Dazai inserted someone between Oba and himself, though, in the end, it is generally seen as an example of the so called I-Novel genre, a naturalist novel written in the first person, where there is assumed to be a connection between the protagonist/narrator's life and the novel's author.

In the novel there is some small room for distance between the narrator and the author, as the novel is offered as a series of notebooks by Oba, with a preface and afterword by an unnamed narrator who came into possession of the notebooks along with a few photos of Oba. (translation by Donald Keene)Īnd this is how women are portrayed in the novel and the manga. These and various other, generalizations were products of an observation of women since boyhood days, but my conclusion was that though women appear to belong to the same species as man, they are actually quite different creatures, and these incomprehensible, insidious beings have, fantastic as it seems, always looked after me. Who knows? Women may live in order to sleep. Women sleep so soundly they seem to be dead. only to embrace me with passion as soon as everyone had left.

Women led me on only to throw me aside they mocked and tortured me when others were around. And you can find where Ito's text came from, much earlier in the novel's plot: I was so struck by the issues in the manga, that I went back to Dazai's original novel (in English translation), thankfully now out of copyright. But I was reviewing the book so I kept reading through all 600 pages of it, hoping, maybe I would see some light between the protagonist's statement and the authors'. There had been numerous other warnings signs of this book's misogyny, and this one was the most direct. If I hadn't been asked to review it, I would have. If that sets off red flags for you, then stop reading now, and don't read this manga. The ones who always drew near and looked after me for some reason. More than difficult, these incomprehensible, insidious beings. On page 377-380 of Junji Ito's 2017 adaptation of Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human (1948) the protagonist Yozo Oba, after another suicide attempt, narrates:

No longer human book