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The First Notebook
Themes
and Colors
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
Yozo attends high school on the coast while living with a relative. He likes being away from his immediate family, since it’s easier to carry out his “clowning” around people who don’t know him very well. In this new environment, he manages to win over his peers and teachers by making them laugh. One day, though, he finds himself deeply unsettled by an unsuspecting boy named Takeichi. It’s during a physical training exercise at school. Yozo purposefully fails a physical challenge in a humorous, slapstick way that makes everyone laugh. But then Takeichi, whom Yozo sees as an unintelligent onlooker, taps him on the shoulder and says, “You did it on purpose.”
Yozo has become accustomed to fooling everyone in his life—even his family members, though he suggests that it’s easier to get away with his identity performance when he’s not around people who have known him for his entire life. It is perhaps because he feels so confident in his ability to hide his true nature, then, that he is so shocked when Takeichi manages to see through his façade of gregarious silliness. In this moment, Yozo suddenly faces somebody who seems to see him on a deeper, more fundamental level than he’s used to.
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Yozo is horrified by Takeichi’s words, which make him feel suddenly as if his entire world has gone up in flames. In the coming days, he feels certain that Takeichi can see right through him, even as Yozo fools everyone else into laughing at his antics. Fearing that Takeichi will tell everyone that he’s a fraud, Yozo resolves to endear himself to him by becoming his close friend, but this is more difficult than he would have thought. He wants to keep a constant watch over Takeichi to make sure he doesn’t say anything, determined to convince him that he’s not, in fact, pretending to be a clown. If this doesn’t work, he realizes, he will have no other choice but to pray for Takeichi’s death—but he wouldn’t kill him, since he has never wanted to murder anyone.
It's clear that Yozo abhors the idea of anyone managing to understand him on a fundamental level. He wants to keep the world at a distance, ultimately insulating himself from everyone around him. To realize that Takeichi sees through his guise, then, is to realize that he’s not as protected from his surroundings as he once thought.
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Finally, after multiple attempts to befriend Takeichi, Yozo succeeds by ushering him to his house after school. It’s raining heavily, so it’s easy for him to sweep Takeichi up with the suggestion that they take shelter in his house. In Yozo’s room, Takeichi complains that his ears hurt, so Yozo gently examines them. He sees that there’s pus oozing from Takeichi’s ears, so he carefully wipes it away while soothingly apologizing for taking Takeichi into the rain. He speaks in a voice that he normally associates with women, trying hard to act like a caretaker. Eventually, Takeichi appreciatively comments that many women will surely “fall” for Yozo.
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Yozo feels somewhat unsettled by Takeichi’s comment about women falling for him. In retrospect, he now sees that Takeichi’s words were oddly prophetic. Throughout his life, attention from women has made him uncomfortable, partially because he finds women even harder to understand than men. And yet, women tend to be drawn to Yozo. While living in his relative’s house in high school, for instance, his two female cousins (who live there too) frequently pay him visits in his room, and though he never wants to talk to them, he never protests—to the contrary, he does whatever he can to make them laugh and engage them in conversation.
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One day, Takeichi comes over to Yozo’s house and shows him a reproduction print of a painting that Yozo recognizes as Van Gogh’s self-portrait. Takeichi, however, says that the painting is of a ghost. Yozo is astonished and deeply moved by this strange comment. He starts to think about how some people view the world with a horrified gaze, seeing human beings as terrifying “monsters.” One way of dealing with this is by constantly “clowning” around in an attempt to fit in with these “monsters.” This, of course, is what Yozo has been doing, but he now realizes that some people, like many of the world’s most famous painters, have responded to the horror and strangeness of humanity not by cowering from it, but by unflinchingly depicting it in art. He decides right then and there that he will become a painter.
Yozo has always drawn cartoons, but now he decides to bravely paint the grotesque side of humanity that he sees on a daily basis. The paintings he makes are—to his estimation—horrifying, but they accurately represent his truest self. He only shows them to Takeichi. If he showed them to other people, they might fail to recognize in the paintings Yozo’s true nature, and this would be mortifying.
Takeichi, for his part, thinks Yozo will become a great painter. Upon finishing high school, Yozo wants to attend art school, but his father sends him to a traditional college in Tokyo instead. At first, he lives in the dorms. But Yozo hates being surrounded by his peers, so he moves into a nearby townhouse that his father uses when he comes to Tokyo for work. His father is a government representative, so he has to come fairly often, though only when the legislative body is in session.
