A gloomy young man feels deeply alienated from society. He is preoccupied with his inability to reveal himself to others but has learned to act the clown; he notes that, since childhood, he has “seemed to lack the qualifications of a human being.” He feels distant from his family and freely criticizes his friends. He trains his considerable wit equally on social norms—which he finds almost uniformly silly—and on himself, for his unease in navigating them. He treats his alienation alternately as a joke and as a life sentence.

A reader discovering Yozo Oba today might see in his ironic detachment and biting self-judgment the telltale signs of an antihero. His caustic first-person narration is the jolting spine of the novel he appears in: No Longer Human, by the Japanese writer Osamu Dazai. The 1948 book, which follows Yozo from childhood to adulthood as he unsparingly traces his (and society’s) failings, is a classic of modern Japanese literature; when it was released stateside a decade after its initial publication, The New York Times praised it, calling it a “self-prosecution,” a “damning narrative told in a conversational tone.” No Longer Human has since become a minimalist cult favorite, championed by artists and adapted into films and graphic novels; Dazai himself has also popped up as a character in popular manga series.

The author’s dramatic, troubled life—he died by suicide shortly before No Longer Human was published—no doubt affected the book’s reputation. But the novel’s sardonic self-awareness may be the more lasting reason it keeps finding a new readership. Though set in 1930s Japan, its themes are distinctly relatable, and its claustrophobic, almost performatively insular narration feels current, of a piece with novels of the past decade that have explored a lush psychological myopia. And its narrator’s pessimistic view of social humanity—which, for some, might also conjure Holden Caulfield’s angsty worldview—will likely strike a chord with readers facing the stressors of our era: the pressure to be genuine, the burden of creating a public persona, the feeling that you need to perform your life for others.

Seventy-five years later, No Longer Human still reads with an apt urgency. As the musician Patti Smith once put it, Dazai “wrote at the pace of a dying man, yearning for … the solution to an unresolved equation.” With the new translation of the novel’s prequel, The Flowers of Buffoonery, Dazai’s intimate, visceral writing now encounters a fresh audience. Taken together, the two works assert his mastery of the ironized confession. They also make clear a great paradox of his writing: For all his novels’ reputation as sketches of alienation, they’re equally potent as modern portraits of human connection.

Dazai was a practitioner of the “I” novel, the confessional mode of Japanese literature in which authors wrote stories based loosely on their life. Many of the basic beats of Yozo’s story—his lonely childhood, his fraught relationship with his wealthy family, his womanizing, his repeated suicide attempts, all of which he recounts with an almost masochistic bluntness in No Longer Human—trace back to events from Dazai’s own life. (The author’s first-person style is evident, too, in a story of his that was published in The Atlantic in 1955; stark and candid, it’s composed almost entirely of dialogue.) Yet it’s the rawness of Yozo’s perspective, not simply the similarities with his creator, that gives the book its force and its staying power. As Donald Keene, the book’s translator, writes in his introduction, “There is nothing of the meandering reminiscer about Dazai; with him all is sharp, brief and evocative.”

One of the mordant twists of No Longer Human is that Yozo, who describes himself as being in “perpetual flight from human society,” appears outwardly to be no less grounded in it than anyone else. Growing up wealthy but lonely in the remote north of Japan, Yozo is a sickly, brainy kid who feels at odds with his family and schoolmates. This is when he learns to play the clown, making people laugh to distract them from seeing his discomfort. He states that he doesn’t understand customs like eating communal meals or telling white lies in order to be polite. He alludes to being abused as a boy by family servants and not feeling like he could tell anyone; some scholars have interpreted the alienation he feels later in life as a product of this childhood trauma. As a teenager, he begins to see that girls are drawn to him, but their affection appears to only confuse him. He seems to have little impulse to develop real relationships.

Yet Yozo needs relationships: He’s a social loner, someone who sees himself as inexorably removed from the world, but who depends on others for survival and companionship. Yozo ends up in Tokyo, where he takes art classes and before long is drinking heavily, sleeping around, and skipping school. He has harsh words for many of those he interacts with, which Dazai contrasts with Yozo’s clear reliance on them. A Tokyo friend whom Yozo ridicules as a Dionysian fool teaches him how to live in the city on little money once he’s cut off by his family for his debauched lifestyle. A family acquaintance whom he describes as “contemptible,” meanwhile, gruffly takes him in after he attempts to kill himself. Despite the disdain Yozo has for the social infrastructure that surrounds him, it is obvious to the reader that he needs it.

If one manifestation of his perceived disconnection is an impulse to mock the people he relies on, another is his impulse to mock himself. Dazai’s choice to make Yozo his own worst critic feels particularly contemporary, even as it makes him an unreliable narrator. For instance, Yozo’s frank recounting of his reliance on the women (a waitress, a journalist, a bartender—hard workers all) who fall for him and become sources of booze or boarding is sad and bleak, his behavior easy to condemn. But Dazai hints that Yozo isn’t the monster he portrays himself to be. At the end of the novel is an addendum by an unnamed person who has found Yozo’s personal notebooks (which make up the bulk of the book), and who talks to a woman who knew Yozo. He was, she says, “a good boy, an angel.” Seeing him suddenly from someone else’s perspective, in such a different light, makes us wonder what else we might see if our vantage point shifted just a bit.

