>>863082
Yes, it really is. Ito's adaptation leaves out so much and emphasizes things that have no place in the story that it almost feels like mockery, and would if it wasn't for the sickening wanking of Dazai. Most egregious of these omissions is that of the epilogue. Unlike the manga, the book is framed as recollections from Oba's diary read by an investigator. The epilogue is the conclusion to this framing and meant to completely shake your interpretation of the work.
Ito's bastardization became popular among Westerners because of an idiot's glowing, slobbering review of it, and now even Google repeats its painful lie, that the final line is "Everything passes," a quality only held by Ito's piece. No Longer Human was a last, desparate call by its author into the world before his suicide. It was a long and haunting confession that was short for even a novel. Ito does not understand this work at all. His reverence for Dazai is facile. His understanding of Oba's experiences is expressed in his adaptation as nothing more than a haunted house. The words written as if they were on the interior of the shell of something shaped like a human are turned into a salacious rag with the quality of a Simpsons parody. It's terrible, despicable.
To make it short, Ito is an ok artist with a striking style, but he is an bad writer with the sensibilities of someone who has never felt the despair of being alien, those of the common person. He should stick to writing his own stories.