In art school, he meets fellow student Horiki, who quickly introduces him to smoking, drinking, and women.
Everyone seems to like him, and yet no one really knows him. Oba, the privileged, handsome son of wealthy parents, gets through life playing the clown. “I’ve lived a life full of shame,” volume 1 begins. The transformation from young child to handsome teenager to decrepit old man in such a short time is so startling that Furuya must find out why.
Three photos show Oba at ages 6, 17, and 25. Told as a story within a story, a manga artist named Usamaru Furuya (surprise!) stumbles on an online “‘ouch’ diary” written by a mysterious young man, Yozo Oba. In addition to the contemporary facelift, Furuya also ups the graphic factor – a whole lot of ‘show’ going on, so parents BEWARE: this is most definitely NOT a kiddie cartoon in content or execution. What does it take to update a 60+-year-old story? In the case of Usamaru Furuya’s 21st-century manga adaptation of the literary classic Ningen Shikkaku, a semi-autobiographical novel by Dazai Osamu (published in 1948 in Japan, translated into English as No Longer Human in 1958), an updated wardrobe and the requisite techno-gadgets seem to be all that was needed to create a thoroughly contemporary tale of hedonistic decadence and human disconnect.įrom what I remember of reading Ningen in the original in grad school (no, I couldn’t do it now in my old age), Furuya closely follows Dazai’s narrative, even using original Japanese passages (with English translations on the facing page) to begin his chapters.
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