David’s Reviews > No Longer Human > Status Update

The narrator again attempts and fails suicide. He coughs blood (presumed due to TB), becomes addicted to morphine, and begins an affair with the crippled, widowed pharmacist who supplies him. He contemplates suicide again, but Horiki and Flatfish intervene and enroll him in an asylum.

As before, the narrator begins his marriage happily and productively. The catalyst to ruin it is Horiki, who takes him drinking. Playing ghoulish word games on the roof, Horiki finds the narrator’s wife, Yoshiko, being raped in their home. The narrator flees, and Horiki intervenes. The narrator wallows in self-disgust. Yoshiko is “condemned to a life of anxiety.”

Notebook 3, part 1 done. The narrator drinks more and more. Shizuko seems unfazed. He states that “society,” which Hiroki invokes to scold the narrator, is actually an individual. The narrator spends multiple nights away, creeps back home, glimpses Shizuko and Shigeko, then leaves for good. He lives at a bar and marries a 17-year old shop clerk. He foreshadows horrors from this marriage.

Without clarity, the conversation with Flatfish turns sour. The narrator flees the next day, and by chance meets Shizuko. Suddenly through her he has a partner, money, freedom from Flatfish, and even a stepdaughter, Shigeko. This makes me feel very uncomfortable remembering the narrator’s precious allusion to a wife. His sincere relationship with Shigeko fractures when she makes a wish for her birth father.

Notebook 2 done. The narrator became a communist, then was cut off by his father leaving Tokyo, and then attempted suicide (he failed) with a lover (she succeeded). He experiences happiness with the her, a hostess at a hostess bar, and then runs from it. He doesn’t feel the need to clown with her. They share in misery, and this is happiness. He alludes to a future wife, and not intervening while she’s violated.

The narrator makes friends with Takeichi, a classmate whom he describes as a “halfwit.” Takeichi sees through the narrator’s clowning, and it mortifies him. Takeichi prophesies that women will fall for the narrator. The narrator becomes friends with Takeichi, as a means of defense against Takeichi outing the narrator. Their connection seems genuine despite the narrator professing his disconnectedness.

The narrator cites the duplicity of his father’s friends and servants as a reason why he lost faith in humans. The narrator is Christian, and there is a connection between the lack of faith in humans and faith in Christianity. The narrator was corrupted cruelly by the family servants, but how?

Two narrators? Two voices of the same narrator?

Notebook 1 hints he is not human. He lacks empathy and professes not to understand what others are thinking. He cannot “be genuine.” But he does infer what his father wants to give him, and successfully “clowns.” Such distress at not feeling connected seems more human than feeling connected to humanity. He anticipates shame when he’s found out. What is shame?