To start with an early example (and yes, I am going to start spoiling the story a bit). As a child Oba goes to high school and ends up living with some cousins, including two younger women (slightly older than he). He also meets this classmate, Takeichi, a social outcast, who one infers had some kind of mental illness. Takeichi sees Oba clowning around, purposefully failing at some gym activity to get laughs, and tells Oba that he knows he did it on purpose. Oba is horrified by this (as if he thinks no one else could imagine that his clowning is a put-on), and then tries to win the boy over so he won't expose Oba to their classmates. It's a good thing he didn't end up a twisted sociopath, though there were instances when he was teetering on the edge of that abyss. He did become dissipated, profligate, and keen to keep bad company - vices that only worsened as time went by. no longer human till this day resonated with so many people. its a story that exposed the weakness, self destruction, honesty to the point it hurts, no rationalization for all bad decision and actions and somehow we empathize with the character. It happens with Oba's wife later in the story, in another change from the novel. In the novel Oba's wife Yoshiko is, it is heavily implied, raped by a casual acquaintance. Oba (despicably) sees it happening and runs away, then gets all messed up about it, on his own behalf (he seems mostly unconcerned about his wife's trauma). In the manga, the scene he observes is much more heavily implied to be an affair (at least it is not at all implied it is not consensual) without any logic, but then the wife, you guessed it, goes crazy (cue bulging eyes and darkened forehead). By the end, reading this manga was just a slog. Ito is known for his horror work, and I was horrified by this book but I don't think it was in the way he meant.

Eventually the narrative is reduced to hallucinations and an extended dream sequence as Oba becomes increasingly unhinged. in Japanese). Shogakukan. Archived from the original on December 24, 2021 . Retrieved December 25, 2021. Born in Gifu Prefecture in 1963, he was inspired from a young age by his older sister's drawing and Kazuo Umezu's comics and thus took an interest in drawing horror comics himself. Nevertheless, upon graduation he trained as a dental technician, and until the early 1990s he juggled his dental career with his increasingly successful hobby — even after being selected as the winner of the prestigious Umezu prize for horror manga. Dazai's stand-in, Yozo Oba, seems to suffer from trauma and impostor syndrome due to childhood molestation and daddy issues. To compensate he becomes a class clown and womanizer in attempts fit in with other people -- from whom he feels separate and whom he hates and fears. He carves his way through the lives of others leaving suicide and murder in his wake, periodically attempting suicide himself. He alternates between living off a family allowance, being a kept man, and a life of poverty as a struggling manga artist and aspiring painter. He dabbles in Marxism and relationships but tends to betray everyone, really only committing to alcohol and drugs.

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Apparently Dazai’s style was autobiographical fiction and I’ve never read the original book (nor ever will) so I can’t say how much of this is directly taken from the book or whether Ito added in biographical elements from Dazai’s life. But the book opens with an alcoholic writer and his young girlfriend committing suicide by drowning, which is really how Dazai died. This graphic novel is a departure from Ito's trademark narratives, interpreting as it does a Dazai classic that stands as one of the best-ever selling books in Japan. While the original seems to have focused on the sadness and pathos that marked the existential crisis that our lead (who seems to have been patterned after Dazai himself) labored under, true to Ito's style this book lets the horrors and absurdities of his experiences take the limelight. The novel is one of existential horror. Oba cannot survive in the face of society. It is also not a novel with an excess of dialogue or scenes. It is presented as notebooks and thus it is very much a novel narrating thoughts and feelings. Add in that the horror is one of, one assumes, mental illness and (charitably) societal illness, and it is not at all something that sounds easy to adapt into a visual medium. This is obvious from the beginning of the novel. In the prologue, the narrator describes one of the photos he has of Oba as a child: This manga was a great adaptation of the novel. It's clear that Ito took some risks here. Where Dazai was more elusive, Ito chose to be more explicit. I personally am not a fan of sexual depictions, but thankfully this wasn't the focus of the story - and keeping in mind his usual demographic and the one targeted with this adaptation I do get the choices he made. I was really pleased to see how this manga was able to keep the essence of the story and I enjoyed most of the creative liberties Ito took. No Longer Human is an incredibly story and I don't think it is suitable for everyone. If one does however, I would highly recommend reading the novel beforehand as well as reading up on Dazai (there are a lot of autobiographical elements in the novel). I did so and it definitely payed off - I don't think I would have appreciated this manga as much as I do now. I'm working on a video discussing No Longer Human, Osamu Dazai and this adaptation for my Youtube channel, so stay tuned for that :). Later on he gets involved with the communists, continues to jump from woman to woman, becomes an alcoholic, attempts suicide, and that’s it. I’ve no clue what the point was - all I saw was gratuitously gloomy people being sad over their depressing lives. I didn’t understand why Oba doesn’t feel human or what we were meant to think about that.

His longest work, the three-volume Uzumaki, is about a town's obsession with spirals: people become variously fascinated with, terrified of, and consumed by the countless occurrences of the spiral in nature. Apart from the ghastly, convincingly-drawn deaths, the book projects an effective atmosphere of creeping fear as the town's inhabitants become less and less human, and more and more bizarre things begin to happen. Badman, Derik (January 29, 2020). "No Longer Human". The Comics Journal. Fantagraphics. Archived from the original on December 24, 2021 . Retrieved December 25, 2021. However! Let the record show that this is a book that demands some form of self-blitzing (read: weed) to be even bearable, especially if you're a queerdo with complicated lady feelings, because Ito loves a booby and I do, too, but he also loves charring that booby and drawing the emaciated toothy corpse or drowning it and drawing it bloated and tongue-slugged, so. Junji Ito lleva a su terreno la obra de Osamu Dazai, le da forma, la desarrolla e incluso añade elementos nuevos, como es usar al mismo Osamu Dazai como un personaje más. El mundo de pesadilla que normalmente desarrolla Junji Ito en sus ilustraciones a través del estado mental de sus personajes, está aquí perfectamente reflejado y de alguna forma y aunque sea una adaptación libre, es muy fiel a la obra de Dazai. Ressler, Karen (February 11, 2019). "Viz Licenses Junji Ito's No Longer Human Manga". Anime News Network. Archived from the original on December 25, 2021 . Retrieved December 25, 2021.Oba is himself haunted by ghosts in his daily life, so he draws mostly ghosts, so you can see the attraction to the supernatural for Ito. Oba/Dasai was derided by his father throughout his life. He was told he was a failure for doing manga and told the honorable thing he should do would be to commit suicide, which in fact he/Dasai attempted a few times. El estilo inquietante y turbador de las ilustraciones de Junji Ito, aunque aquí parece algo más controlado y realista, es en el fondo el de siempre; convierte al protagonista de la novela de Dazai, Yozo Oba, en un artist manga también, y de alguna forma Junji Ito se implica de la misma forma en que lo hizo Dazai en su novela: obras semiautobiográficas donde los autores se retratan si mismos y se se desnudan emocionalmente. Early on, a young man and his lover commit suicide by drowning themselves in a river, something Dasai himself did five days after completing this book. Ito is a man driven to creating horror comics, and he here is attracted to every day psychic horror. The books are in translation, too. How are we expected to find the heart and soul of Dasai, or Ito, or ourselves in this hall of mirrors about a man who people find to be a clown, a man wearing a mask of humor as he heads daily into greater and greater darkness? Who is Oba/Sadai/Ito, really?! What a bizarre and boring book! Horror manga artist Junji Ito adapts Osamu Dazai’s 1948 novel No Longer Human into comic form with mixed results. Ito’s art is fantastic as always but the story, etc.? Yeah, all of that is utter rubbish!