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
Yozo and Yoshiko move into an apartment together, and Yozo stops drinking. He enjoys spending time with his new bride, and he even begins to hope that he’ll find happiness and learn how to lead a normal life. But then Horiki reappears in his life. He says—in front of Yoshiko—that Shizuko has asked him to tell Yozo to come visit her. Yozo suddenly feels deeply ashamed about his past and how he abandoned Shizuko. Distressed, he suggests that he and Horiki should go out for a drink. From this point on, he and Horiki periodically go to the bar in Kyobashi, get drunk, and then visit Shizuko, sometimes even spending the night at her apartment.
Just when it seems that Yozo might actually manage to find some sort of contentment in life, Horiki causes him to rehash his troubling past and start drinking again. This effectively shatters the domestic happiness that Yozo has secured with Yoshiko, and though it’s certainly the case that Horiki is a bad influence, the fact that Yozo backslides so easily highlights the fragility of his brief sense of happiness—his marriage to Yoshiko is clearly a temporary solution to his longstanding struggle with depression, and it takes very little to plunge him back into a life of squalor and despair.
Themes
One night, Horiki comes over and asks to borrow some money. Yozo sends Yoshiko to the pawnshop to pawn some of her clothes, and then he tells her to use a portion of the money to buy gin, which he and Horiki spend the evening drinking while lounging on the roof. As they get progressively drunker, they talk about crime, and Horiki makes offensive comments about how, unlike Yozo, he has never been arrested and imprisoned. Nor, he says, does he want women to die. Yozo recognizes this as a rude comment about what happened between him and Tsuneko. He feels an impulse to defend himself by saying that he didn’t want Tsuneko to die, but he doesn’t say anything because he’s so accustomed to seeing himself as “evil.”
Horiki’s comments underscore just how little he truly cares about Yozo. He not only brings up Yozo’s painful past, but deliberately casts his friend as cold and mean-spirited, as if he wants to legitimately hurt Yozo’s feelings. Yozo, however, won’t give him a reaction, since Horiki couldn’t possibly say anything about Yozo that would be worse than what Yozo already thinks about himself.
Themes
At one point, Horiki drunkenly announces that he’s starving, so he gets up and descends from the roof, going downstairs to look for food. He quickly returns, though, and Yozo can see by his face that something strange is happening downstairs. Horiki tells him to come take a look. Yozo follows him and then sees a man raping Yoshiko in an adjacent room. Yozo is deeply troubled by this, but he doesn’t do anything to help Yoshiko. Instead, he tries to tell himself that this sort of thing is simply “another aspect of the behavior of human beings.” Horiki, for his part, announces that he's leaving, at which point Yozo retreats and continues to drink gin and cry until Yoshiko appears and offers him some food, explaining that the man who raped her had promised he wouldn’t do anything.
This is a very strange and troubling section of No Longer Human. Yozo’s inability or unwillingness to intervene and protect Yoshiko is hard to account for, though it’s a good illustration of how his own struggle with feelings of depression and isolation ultimately impact the way he treats others. In this moment, he’s so focused on his own feelings—and his discomfort with humanity in general—that he fails to rescue his wife from a horrific, traumatic experience.
Themes
Yozo tells Yoshiko not to talk about getting raped. Before he left, Horiki told Yozo to “forgive” her, but now he feels as if he neither forgives Yoshiko nor holds the rape against her. What mostly bothers him isn’t necessarily that she herself was violated, but that she was taken advantage of because she tends to trust people. In the coming days and weeks, Yoshiko becomes jumpy and nervous around Yozo, constantly worrying about how he feels. In response, he plunges into his drinking habit.
Yozo responds to Yoshiko’s rape in a very selfish way, basically making the entire ordeal about his own emotions instead of recognizing the trauma she has been through and trying to do something to help her manage it. Once again, then, it becomes clear that the intensity of his own feelings ultimately gets in the way of his ability to show kindness and compassion to others.
