Ito draws it as if the wall were made of plants, merged together, looking like some kind of many eyed alien. He was told he was a failure for doing manga and told the honorable thing he should do would be to commit suicide, which in fact he/Dasai attempted a few times. At over 600pgs long, this is quite the dense and emotionally arresting work but Ito’s signature art and the seamless storytelling propel the book along as you feel yourself pulled deeper into the unraveling mind of Oba Yozo, the fictional narrator of Dazai’s story who draws much inspiration from the author himself. He did become dissipated, profligate, and keen to keep bad company - vices that only worsened as time went by.

This is not a work for children, and perhaps young adults will also have to struggle to detach themselves from the surface level lust, grit and angst of the graphic novel. Derik Badman from The Comics Journal was more critical of the book, stating Ito's art was alright but can feel stiff and simple in later parts.It seemed like death and the love of women came to him easily, like a song that broke the monotonous buzz of despair and dread that continually consumed him.

Ito’s influences include classic horror manga artists Kazuo Umezu and Hideshi Hino, as well as authors Yasutaka Tsutsui and H. On top of that, I couldn't help but have flashbacks to the first time I read The Great Gatsby and reeled at how deeply unlikable the main character was, how little I could identify with his struggles when most of them were made by his own hand and were easily fixable, given that he's from a rich, influential family. Ito is a man driven to creating horror comics, and he here is attracted to every day psychic horror. He later reconnects with that cousin in the mental hospital, where she is still crazy, but he goes to live with her and her son, who is drawn to look like Takeichi.In general, it reads like a story a disgruntled teen boy might fall in love with and (hopefully) later regret loving so much. And we get a child posed in a monkey-ish way, but instead of a nauseating feeling one just see a stupid looking pose. It is the only adaptation you will need, but it is not necessarily easier to read than the original.

That tends to be effective to shift the mood from the normal to the amped up, especially in comparison to if his art used a conventional big-eyed manga style. A box of sleeping pills Oba uses to overdose on, is, in the novel, one he hid from her in case he wanted to use them. They were potrayed in these vivid, cruel horrible, disgusting and disturbing images that came to life so extravagantly.Only by subsuming the selfish urge to constantly fulfill our unreasonable desires can we become truly human. Before Uzumaki, Ito was best known for Tomie, a comic series about a beautiful, teasing and eternally youthful high school girl who inspires her stricken admirers to murder each other in fits of jealous rage. Like when Oba, as a defence mechanism, becomes the class clown, purposely making an ass of himself for the amusement of his classmates. It’s worth flicking through No Longer Human for the art but don’t torture yourself reading the dull, go-nowhere, overlong story.