The Divided Self: A Jungian Psychoanalytic Reading of Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human

This paper considers Carl Jung's notions of the persona and the shadow in relation to Osamu Dazai's novel No Longer Human (1948). The central figure, Oba Yozo, fashions a "clown" mask as a way of coping with a world that he finds frightening and bewildering. In this paper I argue that Yozo's tragic destiny is the consequence of a "crisis of becoming whole": the dark side he hides eventually overwhelms the false self he presents to the world and he breaks down completely. The paper demonstrates how Yozo's public mask, a result of fear from his childhood and family pressure, prevents him from accepting his dark side. He feels this failure as painfully alone and refers to himself as "disqualified from being human." This paper attempts to grasp Yozo's hopelessness and the universal human struggle between our public face and our hidden self by reading the novel with Jung's ideas.