Books like No Longer Human
Three notebooks left by Oba Yozo tell how, since childhood, he has felt unable to understand other people, playing the clown to hide it, and how he has drifted from school to drink, women and worse.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of No Longer Human
A Personal Matter
Bird, a twenty-seven-year-old cram-school teacher who dreams of escaping to Africa, learns that his newborn son has a severe brain hernia, and spends the following days running from the decision in front of him.
The Setting Sun
After the war, Kazuko and her aristocratic mother lose their Tokyo house and move to a country villa, where they wait for Kazuko's brother, Naoji, to come home from the army with his addictions intact.
Notes from Underground
A bitter clerk in St. Petersburg writes a confession that swings between self-loathing and grandiosity, inventing the template for every unreliable narrator who followed.
13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl
Thirteen linked stories trace one woman's lifetime of self-hatred, dieting, and uneasy reconciliation with her body.
The Fall
A man in an Amsterdam bar confesses to a stranger, and his monologue reveals a life of moral failure, self-deception, and the impossibility of escaping judgment.
Kokoro
A student in Meiji-era Tokyo befriends a withdrawn older man he calls Sensei, whose long final letter reveals the betrayal that hollowed out his life.
The Lake
Gimpei Momoi, a former teacher who lost his job after an affair with a pupil, can't stop following women he sees in the street, and his memories drift back to a lake of his childhood.
Territory of Light
Separated from her husband, a young woman moves with her two-year-old daughter into a fourth-floor Tokyo apartment flooded with light, and over twelve chapters, one for each month, tries to make a life there.
Big Sur
Worn out by the fame On the Road brought him, Kerouac's stand-in Jack Duluoz hides in a friend's cabin in Big Sur to dry out, and the solitude turns into something closer to a breakdown.
Woman at Point Zero
Firdaus, a woman awaiting execution in a Cairo prison for killing a man, tells a psychiatrist the story of her life.
By Night in Chile
A priest reviews his life under Pinochet's regime in a single feverish night, and the monologue reveals the complicity of Chilean intellectuals with fascism.
Snow Country
A Tokyo dilettante travels to a hot-spring town in snow country to visit his geisha lover, and the cold landscape mirrors the impossibility of their connection.