TikTok videos

The enduring appeal of a midcentury Japanese novelist who wrote of alienation and suicide.

“That’s not true, is it?” His wife, summoning the wisdom and resignation of countless partners of egomaniacal artists, gets the last word: “There’s nothing wrong with being a monster, is there? Whereas “No Longer Human” ends on the ironic revelation that an old acquaintance of Yozo’s remembers him, despite his misdeeds, as “a good boy, an angel,” the narrator of “Flowers of Buffoonery” bluntly asserts midway through the book that “Yozo was not merely close to god, but like one. As in “No Longer Human,” and echoing Dazai’s own experience, Yozo has survived a leap from a cliff into the sea thanks to a passing fishing boat; the cafe waitress with whom he jumped has not. Dazai’s art transcends the emotional volatility of Yozo, his most famous literary alter ego, and though “No Longer Human” exerts a nihilistic charm, venturing further into his body of work as it becomes more widely available in English presents a subtler and more complex picture of this writer’s vision. Dazai, introduced in the first episode floating down a river after a suicide attempt, his feet sticking up out of the water like those of a duck bobbing for fish, is the show’s charismatic, androgynous protagonist, an improbable combination of Jack Skellington from “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and Harold from “Harold and Maude.” (Here it must be noted that there seem to be many more videos of people dressed up as or creating fan art about the anime character than there are those directly referencing the novel.) Like the author from whom he takes his name, the Dazai of “Bungo Stray Dogs” is constantly contemplating and attempting suicide (the real Dazai succeeded, on his fifth attempt, with a lover just before his 39th birthday), though on the show this is mostly played for morbid laughs. Like the goddess of wisdom, Minerva, sending her sacred bird, the owl, out into the dusky sky and laughing to herself at the sight of it all.” One imagines this is a parody of or homage to the French decadents he admired (as is the title’s play on “The Flowers of Evil”), but, like the literal cliffhanger ending, it’s more clever than convincing. What would it mean to unabashedly identify with a novel that turns on the Hobbesian epiphany that society “is the struggle between one individual and another, a then-and-there struggle, in which the immediate triumph is everything”? “No Longer Human” is presented as a found diary of unmitigated despair by Yozo Oba, a man whose social anxiety and fear of other people is so extreme that he believes he has never been happy. Like the young men themselves, the narrator is clowning to keep from crying, but the story never develops the depth of feeling that marks Dazai’s mature work. In other words, Dazai’s brand of egoistic pessimism dovetails organically with the emo chic of this cultural moment (he himself came by it via miserabilist classics like Baudelaire’s “Paris Spleen” and Dostoyevsky’s “Notes From Underground”) and with the inner lives of teenagers of all eras. [Mag.Lo](http://maglo.work/)), and many more use the same piece of dialogue with different combinations of backing tracks. To someone with a great deal of interest in postwar Japanese literature and almost no working knowledge of TikTok, anime or manga (surely I’m not the only one), this combination of elements is baffling, if not alarming.