Yozo Oba was plainly put, inhumanely humane, inhumane in his antics, personal philosophy and desensitised emotions (which we find out at the very end, was in part due to the sexual assault inflicted on him at young age, made me realised why he was so unsettled in his normal life), humane in his imperfections and realizations. He is as pitiful and scorned as it gets, and with him being such a sociopath yet learning and evolving as time progresses, understanding or being at odds with how others feel, behave or act, establishing humans in containing traits of characteristics and changing his persona and emotions towards them (for good or for bad), just to change them yet again as he comes across new instances as he is still a young man experiencing things anew, humanizes him so much more. It was painful to see him go through what he went through but in the back of your head, you know that's the least of what he deserved.
I wouldn't even talk about other characters as they're all pieces of the puzzle, different but fit in so perfectly. They felt as real as they could get and go into such depths of abstraction in personality and traits at different times, but at so many points just plain observations by Yozo on them would just leave me in distress, how little things would connect from seemingly small nuances to character portraits unlocking layer by layer, uncovering them and putting all their actions and dialogues till the point in perspective. But in the end, all of it comes from the eyes and mind of the Narrator, who can tend to have different perspectives at different points in his life for different people, which can be very skewed in the narrative which makes it even hard to digest.
Another thing which I really loved is how Osamu has written the ever so growing disdain even amongst people who have inevitably sticked around Yozo for good or for worse, seeing how he kept on being a nuisance for everyone who was around him, yet many of them still wish for his well-being one time or the other as he wasn't bad by the virtue of being evil to people, he just had a terrible worldview and attitude.
The focus is on life long trauma, which leaves a permanent scar on your mental state, leaving parts of you crazed forever; and slow burn emotions, like internalised fear, frustration, trust, jealousy, desire, passion, emptiness which aren't visible to you immediately but play with your mind as long as your consciousness is alive, and they screw your up at the most emotionally vulnerable moments, where many seemingly everyday people loose their control over themselves and enter a state of utter madness, you just loose control. It's an account that can only be heavily inspired by real-life itself because of such a real depiction of actions and emotions.
Masterful work by Usamaru Furuya, who brings the craze into the light so elegantly. Truly Osamu Dazai must've been proud of this if he was around to witness it, and considering how according to Ito himself the manga couldn't put the story in its full glory here, I must pick the original work soon. This has been a chokehold of a read for me, pure insanity
