The Fall 2022 Manga Guide

No Longer Human Complete Edition

What's It About? 

Yozo Oba is a young man originally from a well-off family from Japan's far north and a troubled soul incapable of revealing his true self to others. A weak constitution and the lingering trauma from some abuse administered by a relative has forced him to uphold a facade of hollow jocularity since high school.

No Longer Human is Usamaru Furuya's manga adaptation of Osamu Dazai's novel. Vertical Comics released its first volume in November 2011, and will release its Complete Edition version both digitally and physically on November 1, 2022

---

Is It Worth Reading?

MrAJCosplay

Rating:

No Longer Human gives us an uneasy, detailed and frightening look into the mind of a sociopath. Here we have a story that is mostly narrated from the perspective of a man who goes through life putting on a façade. Whether he is playing the fool or the involved activist, everything our protagonist does is for the sake of blending in and he does a good job of it. There are various points throughout the book where, if it wasn't for the overlapped narration going into detail about how much control this man has over every little action he does, you would almost think that he was just another background character. But that's part of the frightening thing about this story, someone with such a warped perception of reality can inherently do such a good job of playing the role of what many of us see as ordinary. But when you take a second to look at things from their perspective, the things looking back at us can look incredibly frightening. A lot of this is annunciated with a manga's gorgeously well shaded artwork with excellent use of framing to properly convey the uncomfortableness of what is being contemplated or buried in the background. This is a hefty volume, spending over 600 pages but considering the quality of the story, you are definitely getting your money's worth picking this up.