I’ve come to dread writing about Aoi Bungaku as it usually leaves me disappointed. I could spend an hour diving into both the novel and the anime to write an entry, but I’d get more than twice as many views had I written about some trashy harem anime instead. After seeing the last episode of the No Longer Human arc, however, I guess it deserves one last entry.
Everyone is at fault. Everyone does poor ol’ Yozo wrong. Horiki keeps exploiting him. Daddy didn’t like his pictures. Society keeps reminding him that he’s a monster.
In my previous entry regarding Aoi Bungaku, I lamented Madhouse’s decision to tweak certain aspects of Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human. The first episode had piqued my interest in Dazai’s work so much that I acquired for myself a copy of his famous novel (along with other Japanese classics but we can talk about them some other time). To my surprise, I found No Longer Human to be very enjoyable, but to my equal disappointment, Madhouse’s adaptation is different in ways I found wholly unnecessary. Does this, however, make it a bad anime?
I had written before that I wouldn’t touch on No Longer Human again until I had read the novel and also seen the arc in Aoi Bungaku, but after getting about halfway through the novel, I felt compelled to note the drastic differences between the two. Spoilers for the first episode and first half of the novel.