Themes
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One night, Yozo comes home excruciatingly drunk. Wanting some sugared water before bed, he ends up finding a box of sleeping pills. He takes all of them and then goes to bed. He doesn’t regain consciousness for three days. The doctor treating him rules the incident an accident, so the police don’t descend on Yozo when he wakes up. Yozo’s first words upon waking up are, “I’m going home,” though he doesn’t know what this means and doesn’t remember saying it later on.
This is Yozo’s second attempt to die by suicide. It’s evident that not much has changed in his life between the first time he tried to die and now—in fact, it’s arguable that he’s in an even worse position than before, since his first suicide attempt saddled him with the grief of Tsuneko’s death, thus adding to his already bleak outlook.
Themes
Flatfish is there when Yozo regains consciousness. He’s talking to the bartender in charge of the bar in Kyobashi, remarking that the last time Yozo tried to take his own life was also near the end of the year. Addressing the woman from the bar, Yozo asks to be taken away from Yoshiko. Then, without understanding what he means, he says that he’s going to a place where there aren’t women.
It's somewhat unclear why, exactly, the bartender from Kyobashi is at Yozo’s bedside. The only logical explanation is that she feels close to Yozo and is yet another woman who has taken pity on him—she did, after all, let him stay in the room above the bar in Kyobashi for an entire year before he married Yoshiko. Again, then, Yozo manages to surround himself with sympathetic women even though he doesn’t actually want to grow close to people.
Themes
In the aftermath of Yozo’s incident with the sleeping pills, Yoshiko thinks he tried to kill himself because he blames himself for her rape. Flatfish, for his part, gives Yozo some money, acting as if it’s a gift from him even though Yozo knows it’s really from his own brothers. Still, Yozo accepts the money and uses it to go on a solo trip to some hot springs, but the trip doesn’t do him any good—he spends the whole time drinking indoors, thinking about Yoshiko, and feeling miserable. He returns to Tokyo feeling even worse than before.
Even with the resources from his brothers and a number of people giving him emotional support, Yozo is miserable. This, in turn, provides insight into the nature of his struggle with depression—it’s not that he's unhappy because of some specific grievance, it’s simply that life itself feels unbearable to him, and there’s very little anyone can do to change this unfortunate fact.
Themes
Drunkenly wandering the streets one night, Yozo throws up blood and falls into a snowbank. Pulling himself up, he decides to go to the pharmacy to get some medicine. It’s late, but the woman who runs the pharmacy is still there. When she sets eyes on Yozo, they both immediately seem to recognize each other’s suffering. They both start crying, at which point Yozo backs away and returns to his apartment. The next night, he returns to the pharmacy and tells the pharmacist about his condition. She tells him to stop drinking—her husband, she says, took years off his life by drinking. Yozo says he feels too unsettled when he’s not drunk, so she gives him some medicine to help, making him promise not to touch alcohol.
Yet again, Yozo manages to make a fast connection with a woman, despite the fact that he isn’t looking for connections. At the same time, the unspoken bond between him and the pharmacist seems perhaps a bit deeper—and more fraught—than his bond with somebody like Yoshiko or Shizuko. In fact, this emotional attachment is similar to the one Yozo had with Tsuneko, since it’s clearly based on a sense of mutual suffering. In and of itself, the fact that they connect to each other because of their sorrow suggests that their relationship will be tumultuous and dangerous, as was the case with Yozo and Tsuneko.
Themes
The medicine that the pharmacist gives Yozo is morphine. She tells him it’s no worse than alcohol, and at first, he thinks this is true. He’s astonished by how the morphine makes him feel optimistic and unworried. All of his anxieties seem to melt away, and he frequently experiences a state of elation. But it isn’t long before he’s taking multiple injections of morphine each day. He soon runs out of his supply and has to return to the pharmacy, and though the pharmacist is hesitant to give him more, he convinces her. This pattern repeats, and he even begins an affair with the elderly pharmacist as a means of convincing her to continue supplying him with the drug.
