Tokyo Ghoul vs. Literature: No Longer Human

Assume there is some way to define humanity in a quantifiable trait and measure it. The most logical way to do this is by comparing it to something not human. If humanity is a trait, it could be gained or lost. At which point then, does a person become No Longer Human?

Osamu Dazai, uses the metaphor of loss of humanity in order to define the breaking point of the struggles of a young man as he attempts to gain some foothold in society only to be further and further rejected by it and fall into darker places. In a similar manner, Tokyo Ghoul portrays a young man losing his place in the world until eventually he comes to reject his own humanity as well.



You could even say the character of Kaneki is partially inspired by Osamu Dazai, who put a lot of his lifetime struggles in his writing. As Eto points out, Kaneki can be read also as Kanegi.

Today we’ll compare this theme of Loss of Humanity in both No Longer Human and Tokyo Ghoul, and how two narratives share events in common, and their main characters show similar reactions to trauma.







Tokyo Ghoul and No Longer Human both start off right the bat with mirror instigating events. In No Longer Human, the event that really gets the narrative going is the protagonist’s failed suicide attempt with another woman. Yozo survives, while the woman doesn’t, and the protagonist is left alive and now forever changed and marked by his experience.

We entered the water together. She died. I was saved, Yozo 87.

A woman who he quickly comes to associate with death.

Towards dawn she pronounced for the first time the word ‘death’. She seemed to weary beyond endurance from the task of being a human being, Yozo, 86.

Yet, despite only knowing her for a short time he projects an unnecessary and unfitting amount of love and forgiveness in her direction.

I felt pity for Tsuneko; for the first time in my life I was conscious of a positive, if feeble movement of love in my heart, Yozo 87.



I thought of dead Tusneko, and, longing for her, I wept. Of all the people I had ever known, that miserable Tsuneko was the only one I loved. Yozo 88.

In the next major phase of the story, the male protagonist develops a close emotional relationship with a child, who he ends up acting as surrogate family towards.

At such times one slight relief came from little Shigeko. By now she was calling me daddy with no sign of hesitation Yozo, 116.

Only for him to abandon her in the end due to what he perceives as his selfishness.

They were happy, the two of them. I’d been a fool to come between them. I might destroy them both if I were not careful…I shut the door softly, went to the Ginza, and did not return to my apartment.

Those aren’t the only similarities between protagonists. Both protagonist suffered a deeply repressed abuse at an early age that they told nobody about.

Already by that time I had been taught a lamentable thing by the maids and manservants; I was being corrupted. I now think that to perperate such a thing on a small child, is the ugliest, vilest, cruelest crime a human being can commit. But I endured it. If I had formed the habit of telling the truth I might perhaps have been able to confide unabashedly to my father or my mother of the crime, but I could not even understand my own parents. Yozo, 35.







Both protagonists also developed a habit of smiling to hide their pain at an early age.

This was how I happened to invent my clowning. It was the last quest for love I was to direct at human beings. Although I had a mortal dread of human beings I seemed quiet unable to renounced their society. I managed to maintain on the surface a smile which never deserted my lips. Yozo, 26.

Both have such low self esteem it’s near non-existant. They describe themselves in similar despairing poetic candor.

Mine has been a life of such shame Yozo 21.



So Dark is their outlook they view happiness as some unattainable goal.

God, I thought, if you listen to the prayers of people like myself, grant me happiness once, once in my whole lifetime will be enough! Yozo, 124.

The stories of both protagonists also end in a second attempted failed suicide.

I want to die. I want to die more than ever before. There’s no chance now of a recovery. No matter what sort of thing I do, no matter what I do, it’s sure to be a failure, just a final coating applied to my shame. 163, Yozo.

Which afterwards both Yozo and Kaneki fade away entirely, unable to face the world anymore.

Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness. Everything passes. Yozo, 169.

