This book made me fall in love with Osamu Dazai's works, and now I can't stop reading them. The quality of the printing is good and there were no damages when it arrived.

Osamu Dazai's sleek novel, No Longer Human, details the life of a man named Oba Yozo, whose parents were so busy that they didn't have much time to invest in loving him when he was a boy. Being naturally quiet and reserved, he then grew to despise the humans. Veneering his disgust for mankind, he lived his life by becoming a clown, a term he used to call his other self which he created in order to get by his bleak and loveless days, until one day he ended up being placed in a mental asylum to rehabilitate for his suicidal tendencies. It was during this grueling trice of his life that Dazai-san drafted the book, which was compiled from the pieces of his subjective journal entries and then arranged, into a tightly knit foursquare story. Wherefore, in a passably arresting way, the book was also a semi-biographical account, with Oba Yozo being the adequately faithful portrayal of the author himself. Taken at the face value, this novel with its gloomy premise, may not be educational or invigorating to read. However, upon a complete and an in-depth meditation on the true aspiration of the writing done in this book in its entirety, I come to learn that Dazai-san might eventually try to unravel what lurks beneath every heart of man: the dark, animalistic, and egotistical drives to be the only one human being reigning supreme in the society. As an art form, this novel is very refreshingly dogmatic and may give its readers a newly found insight and questions worth pondering on what it really means to be a true human being, whose life in this world is creeping away so fast like unflinching shadows towards its inevitable death, that was barely even traceable.