Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in No Longer Human, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Social Isolation and Alienation
Compassion and Mutual Suffering
Depression, Mental Health, and Stigmatization
Self-Expression, Privacy, and Art
Summary
Analysis
The voice of the unnamed speaker returns, saying that he never met “the madman who wrote these notebooks”—that is, he never met Yozo. He did, however, know the bartender who ran the bar in Kyobashi, whom Yozo has written about. The speaker visited her bar in 1935, roughly five years after most of the events Yozo writes about in his notebooks. Now, though, the speaker has come to the countryside to visit a friend and to get some seafood to bring back to his family. At one point, he wanders into a café and recognizes the woman working there as the same woman who ran the bar in Kyobashi. They strike up a conversation, and she asks if he ever knew Yozo.
The Epilogue helps readers make sense of the structure of No Longer Human. The unnamed speaker, it seems, has somehow come into possession of Yozo’s notebooks and has assembled them into a book. The speaker now begins to explain how this came to pass, and—in doing so—refers to Yozo as a “madman.” Of course, the speaker himself is fictional, but his assessment of Yozo ultimately emphasizes the novel’s suggestion that the majority of society tends to judge people like Yozo rather harshly, viewing them with a certain lack of empathy and compassion.
Themes
The unnamed speaker tells the bartender from Kyobashi that he never knew Yozo, but she still gives him three of his notebooks, suggesting that perhaps they might give him good material for a novel. The speaker is about to hand them back, but the three pictures of Yozo (included with the notebooks) capture his interest. That night, he gets drunk with his friend and decides to spend the night. Instead of sleeping, though, he stays up and reads all of Yozo’s notebooks.
The implication is that the unnamed speaker is a writer, since there’s no other conceivable reason that the bartender from Kyobashi would suggest that Yozo’s notebooks might make good material for a novel. In a way, then, there’s a voyeuristic aspect at play, as both the bartender and the unnamed speaker come to view Yozo’s emotional troubles with intrigue.
Themes
The unnamed speaker decides to get the notebooks published without alteration. The next day, he returns to the café and asks the bartender from Kyobashi about them. She says she received them in the mail a decade ago. She thinks Yozo sent them, but he didn’t include a return address. When the speaker asks if she cried upon reading them, she says she didn’t—she simply says the notebooks made her think about how, “when human beings get that way, they’re no good for anything.” Still, she remembers Yozo fondly, insisting that, despite everything, he was “a good boy, an angel.”
The bartender’s comments about Yozo underscore the societal stigma surrounding depression, as the bartender considers people with severe depression as essentially useless. At the same time, though, she seems to have been quite fond of him, and her final assertion that he was “an angel” illustrates the strange effect he had on people (and especially women), somehow managing to win their affection without even trying to secure it—or, perhaps more importantly, without wanting it in the first place.
Themes
