Reconstructing an Existential Written Narrative as Visual Horror; Junji Ito’s Manga Adaptation of Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human

This study examines the intermedial and generic transformation of Osamu Dazai’s novel No Longer Human (Ningen Shikkaku, 1948) in Junji Ito’s manga adaptation. It addresses the question of which narrative and generic interventions restructure an existential and confessional written work as a visual, sequential horror narrative, and to what extent this transformation enables the adaptation to become an autonomous creative work bearing the artistic signature of the manga artist. Accordingly, the study aims to demonstrate how Ito reinterprets Dazai’s source text through his own horror aesthetics and the expressive possibilities of graphic narrative. The research is based on a comparative analysis of the novel and its manga adaptation. The source text is examined within the sociocultural context of postwar Japan and in relation to Dazai’s life, the I-novel tradition, confession, memoir, and suicide narrative. The adaptation is then analyzed in terms of narrative and generic transformation through the approaches of Timothy Corrigan and Julie Sanders. Sequences added or altered by Ito are compared with their counterparts in the novel, while the changes arising from the transformation of written narrative into visual language are examined through manga-specific devices such as composition, viewpoint, shot scale, facial expression, and body language. The adaptation’s restructuring within the horror genre is analyzed through kaidan and yūrei elements, surreal interventions, a karmic plot structure, and body-horror aesthetics; this aesthetic is interpreted through Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of “grotesque realism” and Julia Kristeva’s concept of “abjection.”The findings demonstrate that the shame, guilt, anxiety, and alienation constructed at a psychological level in the novel are transformed in the manga into a bodily and visual experience of horror. Ito expands the narrative’s internal tension through elements of ghosts, haunting, revenge, and karmic justice, while positioning the reader as a compulsory witness through grotesque bodily imagery, physical deformation, and graphic violence. The work thus becomes a new narrative grounded in body-horror aesthetics through Ito’s creative interventions. In conclusion, by explaining the originality of Ito’s adaptation through intermedial transformation, generic restructuring, and body-horror aesthetics, this study demonstrates how graphic narrative adaptations interpret and transform their source texts.