Originally published in Japanese in 1937, I was reading an English translation from the late 1950s. This short novel of disconnection and depression is written in from the point of view of Yozo, a man who seems unable to connect emotionally with other humans. My 2021 brain kept wondering if the character was neurodivergent, but lacked any language to define his experience. It manifested as an extreme fear of people's bewildering and unknowable emotions. Yozo developed the personality of a class clown in childhood as a way to control people's reactions to him. He had ambitions to be a painter but ended up working primarily as a cartoonist later in life between bouts of alcoholism, drug addition, two suicide attempts and numerous affairs. Yozo is very susceptible to peer pressure and when he fell in with a bad friend, he was never really able to turn his around. The book left me thinking about will power, and how important it is to define what you want, and follow your own path even when it runs contrary to the general pattern of society. I'm unlikely to recommend this book to anyone though.