Both protagonists even suffer from Marie Antoinette Syndrome, an immature greying of their hair due to stress.

This year I am twenty seven. My hair is much greyer. Most people would take me for forty. Yozo, 170

Both protagonists drop out of school after a certain point in the story. Both protagonists mention only having one significant friend when they were young, an uncannily observant boy who could see through their fake smiles. Both protagonists have a difficulty saying no to others or speaking up about their own needs.

That’s not even beginning to scratch the surface though. You could sit all day and list similarities on a surface level between two works, but what they mean is the more important point.

These are narratives that tell of a protagonist who fail to fit society’s defintion of human, and spend half of the story struggling to fit into that term human, or at least coexist among humans. Until they reach a breaking point, at which from that point forward they reject their humanity, but that only causes them to further spiral.

Tokyo Ghoul evaluates humanity a lot. Mostly by contrasting it with what is not human. In the manga, ‘Tokyo Ghoul Jack’ we see the ironic coupling of a ghoul who strived her best to fit into normal human society, something she was born incapable of doing.

Who loathed natural born humans who took their place in society or granted. With one of those dissatisfied humans who concluded that even if his friends were unwanted by society, they still were good people.

Eto mocks characters who were former humans, who left human society completely by choice.

She repeats the idea that Yozo did as well, that at a certain point you fall off the edge and can never go back.

“Even if released, I would be forever branded on the forehead with the word ‘’madman’, or perhaps ‘reject’. Disqualified as a human being’ Yozo, 167.



How does that relate back to Kaneki and his narrative though?

Because Kaneki repeats the same self destructive, ruinous behaviors that Yozo shows throughout the book. All because of this idea of humanity forced upon him, that he feels he cannot possibly live up to.

He puts on a fake smile so nobody can know the real him, and nobody can ever attempt to help him with his pain. He does so because, he beliees in his heart the moment other people would be able to see through his fake smile, they would instantly abandon him because they would be able to see his inhumanity.

Despite his low self esteem he somehow attracts untold love and devotion in others towards him, not that he even expects it or enjoys it. He nonetheless, tries to commit himself to them and ends up setting up multiple pseudo families as a coping mechanism.

Only to abandon them in the end, convincing himself all the while it’s for their own good while really, he’s only protecting himself by preemptively abandoning before he can be abandoned.

Every action then from that perspective becomes twisted and self serving. But then again, all these are are defensed mechanisms. Failed repeating patterns. Symptoms.

Osamu Dazai wrote his book to be semi-autobiographical. It reads like a suicide note, written in the last year of his life before taking his own life. There are many similiarities between the events of the book, and events in his own life.(x)

There are also those who see it as a narrative of a man struggling with mental illness, specifically complex post traumatic stress disorder. There are some who have said Kaneki shared the same symptoms (x). But these are both diagnoses of fictional characters so take that as you will.

On a much larger picture though, without trying to pick out many of the twisted themes this book makes a commentary on, like collectivism and post world war 2 japanese society and analyze them as a single thread, what is the whole arc statement.

What is Yozo’s conflict? What is Kaneki’s conflict? What is the root cause of both?

The only way to define what is human, is by comparing it to what is not. However, the only way to do that is by excluding that which is not human. Those who are excluded, like Kaneki, like Yozo, feel the loss of their humanity like a great existential angst, a hole in themselves to which they can never fill. They stretch every part of themselves to try to fit this standard of human anyway, but only tire themselves out to the point where they believe happiness is just some far off concept. Then they resign themselves to what they are.

Ghouls. Rejects. No longer human.

By drawing that line between human and not, you’ve excised those excluded to a terrible fate in order to elevate those who do qualify for being human. Isn’t that the problem that all ghouls face though? The fact that by being born inhuman, all they can hope to accomplish in life is to just pass as a normal human and go unnoticed by organizations like the CCG.

They live a wretched existence for no reason other than they were disqualified from reaching this definition of so called “humanity”.