no longer human — osamu dazai

“People talk of ‘social outcasts.’ The worlds apparently denote the miserable losers of the world, the vicious ones, but I feel as though I have been a ‘social outcast’ from the moment I was born. If I ever meet someone society has designated as an outcast, I invariably feel affection for him, an emotion which carries me away in melting tenderness.

People also talk of a ‘criminal consciousness.’ All my life in this world I have been tortured by such consciousness, but it has been my faithful companion, like a wife in poverty, and together, just the two of us, we have indulged in our forlorn pleasures. This, perhaps, has been one of the attitudes in which I have gone on living. 

People also commonly speak of the ‘wound of a guilty conscience.’ In my case, the wound appeared itself when I was an infant, and with the passage of time, far from healing it has grown only deeper, until now it has reached the bone. The agonies I have suffered night after night have made for a hell composed of an infinite diversity of tortures, but—though this is a very strange way to put it—the wound has become dearer to me than my own flesh and blood, and I have thought of its pain to be the emotion of the wound as it lived or even its murmur of affection.”