The best part is the sequence most Ito’s own: the culminating love triangle among the novel’s anti-hero Oba, his ingenuous wife, and a pharmacist who decorates the room where she makes love to Oba with dried poisonous herbs. Ito goes for the gross-out often enough to defy Dazai’s understated aesthetic, and too much of this book’s blood, vomit, and other excretions, not to mention its graphic sweat-soaked tongue-wagging sex scenes, seemed to be there only for shock value (though, if I may, Goodreads reviewers so reliably performed their shock that the effect was more satisfying than it otherwise might have been). Yet the literary style of Osamu Dazai’s classic novel is so spare and dry, and horror maven Junji Ito’s drawing style so grotesquely profuse, that the manga becomes an expansion, a swelling, an inflammation of No Longer Human. If the old cliché about the thousand-to-one word/picture ratio is true, then a comics adaptation of a novel will likely not be more detailed than its purely verbal source material even if it is longer. I posted this review yesterday to Goodreads:
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