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so in Dazai Osamu’s No Longer Human there is this description of the protagonist in the beginning, with special focus on his facial expressions in three photographs, and when i read it, it reminded me of a few moments in the anime so here’s a small and, kind of, sad thread:
1) “Indeed, the more carefully you examine the child& #39;s smiling face the more you feel an indescribable, unspeakable horror creeping over you. You see that it is actually not a smiling face at all. The boy has not a suggestion of a smile. +
“It is a monkey. A grinning monkey-face. The smile is nothing more than a puckering of ugly wrinkles. The photograph reproduces an expression so freakish, and at the same time so unclean and even nauseating, that your impulse is to say, "What a wizened, hideous little boy!" +
I have never seen a child with such an unaccountable expression.”
2) “He sits in a wicker chair with his legs crossed. Again he is smiling, this time not the wizened monkey& #39;s grin but a rather adroit little smile. And yet somehow it is not the smile of a human being: it utterly lacks substance,all of what we might call the "heaviness of blood”+
“or perhaps the "solidity of human life"—it has not even a bird& #39;s weight. It is merely a blank sheet of paper, light as a feather, and it is smiling. The picture produces, in short, a sensation of complete artificiality. Pretense, insincerity, fatuousness—none of these words +
quite covers it. And of course you couldn& #39;t dismiss it simply as dandyism. In fact, if you look carefully you will begin to feel that there is something strangely unpleasant about this handsome young man. I have never seen a young man whose good looks were so baffling.”
3) “The remaining photograph is the most monstrous of all [...] “His small hands are held in front of him. This time he is not smiling. There is no expression whatsoever. The picture has a genuinely chilling, foreboding quality, as if it caught him in the act of dying as he sat +
![3) “The remaining photograph is the most monstrous of all [...] “His small hands are held in front of him. This time he is not smiling. There is no expression whatsoever. The picture has a genuinely chilling, foreboding quality, as if it caught him in the act of dying as he sat +](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Eg7k01qXcAETTUp.jpg "3) “The remaining photograph is the most monstrous of all [...] “His small hands are held in front of him. This time he is not smiling. There is no expression whatsoever. The picture has a genuinely chilling, foreboding quality, as if it caught him in the act of dying as he sat +")
before the camera, his hands held over a heater. That is not the only shocking thing about it. The head is shown quite large, and you can examine the features in detail: the forehead is average, the wrinkles on the forehead average, the eyebrows also average, the eyes, the nose,+
the mouth, the chin . . . the face is not merely devoid of expression, it fails even to leave a memory. It has no individuality. I have only to shut my eyes after looking at it to forget the face. I can remember the wall of the room, the little heater, but all impression of
the face of the principal figure in the room is blotted out; I am unable to recall a single thing about it. This face could never be made the subject of a painting, not even of a cartoon. I open my eyes. There is not even the pleasure of recollecting: of course, that& #39;s the kind
of face it was! To state the matter in the most extreme terms: when I open my eyes and look at the photograph a second time I still cannot remember it. Besides, it rubs against me the wrong way, and makes me feel so uncomfortable that in the end I want to avert my eyes.”
