once reviled. She can’t abandon her children but must find a way to live in the human world. At night she hunts, in the day hides what she’s becoming and attempts to fit in. Then townspeople begin dying. Like years before. With her blackouts, she fears she may be the killer, or is it her vampire attackers? For they've found her and demand she joins them–or her family will die. She resists until they kidnap her children. Then she has to find a way to outwit and ultimately destroy them. ***