1930

The year 1930 serves as the chronological anchor for the most consequential period of Yozo's life, the era in which the events of his notebooks are set. It is the Tokyo of 1930 that provides the stage for his encounters with art, radical politics, and the women who would shape his descent. The year is not merely a date but a threshold: it is the moment when the two prophecies made by his schoolmate Takeichi—that women would fall for him and that he would become a great painter—begin to take on their sinister, lived reality.

Artistic Awakening and the Ghost Pictures

It is in 1930 that Yozo's understanding of painting undergoes a radical transformation, catalyzed by Takeichi's offhand remark that van Gogh's self-portrait looks like a ghost. This comment shatters Yozo's previous, superficial approach to art—the attempt to depict pretty things in a pretty manner—and reveals to him the true vocation of the painter: to give form to the monsters that haunt the human soul. He begins to paint self-portraits so harrowing that they stupefy even himself, pictures that lay bare the true self he had so desperately hidden behind his clowning. These "ghost pictures" become his secret masterpieces, the only works he considers genuine, and they are produced in this year. The memory of these lost paintings—the "undrunk glass of absinthe"—will later torment him, a symbol of a creative potential that he feels he has squandered. The year 1930 thus marks the birth of his authentic artistic vision, even as it remains hidden from the world.

Political Involvement and the Irrational

Also in 1930, Yozo is drawn into the orbit of left-wing politics through his acquaintance Masao Horiki, who takes him to a secret Communist meeting, a "Reading Society." Yozo's participation is not born of ideological conviction but of a fascination with the movement's irrationality, its atmosphere of secrecy and life-and-death tension. He finds the logic of the world—the mechanism of society—frightening and incomprehensible, whereas the sea of irrationality in which the movement swims feels more agreeable. He attends meetings regularly, performing his clowning for the comrades, and is eventually entrusted with dangerous missions, becoming the leader of all Marxist student action groups in central Tokyo. Yet his commitment is a form of escape: he feels that if he were caught and imprisoned, it might be preferable to the sleepless nights of dread he endures in the ordinary world. The year 1930 is thus the period of his most intense, if hollow, political engagement.

The First Suicide Attempt and Its Aftermath

The year 1930 culminates in the most decisive event of Yozo's early adulthood: his love suicide with Tsuneko, a married waitress. Exhausted by his political activities, chronically short of money, and overwhelmed by his dread of human beings, Yozo readily agrees to Tsuneko's proposal of a double death. They throw themselves into the sea at Kamakura. Tsuneko dies; Yozo is saved. The incident is reported in the press, leads to his expulsion from college, and severs his connection with his family. It is the first concrete manifestation of his conviction that he cannot go on living, and it sets the pattern for his subsequent attempts at self-annihilation. The year 1930, then, is not only the setting for his artistic and political experiments but the year in which his life of shame is publicly and irrevocably inaugurated.