No Longer Human (Junji Ito)

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In fact, it is only clarified, hundreds of pages of later when Dazai is reintroduced into the story, meeting the protagonist in a mental hospital (and then only if you go back and compare the rendering of the characters). I don't want to say that one piece is better than the other, if anything I think they should be read side by side. 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.

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. It is more vibrant when you see the artwork attached to the text, and I think that is why this is probably my favorite of all Junji Ito's pieces as well. On top of that, I couldn't help but have flashbacks to the first time I read The Great Gatsby and reeled at how deeply unlikable the main character was, how little I could identify with his struggles when most of them were made by his own hand and were easily fixable, given that he's from a rich, influential family. Essentially, the manga effectively converts into a different style of horror that really benefits the visual storytelling here.Eventually, unable to cope with her coy flirtation and their desire to possess Tomie completely, they are inevitably compelled to kill her — only to discover that, regardless of the method they chose to dispose of her body, her body will always regenerate. He later reconnects with that cousin in the mental hospital, where she is still crazy, but he goes to live with her and her son, who is drawn to look like Takeichi. 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). The abuse he suffered from lecherous servants must have cemented in his mind how untrustworthy and scary people generally are.

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.The art in this book is absolutely stunning, with dark ink illustrations that fluidly shift from reality to viscous interpersonal hellscapes in the span of a single frame. One of my “complaints” about Japanese literature (and I put complaints in quotes because I don’t believe it’s a flaw with the actual books) has always been that the emotion is too subtle.

While I appreciated Ito's ability to make this spooky without any monsters, I found that this reflected the source material a little too closely, so to speak - my god, the misogyny! 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. But overall, I didn't LOVE this and had a lot of issues of the portrayal of women and the use of women as "demons" and the cause of all men's woes and troubles.The nightmare imagery from the suicide attempt on the beach in Chapter 7 (which also really happened to Dazai) was really terrifying. I haven't read the original novel, but my understanding is that Ito has taken many liberties, including the insertion of original author Osamu Dazai as an actual character. No Longer Human is told in the form of notebooks left by one Ōba Yōzō (大庭葉蔵), a troubled man incapable of revealing his true self to others, and who, instead, maintains a facade of hollow jocularity.