No Longer Human Osamu Dazai

go on playing the clown.
Some perhaps will deride me. "What do you mean by not having
faith in human beings? When did you become a Christian anyway?"
I
fail to see, however, that a distrust for human beings should necessarily
lead directly to religion. Is it not true, rather, that human beings,
including those who may now be deriding me, are living in mutual
distrust, giving not a thought to God or anything else?
There was something that happened when I was a small boy. A
celebrated figure of the political party to which my father belonged had
come to deliver a speech in our town, and I had been taken by the
servants to the theatre to hear him. The house was packed. Everybody
in town who was especially friendly to my father was present and
enthusiastically applauding. When the speech was over the audience
filtered out in threes and fives into the night. As they set out for home
on the snow-covered roads they were scathingly commenting on the
meeting. I could distinguish among the voices those of my father's
closest friends complaining in tones almost of anger about how inept
my father's opening remarks had been, and
how difficult it was to
make head or tail out of the great man's address. Then these men

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stopped by my house, went into our parlor, and told my father with
expressions of genuine delight on their faces what a great success the
meeting had been. Even the servants, when asked by my mother about
the meeting, answered as if it were their spontaneous thought, that it
had been really interesting. These were the selfsame servants who had
been bitterly complaining on the way home that political meetings are