Yozo’s use of morphine only provides him with a temporary sense of relief. The drug gives him a sense of elation at first, but nothing has actually changed about his life, so it’s unsurprising that he soon feels just as miserable as he did when he was still drinking. In fact, it’s arguable that his morphine use makes everything worse, since he has essentially just taken on a new dependency—and one that is difficult and even dangerous to give up, at that. What’s more, living with this addiction further isolates him from the people around him, since he has to struggle with his cravings for morphine on his own. And though he starts a romantic affair with the pharmacist, he only does this as a way of getting more drugs, so it certainly doesn’t make him happy.
Themes
Yozo is already fully addicted to morphine by the time he realizes it’s no better than alcohol. He wants to die, but still he keeps going back to the pharmacy for morphine, thus racking up a huge debt. He decides to write to his father and beg for help—and if he doesn’t receive this help, he’ll kill himself. His father never writes back. On the day that Yozo plans to kill himself, though, Horiki and Flatfish show up and take him to a psychiatric ward. Yoshiko comes with them, and just before leaving Yozo at the ward, she tries to slip him some morphine, thinking he’ll need it. However, he doesn’t take it.
Neither Horiki nor Flatfish seem like the kindest, most empathetic people. And yet, they do show up for Yozo when he’s in dire need of some kind of support. Of course, taking him to a psychiatric ward isn’t necessarily something he wants, but there’s no denying the fact that their decision to do this ultimately prevents him from trying once again to die by suicide. Yoshiko, for her part, also seems eager to help Yozo—the problem, though, is that she naively believes that he has been taking morphine for health reasons. Her final effort to help him is thus misguided.
Themes
In the psychiatric ward, Yozo realizes that his premonition has come true: he’s now in a place where there aren’t any women. He also realizes that, even when he gets out of the ward, society will always see him as a “reject.” He has been, he thinks, “disqualified as a human being.”
The phrase “disqualified as a human being” is the literal translation of No Longer Human’s Japanese title. Now that Yozo has been removed from society, his sense of isolation is all the more pronounced, since his presence in the psychiatric ward feels to him like a very clear indication that he doesn’t fit in anywhere else. He is, he thinks, unfit for everyday life, and his stay in the psychiatric ward only reaffirms this idea.
Themes
After spending three months in the psychiatric ward, Yozo is released. His older brother and Flatfish come to pick him up, and his brother tells him that their father has died. The family, his brother says, will now support him financially without asking any questions about his past—if, that is, he agrees to leave Tokyo. They want him to recuperate in the countryside. Devastated by the news of his father’s death, Yozo agrees to leave Tokyo. His brother installs him in a house near a coastal hot spring.
Yozo hasn’t spoken to his father since before he tried to die by suicide alongside Tsuneko. That the news of the old man’s death devastates him, though, suggests that he still felt a connection with—or a tenderness toward—his father. Unfortunately for him, though, the societal stigma surrounding suicide drove him and his father apart, making it impossible for Yozo to ever develop a closer relationship with him, since the old man essentially disowned him for trying to take his own life.
Themes
It has now been three years since Yozo first went to the countryside. He still sometimes coughs blood, and the old servant his brother hired occasionally torments him in strange ways. For instance, he recently sent her to get some sleeping pills, but she brought back laxatives instead. He took ten of the pills and then stayed up all night with a cramping stomach. In the long run, though, he is neither unhappy nor happy. Life simply passes him by. He’s almost 27, but his hair is already graying, and most people would think he’s older than 40.
Yozo’s notebooks end without any sense of resolution. His suffering will simply go on, and he will continue to struggle with depression, as evidenced by the fact that he tried to take ten sleeping pills, ultimately suggesting that he once again wanted to die by suicide. Seemingly unable to die, though, he appears doomed to lead an extremely isolated existence in which he will surely continue to struggle with the same emotional challenges that have plagued him since childhood.
Themes
