Misplacement, Evaluation, and Modernity: Structural Unplaceability in Dazai's No Longer Human

This article reinterprets Dazai Osamu's No Longer Human not as a confessional narrative of psychological failure or moral collapse, but as a structural problem of misplacement within a specific social configuration. While the protagonist Ōba Yōzō diagnoses himself as "disqualified as a human being," this paper argues that such disqualification is not the cause but the result of a persistent mismatch between the subject's response patterns and the placement spaces made available to him. To demonstrate this, the paper proposes a three-layer model of social configuration implicit in the text: (1) the world, characterized by its impersonal silence; (2) the social gaze, which appears only through concrete others and enforces unspoken norms; and (3) relational interfaces—such as women, clowning, and casual companionship—that function as temporary membranes buffering direct exposure to the social gaze. Yōzō's repeated breakdowns emerge not from a lack of social capacity, but from his inability to sustain the specific kind of role-based, low-commitment performance demanded by the social gaze. By framing Yōzō as a mispositioned rather than defective subject, this paper shifts the interpretive focus from inner pathology to structural incompatibility. In doing so, it positions No Longer Human as a record of structural failure produced by modern social arrangements, rather than a narrative of individual weakness. The concept of misplacement advanced here offers a transferable analytical framework for re-reading marginal or excluded figures in modern literature beyond the Japanese context, and for understanding the structural limits of evaluation in modern social order more broadly. The paper thus contributes to both literary interpretation and the theoretical study of evaluation by clarifying the structural limits of evaluative applicability.