Usually people dont show how terrible they are. But they are like a calm grazing cow that suddenly raises its tail and whips the horsefly. It is enough that the occasion is given for them to show their horrendous nature. I remember that my hair stood on end with terror when I thought that this innate character is an essential condition for human beings to survive. Thinking about it, I lost any hope about humanity»

First published in 1948, Unworthy of being human is one of the most famous novels in contemporary Japanese literature. Its controversial and brilliant author, Osamu Dazai, incorporated numerous episodes from his turbulent life into the three notebooks that make up this novel and which narrate, in the first person and starkly, the progressive decline as a human being of Yozo, a young student from the provinces who he leads a dissolute life in Tokyo. Disowned by his family after a suicide attempt and unable to live in harmony with his hypocritical peers,
Yozo scrapes by as a comic book artist and subsists thanks to the help of women who fall in love with him despite his alcoholism and drug addiction. the morphine. However, after Yozos ruthless portrait of his life,
Dazai suddenly changes his point of view and shows us, through the voice of one of the women Yozo lived with, a very different profile of the tragic protagonist of this disturbing story. .Unworthy of being human has become, over the years, one of the most popular works of Japanese literature, selling more than ten million copies since its first publication in 1948.