The No Longer Human

There are many readers who dismiss Yozo as “a weak man.” They point at his actions one by one — here he failed, here he ran, here he hurt someone. And they are correct. As a list of facts, they are correct.

But a list of facts is not understanding. Dissection is not treatment. Opening each of Yozo’s wounds one by one, measuring this one is deep, this one is shallow — that is not medicine. That is an autopsy. Autopsies are performed on the dead. Yozo is still breathing.

The act of condemning Yozo is nothing more than apathy disguised as understanding. When you call him “weak,” you are placing yourself on the “strong” side. That faith itself is the antonym of tolerance.

If you could describe Yozo’s life in a single word, it would be “adrift.”

His place of learning was a Campus. A Campus is supposed to become a Compass — a place where you acquire your bearings. A place to learn where you stand and where you are heading.

But Yozo’s Campus never became a Compass. What he needed was not direction. It was an Anchor — a weight. Something that digs into the seabed and holds a ship fast, even in the storm.

A ship without an anchor, no matter how beautiful its sails, will never arrive anywhere. It drifts with the wind, turns with the tide, and eventually vanishes beyond the edge of the chart. That was Yozo’s life. He did not set sail. The mooring line simply came undone. He was left adrift in a wander land.

A lighthouse plants roots. It stands at the tip of a cape and goes on illuminating the night sea. A windmill plants roots. It goes on turning in the wind. A lightning rod plants roots. It catches the thunder and sends it into the ground.

A lighthouse shines for ships. A windmill turns for people. A lightning rod stands for buildings. None of them exist for their own sake. And yet every one of them is rooted. That which serves others first chooses to be bound.

Did Yozo have roots?

No, the world would say. He just drifted. But I want to ask — was there soil for him to root in?

What do you call a person who drops a seed in the desert and blames the seed for not sprouting? That, too, is apathy.

Yozo tried to live by depending on the sun. Because he could not become one. He tried to live as a planet in the sun’s orbit, borrowing the sun’s light to survive.

But the sun can only shine in gold. Those who depend on the sun can only be dyed the sun’s color.

Is the moon, shining with the sun’s light, not beautiful? Are flowers, blooming by the sun’s light, not beautiful? It is the moon that illuminates the night. It is the seed that survives the winter.

Sunflowers gaze at the sun. Van Gogh did the same. But Van Gogh himself was never the sun. He was a flower that kept staring at the sun. He stared, and burned, and withered.

Van Gogh had his canvas. Yozo never found his.

Is facing the same direction the same as loving? When someone is sad, you feel sad too; when someone is happy, you feel happy too. That is empathy. It is beautiful. But on its own, it is unstable. A being that only synchronizes with others’ emotions will sink when others sink.

That is how Yozo went under.

A tanuki shapeshifts with a leaf.

Place a leaf on its head, slap its belly — pon — and it can become a human, a tea kettle, or even the moon. To shapeshift is to become something other than yourself. To hide what you are and offer a different form in its place.

Yozo shapeshifted too. With a leaf called clowning, placed on his head.

Humans call it a “lie.” Deception. Performance. Dishonesty. But from the tanuki’s side, it is survival. In the forest, in the world of humans, you shapeshift because you cannot survive as yourself. To shapeshift is to stay alive.

Those who call Yozo’s clowning “weakness” simply lived in a world where they could survive without shapeshifting. In a world that permits only pitch black or pure white, they never tried to see the navy of the night sky. They never tried to love the glay of the clouds. Yozo had to shapeshift because the world was not tolerant.

Yozo was not a man incapable of loving flowers, birds, wind, and moon. He was simply buried in snow before he could see the flowers. Caught in a storm before he could hear the birds. Walled in before he could feel the wind. Forced to the ground before he could look up at the moon.

To love a flower, you must first be standing. To stand, you must have roots. To root, you must have soil.

At the opening of No Longer Human, the narrator examines three photographs.

The first — Yozo as a child. He is smiling. But the smile is not “a human smile.” It is a monkey. A creature of imitation. It observes human expressions, copies them, pastes them on. A monkey mimics the faces of dominant individuals to survive within the troop. The prototype of Yozo’s clowning is here.

The second — Yozo as a young man. Beautiful, but lifeless. Light as a bird, and empty as a blank page. He can neither fly nor land. He is not riding the wind — the wind is taking him.

The third — the final Yozo. No longer monkey, no longer bird. A Rocinante, then? A worn-out horse with no windmill left to charge. — No. Rocinante can stop. Rocinante can graze. Rocinante can find its stable.

Yozo could not stop. Could not graze. Had nowhere to return. Not a Rocinante. A horse of hell. Driven not by its own will but by something nameless, running without knowing how to stop, accelerating toward a cliff. No one holds the reins.

From monkey to bird. From bird to horse. At every stage, Yozo was not human. He did not want to become human. He wanted to be treated as one.

Yozo was a weak man. I grant that.

Because he was weak, he leaned on weak women. Because he was weak, he used weak people. Like snow, like petals, he could only trample and scatter. He could not give. He had nothing to give.

And yet — because he was weak, he was loved by weak people. Yozo tried to love others. He tried to love himself. Even when he failed at everything else, he never gave up on that single point. That is why he was loved.

Yozo was a man who drowned inside this question. Because he had no starting point of self-love, every act of love toward others became “leaning.” It is easy to call that “exploitation.” But a person who calls a drowning man’s grip on a nearby life ring “theft” is standing on the shore.

Few people are tolerant of Yozo.

You have heard of the paradox of tolerance. The proposition that if intolerance is tolerated, tolerance itself perishes. But Yozo is not an intolerant being. He excludes no one. He attacks no one. He dominates no one. He simply kept shapeshifting. To stay alive.

To condemn Yozo is apathy. It is mercilessness.

We should grant Yozo mercy. As payment for what he gave his readers.