An unnamed narrator recounts three photographs of Yozo Oba, the author of the notebooks that make up the main text of No Longer Human. The first photograph depicts Yozo as an impish, off-putting child. The effect of Yozo’s feigned smile is “unclean and even nauseating” (14). The second photograph is of Yozo in or around his college years. He has shed his childhood “ugliness” and is even handsome; however, the narrator notes that “there is something strangely unpleasant about this handsome young man” (15). The third photograph is the most terrible of all. It depicts Yozo at an indeterminate age: While he is not old, his hair is streaked with gray. He is expressionless and utterly unmemorable; the narrator says that the photo “makes me so uncomfortable that in the end I want to avert my eyes” (17).

Yozo begins the first notebook of his autobiography by describing his childhood. He grows up wealthy in a country estate, and, while many people remark how lucky he is, his life is instead marked by shame and isolation. From a young, he has no concept of how other people find happiness. Yozo believes that he “has been burdened with a pack of ten misfortunes, any one of which if borne by my neighbor would be enough to make a murder of him” (25).