The Role of Women

Within Dazai’s No Longer Human, women play a crucial and interesting role in the life of Yozo. The start of Yozo’s depression and lack of understanding for humans began when a family maid sexually abused him from a young age. From there, Yozo believed women to be the root of all evil.

Yozo’s hatred for women is interesting, though. In many parts of the story, he was able to connect with women better than he could with men. For instance, Tsuneko was able to bond with Yoko because of her same dissatisfaction with life. She was willing to share it with him. He saw himself through the pain of many of those women, as they were able to be vulnerable with him. The men, on the other hand, often led him to destructive behaviors. Horiki introduced Yozo to alcohol and prostitutes, despite he was already a troubled person. Later in the book, he would blame Yozo when his problems got worse, never offering him any help.

Despite this, Yozo still saw women as less than human and often manipulated them to get what he wanted. He tried to convince the girl at the drug store by offering to kiss her, exactly how he had manipulated Yoshiko into marrying him. In both of these instances, Yozo saw the women as expendable, never caring about how his actions would affect them.

At one point in the book, Yoshiko is raped. When Yozo sees this, he chooses to blame her for trusting the man who raped her rather than seeing it as a crime against his wife. Yozo puts the man above the person he is supposed to be the closest with. It is interesting to see that Yozo puts men on a pedestal and sees women as unimportant—despite men often treating him worse. Yozo projects the way men treat him onto the women in his life.

Dazai brings about an important aspect of human personality with the role of women in the book. The bad experiences resulted from a member of one group had caused Yozo to see the rest of them as evil, even though it has clearly been shown that they were able to connect with him.