a mistake, I am sure. Dazai had the creative artistry of a great cameraman. His lens is often trained on moments of his own past, but thanks to his brilliant skill in composition and selection his photographs are not what we expect to find cluttering an album. There is nothing of the meandering reminiscer about Dazai; with him all is sharp, brief and evocative. Even if each scene of No Longer Human were the exact reproduction of an incident from Dazai's life— of course this is not the case—his technique would qualify the whole of the work as one of original fiction.
No Longer Human is not a cheerful book, yet its
effect is far from that of a painful wound gratuitously inflicted on the reader. As a reviewer (Richard Gilman in Jubilee) wrote of Dazai's earlier novel, "Such is the power of art to transfigure what is objectively ignoble or depraved that The Setting Sun is actually deeply moving and even inspiriting. . . . To know the nature of despair and to triumph over it in the ways that are possible to oneself—imagination was Dazai's only weapon—is surely a sort of grace."
Donald Keene
