The Flowers of Buffoonery opens in a seaside sanatorium where Yozo Oba – the narrator of No Longer Human at a younger age – is being kept after a failed suicide attempt. While he is convalescing, his friends and family visit him, and other patients and nurses drift in and out of his room. Against this dispiriting backdrop, everyone tries to maintain a light-hearted, even clownish atmosphere: playing cards, smoking cigarettes, vying for attention, cracking jokes and trying to make each other laugh.