NINGEN SHIKKAKU

One day, when the manga artist Usamaru Furuya is surfing the net while stuck for material, he encounters a personal website called Ningen Shikkaku (No Longer Human). This site carries three photographs of a man, one taken in his seemingly-affluent early childhood, one during his youth when he had an elegant appearance, and one during his young adulthood when he seemes to have lost all his vitality, like an elderly person. Furuya becomes interested in Yozo Ohba, the man in the photographs, and begins to read the diary of his wild life. This is an enigmatic work wherein the artist himself appears in his own manga, which is set in the present day and, needless to say, takes the masterpiece of literary giant Osamu Dazai as its motif.