Yozo Oba can't connect with other humans. He performs normalcy like a clown performing for an audience. His confession — written as notebooks found after his disappearance — is the most famous novel in Japanese literature after the war. Dazai wrote it months before his own death. Beautiful and annihilating.
References to relationships but not explicit.
Skip if you dislike:
Moods: Devastating Confessional Dark Beautiful
Tropes: Unreliable Narrator Self-Destruction Alienation Confession
Heavily — Dazai's own life mirrors Yozo's closely.
Second only to Kokoro — over 12 million copies in Japan.
One of the darkest canonical novels in world literature.