The Lonely Narrator’s Journey
This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
The lonely, alienated young male narrator is a common figure in literature across time and place. Readers encounter him in the unnamed, frenzied protagonist who stalks around Christiania in Knut Hamsun’s Hunger; in Leopold Bloom as he wanders James Joyce’s Dublin in Ulysses; and in J. D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, who ditches his boarding school for New York City. In Osamu Dazai’s 1948 cult-classic novel, No Longer Human, which turns 75 this year, the protagonist Yozo Oba might bring some of these characters to mind as he whiles away his days in 1930s Tokyo. Like some of these other narrators, he is adrift in the world, espousing a “pessimistic view of social humanity,” my colleague Jane Yong Kim wrote this week.
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Yozo struggles with conventions, dismisses the people who show him kindness, and relentlessly criticizes himself. The events in his life mimic major moments in Dazai’s own, and the author’s death by suicide shortly before No Longer Human’s publication has contributed to its myth. But ultimately, it’s the book’s conversational tone—the singularity of that self-deprecating voice—that has made its reputation, and kept it relevant today.
In fact, the tension between what the lonely narrator says he wants and what he actually desires feels deeply contemporary. Reacting to the world with bemusement and criticism requires only wit and observation; admitting a genuine desire demands vulnerability—you might not get what you’ve asked for. Yozo can’t bring himself to say that he needs other people, even though he clearly relies on friends to care for him or help him get by in Tokyo. In that way, Kim writes, Dazai’s works function not just as tales of estrangement, but as “modern portraits of human connection.”
The Cult Classic That Captures the Stress of Social Alienation
What to Read
I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself, by Marisa Crane
In Crane’s imaginative debut, prisons have been abolished, but punishment hasn’t, nor has surveillance. The authoritarian government gives people convicted of crimes a second, literal shadow, and more if they reoffend. These citizens have limited rights and resources, and suffer a great deal of social stigma. When the narrator Kris’s wife dies giving birth to their child, the baby is penalized for inadvertently killing her mother. Kris, now both a widow and a new mom, has a second shadow too, so she and her daughter both become pariahs … Her bond with her child grows: They learn to embrace their shadows as part of their lives, giving them names and playing with them … Kris slowly emerges from her morass of sorrow and builds connections with new friends and neighbors, intent on giving her daughter hope, gumption, and a collection of people who won’t fail her. — Ilana Masad
From our list: What to read when you want to reimagine family
Out Next Week
???? All-Night Pharmacy, by Ruth Madievsky
???? Tabula Rasa, by John McPhee
???? The Holy Days of Gregorio Pasos, by Rodrigo Restrepo Montoya
Your Weekend Read
When Making Art Means Leaving the United States
Tamara J. Walker describes the pillars of diasporic nightlife that earned parts of 1920s Paris the nickname “French Harlem,” where “patrons could dance to Martinican biguines, which derived from the folk songs of the enslaved, Senegalese orchestra tunes that included elements of Cuban music that traveled to African airways and migrated to France, and even some African American jazz” … With each story, Beyond the Shores builds a canon of Black creative expression that crosses both temporal and geographic barriers.
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