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Eventually, a fellow art student named Horiki introduces himself to Yozo. Horiki likes to think of himself as something of a rebel, and he insists on taking Yozo out drinking. Yozo is skeptical of him, but he deeply enjoys getting drunk for the first time, so the two young men start spending more time together. Yozo still dislikes Horiki, who constantly borrows money from him, but he figures that he's better than the average person—plus, he helps Yozo make his way through life in Tokyo, which has, until now, frightened him.
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Another reason Yozo comes to like Horiki is that the belligerent young man doesn’t seem to care what other people have to say, making it easy for Yozo to sit back in silence as Horiki rambles on. As they spend more and more time together, Yozo develops certain habits. He starts to like drinking, smoking, and sleeping with sex workers—activities that give him a certain feeling of “escape.” He views the sex workers he sleeps with rather scornfully, having trouble thinking of them as human beings. And yet, he feels completely at peace when he’s sleeping in their arms, safe from his many fears. He even starts to feel like he and the sex workers are “kindred” souls. When Horiki points out that women tend to like Yozo, though, the comment disgusts him so much that he loses interest in visiting sex workers.
Horiki takes Yozo to a meeting of the Communist Party. Yozo thinks everyone at the meeting is ridiculous and self-important, but he also enjoys watching the members of the Party speak with such absurd seriousness. He finds this entertaining, mostly because he can’t imagine how they could possibly think the things they’re discussing are such dire matters. He starts attending the meetings regularly. To dissolve some of the tension in the room, he acts like the same sort of “clown” he used to be in school, and this makes him very popular.
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Yozo eventually realizes that he likes the Communist Party so much because he enjoys the “irrationality” of its members. In contrast, he hates the rest of society’s orderly commitment to logic. Of course, Yozo is only tricking his comrades in the Communist Party into thinking he actually believes the same things they do, but he likes doing this because it helps him feel a little less isolated in society, in which he otherwise feels like an outcast. He doesn’t care about communism, but he does like the feeling of participating in a secret, subversive movement. He thus doesn’t hesitate to carry out secret jobs for the Communist Party, and though he knows that some of these jobs could get him arrested, he doesn’t mind, since the idea of spending his life in prison doesn’t seem so bad.
Yozo’s father decides to sell the house in Tokyo, since his political term is about to end. As a result of no longer living with his father, Yozo realizes that he won’t have much money at his disposal. His father has always given him a monthly allowance, but he tends to spend that on alcohol and cigarettes within a couple days. When his father still lived in the city, Yozo could just put anything he wanted to buy on his father’s account at the local shops. Now, though, he can’t do that. Upon moving to his own place, he burns through his monthly allowance and then feels terrified by his lack of funds. He starts selling things at pawnshops, but he still never seems to have enough money.
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During this period, Yozo spends the vast majority of his time either meeting with the Communist Party or drinking with Horiki. His schoolwork and painting suffer, but he doesn’t care—and then, he says, he becomes embroiled in a “love suicide” with a married woman. He hasn’t been to class for a long time, and when his family finds out, they reprimand him in a strongly worded letter. Still, Yozo doesn’t concentrate on his studies. But his work with the Communist Party no longer amuses him. All he wants to do these days is drink until he’s completely numb to the world, but he doesn’t even have enough money to do this. Wanting to “escape” from everything, then, he decides to kill himself.
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Feeling depressed and overwhelmed by life, Yozo finds relief at a large café, where he tries to blend into the crowd—he hopes to completely lose himself in the chaos of the scene. But he doesn’t have much money to spend. As soon as he sits down, he tells the waitress how little money he has, but she tells him not to worry, pouring him liquor and making him feel like he doesn’t have to think about money. For some reason, he doesn’t feel obligated to perform in front of her the way he usually does in public.
In retrospect, Yozo can’t even remember the name of the waitress, even though they tried to kill themselves together. This sort of forgetfulness isn’t unusual for him. He does, however, remember the poor quality of the sushi he was eating while waiting for her to get off her shift. He thinks her name was Tsuneko, and he remembers lying in her rented apartment and drinking tea while she tells him about her husband, who’s in jail for conning someone.
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As Yozo lies in her apartment, Tsuneko goes on at length about her life and her many problems. He’s hardly listening, but he comes to attention when she says that she’s desperately unhappy. Suddenly, he feels at peace as he lies next to her, no longer experiencing a perpetual state of fear and discomfort. He even feels a sense of freedom and happiness (though he notes that this is most likely the only time that the word “happiness” will appear in his notebooks). When he wakes in the morning, though, the feeling is gone, and he once again feels like a “shallow poseur of a clown.”