That glimpse is a rare one, though. A big part of what has helped the ornery and depressed Yozo endure over the decades is that Dazai lets us hear from him directly, in the first person. But this wasn’t always how the author conceived of his most memorable character. An earlier attempt at creating Yozo, The Flowers of Buffoonery, shows that Dazai initially wrote him in the third person, from more of a distance—still a pained young man, but less misanthropic, less removed from those around him. Though it’s a very different kind of story, the themes that Dazai would build on in No Longer Human are on fascinating display. And it reveals, too, how being lonely and being a social creature aren’t as far apart as they can seem.

Flowers isn’t a traditional prequel; no narrative chronology links the two books. It seems more like an earlier draft of the character and story that Dazai would return to in No Longer Human. But you can see traces of the eventual Yozo Oba, as well as the importance that Dazai accorded to relationships in his work. If No Longer Human plumbed Yozo’s individual psyche, Flowers widens the lens to encompass Yozo and his friends. The story has hints of alienation, but it’s mostly a portrait of young male companionship, by turns sarcastic and earnest, braggadocious and considerate.

The novella opens just after a disturbing event has taken place, but it unfolds almost lazily. Yozo, in his 20s, is recovering at a seaside sanitorium after a failed lovers’ suicide attempt. (The woman he jumped into the sea with died; he was saved by a fishing boat.) Two young men, his cousin and an art-school friend, come to stay with him for several days—essentially the duration of the story. The boys mostly avoid hard conversations and instead play cards and mug for pretty patients; their presence lends Yozo’s convalescence the screwball vibe of a boys’ getaway.

In Flowers, Yozo is not yet the knowing narrator of his life; Dazai, the author, is. He occasionally interrupts the novella he’s writing to directly address the reader, sardonically remarking on his hopes as a novelist (Will this story make him famous?) or questioning his characters’ development (Will readers like these young men?). The result is a brilliant live dissection of a work in progress. Dazai becomes an active intermediary between Yozo and the reader. We see Yozo not through his own eyes, as happens in No Longer Human, but through his creator’s.

The humor in Flowers is less acidic than in No Longer Human, but Dazai is still extremely good at highlighting the minuscule shifts and contradictions among characters, which has the effect of underscoring what they’re leaving unsaid. A hint of uncertainty permeates the story as the trio alternates between horsing around and administering comfort. “These boys never really argue,” Dazai writes early on. “Ever so careful with each other’s feelings, they tiptoe from one comment to the next, taking great pains to shelter their own feelings in the process.” Because they know “all kinds of expressions that could smooth things over,” and their friendships are built on a foundation of diplomacy, the novelist’s voice is necessary to explain to us what his characters are actually thinking. (When Dazai chooses to break the fourth wall, he is also, at times, hilariously brusque. Starting to describe the sanatorium’s setting, at one point, he interrupts himself: “Never mind. I hate describing scenery.”)

Dazai seems to relish the young men’s inability to speak openly about Yozo’s suicide attempt or about the police’s inquiry into the matter. Yozo says little of what he is really feeling; his emotional state is often opaque to the reader. One friend labors over how to talk with Yozo about his health and future; the other regales his friends with tales of his antics with girls, in lieu of having to discuss anything more serious. All this misdirection brings to mind an observation that Yozo makes in No Longer Human: that there must be “many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity … of people deceiving one another without (strangely enough) any wounds being inflicted.” In Flowers, Dazai seems preoccupied with how human connection so often operates at the surface—suggesting that even when an interaction is glancing or momentary, it can have value and sweetness. That tactful, abashed mode of relating to others is one of the social qualities that the Yozo of No Longer Human scorns, but here, Dazai finds the humanity in it.

Through the young men’s freewheeling conversations, which the translator Sam Bett captures ably, Flowers ultimately explores the question of how to express oneself in moments of trauma, and what it means to offer support and companionship. In one revealing scene, one of the men asks the calm nurse who’s caring for Yozo to tell them a story before they turn in for the night. The request, coming from a grown man, only adds to the feeling that the trio is caught between adolescence and the difficult realities of adulthood, between telling juvenile jokes and communicating honestly about emotional pain.

That tension brings to life something Yozo says in No Longer Human. After his traumatic childhood incident, he recalls feeling unable to “appeal for help to any human being.” That dire, unmet need—to express pain, to trust that a cry for help will be received and acted upon in good faith—metastasizes, over time, into the conviction that there is a chasm between society and himself. In the modest Flowers, we can see the beginnings of how Yozo will relate to others as an adult. We see how his trauma will start to be compartmentalized, how friends will perceive only parts of his pain, and how, despite all of this, he will find people who accept him, because he needs them.

Flowers doesn’t match No Longer Human in emotional complexity and immediacy; it’s a slimmer, more modest work. Yet it is a key stepping stone on the way to the book that many see as Dazai’s masterpiece. The irony is already there, in the form of the novelist-narrator, who half-jokingly questions everything: the worthiness of the story, his motivation in writing, his quest for recognition. The heart is also there, and the urgency. What would change is the perspective. If No Longer Human, with its pronounced interiority, reads with a strangely contemporary flair, Flowers comes off a little old-fashioned—you have to look hard to detect the emotions under the surface. But to read it is to more clearly understand not just the person who feels alienated, but also the world that strains to see him.