No Longer Human - Dazai (Lo squalificato) 3nd notebook
Living that kind of life, maintained, brings Yozo to use all his money for drinking, developing a real dependency. After the women bought him a little bunny, he run away, thinking that his presence would only ruin their life.
He ran away, again, and, his good look and manners, and also his "charm" with women, help him found a place in a pub where he was an "habitue".
After a while he met another women, a women who convince him, through his brutally ingenuity and honesty, to quit drinking. The two marry together.
Now, another terrible event happens, when his old "friend" come back to meet him again, and drink together, the wife got raped. Yazo saw that but was unable to help her, not because he couldn't but because he froze.
That event change both Yozo and his wife. He start drinking again, more than ever, until the friendship with a pharmacist, bring him to the road of something more harmful than the alcohol itself. Morphine.
He become severe addicted to morphine.
The last passage of the life of Yozo is not exactly known, and i can't decide if it was a good ending or not.
The friend of his father, and his brother, bring him into an hospital, where he was detoxed.
After he got out, the brother bought him an house, near his hometown, and paid a old women to take care of him.
The last book finish with some notes of irony. The "maid" bought him a laxative instead of a sleeping pill, passing the entire night in the bathroom.
I want to quote the last phrase of the book, which is somehow very sad to me. It's about the numbing propriety of the time. Everything passes.
"Now i'm neither happy or sad. Everything passes. In the world of men, where i lived like the hell, that's the only thing that is true."
I found the book quite good and intense. Gonna read the Junji Ito transposition.
It was also extremely easy empathize with him, he's depicted as a strange man, even if he's fundamentally a good man, and i bet that a lot of people has the same feelings of him in some moments of the life.
What i've also found interesting was the "Captatio benevolentiae". He was using his behavior for helping himself, the "clown" behavior is something that can be accommodated to this old rhetorical technique.
The desperate jester of Yozo is universal, he lives in Tokyo, around 1930, but the "tedium vitae" and the sense of guilty of a judgement society got him the title of being "disqualified" it's something that everyone can feel. Everyone can wear his mask.