In the coming days, Yozo feels uncomfortable about the fact that Tsuneko paid for him to drink at the café. He worries that she is like the other women who have expressed interest in him and that he will feel overwhelmed by her affection. Thinking this way, he regrets letting his guard down and becoming intimate with her. One night, though, he and Horiki are out drinking and run out of money. Because Horiki wants to keep drinking, Yozo takes him to the café where Tsuneko works, since he knows she’ll give them free drinks.
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On the way to the café, Horiki talks about how he’s going to kiss whoever serves them, saying that he’s “starved for a woman.” When they arrive, a waitress Yozo doesn’t know sits next to him while Tsuneko sits next to Horiki. For a moment, Yozo is struck by the uncomfortable fact that he’s going to have to watch Horiki kiss Tsuneko, though it’s not that he’s afraid of losing her—he doesn’t feel possessive—it’s because he feels sorry for Tsuneko. He knows she’ll have to let Horiki kiss her while he (Yozo) watches. And this, he assumes, will make her think she has to cut things off with Yozo.
Yozo braces, waiting for Horiki to kiss Tsuneko. But then Horiki says he would never kiss someone who looks so “poverty-stricken.” Hearing this, Yozo has the overwhelming urge to drown himself in liquor, so he tells Tsuneko to fetch some. He’s embarrassed that even a drunk, ridiculous man like Horiki wouldn’t kiss Tsuneko. He looks at Tsuneko and realizes that Horiki has a point: she looks extremely impoverished and sad. But this just makes Yozo feel for her all the more, as if she’s a kindred soul. For the first time in his entire life, he feels as if he’s in love. He reacts to this feeling by throwing up and passing out.
When Yozo wakes up, he’s in Tsuneko’s apartment. She lies down next to him and talks about how unhappy she is. He resonates with her feeling of being too tired to go on in life. He himself feels like he couldn’t possibly continue to live, so he quickly agrees when she suggests that they both should kill themselves.
That day, Yozo and Tsuneko wander the city. Although he has agreed to die alongside Tsuneko, Yozo hasn’t fully grasped the idea that his life will soon be over. But when he goes to pay for a glass of milk and realizes he only has three coins, he’s struck by the horror of his life. He also thinks about how his only other possessions are the coat and kimono that he’s currently wearing, and it’s at this point that he understands that he really can’t continue to live—he must, he thinks, die. That night, he and Tsuneko throw themselves into the sea. Yozo survives, but Tsuneko does not.
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The news of Yozo’s failed suicide sweeps through Japan, since his father is a prominent politician. He’s taken to a hospital, where a relative visits him and tells him that his father and the rest of his immediate family are so angry that they might disown him. But Yozo doesn’t care—he’s too busy mourning the loss of Tsuneko, realizing that she’s the only person he has ever loved.
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After his stint in the hospital, Yozo is charged with having been an “accomplice to a suicide.” He’s taken to the police station, but because his lungs are still affected by his efforts to kill himself, they don’t put him in a cell with other criminals. In the middle of the night, an old guard brings him out of the cell and tries to interrogate him, but Yozo quickly recognizes that the man has no true power—he’s clearly bored and trying to pass the time. Yozo thus decides to play along, giving a detailed but inaccurate confession about what happened. This, he sees, greatly satisfies the guard.
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The next day, Yozo meets with the police chief, who’s a lot less intense than the guard was. He comments on how handsome Yozo is and then tells him that the district attorney will decide whether or not to press charges. In the meantime, he tells him to take good care of his health, since Yozo has a bad cough. At one point, Yozo coughs into a handkerchief that is already stained by blood from a pimple. The chief thinks he's coughing blood, and Yozo leans into this assumption, letting the chief think he’s in worse shape than he really is.
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The police chief tells Yozo to contact somebody who can act as a “guarantor,” so Yozo reaches out to a man from his hometown—a man he and his father used to call Flatfish. Flatfish agrees to meet him in the nearby city of Yokohama, where the district attorney examines him. Yozo underestimates the district attorney, thinking that he’s a straightforward, simple man. He thus plays up his cough in the same way that he emphasized it in front of the police chief, but the district attorney catches him off guard by smiling and asking, “Was that real?” Suddenly, Yozo is transported back to the day Takeichi accused him of falling on purpose at school.
Yozo feels as if he’d rather spend 10 years in prison than have to endure the kind of interaction he just had with the district attorney. Still, the district attorney drops the charges, but it doesn’t bring Yozo any happiness.
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