No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai & Donald Keene

Author:Osamu Dazai & Donald Keene
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 1958-08-24T16:00:00+00:00

THE THIRD NOTEBOOK: PART ONE

One of Takeichi’s predictions came true, the other went astray. The inglorious prophecy that women would fall for me turned out just as he said, but the happy one, that I should certainly become a great artist, failed to materialize.

I never managed to become anything more impressive than an unknown, second-rate cartoonist employed by the cheapest magazines.

I was expelled from college on account of the incident at Kamakura, and I went to live in a tiny room on the second floor of Flatfish’s house. I gathered that minute sums of money were remitted from home every month for my support, never directly to me, but secretly, to Flatfish. (They apparently were sent by my brothers without my father’s knowledge.) That was all—every other connection with home was severed. Flatfish was invariably in a bad humor; even if I smiled to make myself agreeable, he would never return the smile. The change in him was so extraordinary as to inspire me with thoughts of how contemptible—or rather, how comic—human beings are who can metamorphize themselves as simply and effortlessly as they turn over their hands.

Flatfish seemed to be keeping an eye on me, as if I were very likely to commit suicide—he must have thought there was some danger I might throw myself into the sea after the woman—and he sternly forbade me to leave the house. Unable to drink or to smoke, I spent my whole days from the moment I got up until I went to bed trapped in my cubicle of a room, with nothing but old magazines to read. I was leading the life of a half-wit, and I had quite lost even the energy to think of suicide.

Flatfish’s house was near the Okubo Medical School. The signboard of his shop, which proclaimed in bold letters “Garden of the Green Dragon, Art and Antiques,” was the only impressive thing about the place. The shop itself was a long, narrow affair, the dusty interior of which contained nothing but shelf after shelf of useless junk. Needless to say, Flatfish did not depend for a living on the sale of this rubbish; he apparently made his money by performing such services as transferring possession of the secret property of one client to another—to avoid taxes. Flatfish almost never waited in the shop. Usually he set out early in the morning in a great hurry, his face set in a scowl, leaving a boy of seventeen to look after the shop in his absence. Whenever this boy had nothing better to do, he used to play catch in the street with the children of the neighborhood. He seemed to consider the parasite living on the second floor a simpleton if not an outright lunatic. He used even to address me lectures in the manner of an older and wiser head. Never having been able to argue with anybody, I submissively listened to his words, a weary though admiring expression on my face. I seemed to recall

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