Decision to Marry Yoshiko

Yozo's decision to marry Yoshiko was a sudden, impulsive act born of a lifetime of shame and a desperate craving for what he imagined to be normal human happiness. It was a then-and-here decision, a gamble on the existence of uncorrupted innocence in a world he had always found terrifying and incomprehensible. The marriage, however, did not bring the great savage joy he had hoped for; instead, it unleashed a suffering so staggering that it surpassed even his darkest expectations, confirming his belief that the world was a place of bottomless horror where nothing could be settled by a single, simple choice.

The Encounter with Virginity

Yozo first noticed Yoshiko, a pale seventeen-year-old girl with crooked teeth, working in a tobacco shop across from the bar in Kyobashi where he was living as a kept man. She repeatedly pleaded with him to give up drinking, a concern that struck him as both naive and holy. One winter night, after he drunkenly fell into a manhole in front of her shop, she bandaged his bruised arm with an earnest, unsmiling expression. In a moment of what he later described as a joke, he promised to give up alcohol if she would marry him. She replied with the popular slang "Natch," and they hooked fingers on the promise. The next day, when he showed up drunk, she refused to believe him, insisting he was just a good actor and that the redness in his face was merely the sunset. Her absolute, uncorrupted trust in his word struck Yozo with the force of a revelation. He had never slept with a virgin, and he suddenly believed that the beauty of virginity, which he had dismissed as a sentimental illusion of stupid poets, was real and present in this world. He made up his mind on the spot to steal the flower, to marry her, and to experience that great savage joy, no matter what suffering might ensue.

The Marriage and Its Immediate Aftermath

The Madam of the Kyobashi bar, displaying what Yozo called a woman's chivalry, enabled the marriage by renting a room for the couple near the Sumida River. Yozo gave up drinking and devoted himself to drawing cartoons. For a brief period, he found pleasure in simple domestic routines: going to movies with Yoshiko, stopping at milk bars, and buying pots of flowers. Most of all, he took joy in listening to his little bride, who trusted him with all her heart. He began to entertain the faint, sweet notion that he might one day turn into a human being and be spared a horrible death. This fragile peace was shattered when Masao Horiki, the bird of ill-omen, reappeared, and Yozo, unable to resist the pull of his old companion, resumed drinking. The marriage, which had been a desperate bid for salvation, quickly became the setting for its opposite.

The Defilement of Trust

The decisive incident occurred on a sticky summer night when Horiki came to visit. While the two men were drinking gin on the roof, Horiki went downstairs and discovered Yoshiko being violated by a small-time shopkeeper who commissioned cartoons from Yozo. Horiki led Yozo to the window to witness the scene. Yozo did not feel fury, hatred, or even sadness; he was overcome by an overpowering fear, a fierce ancestral dread that split him through the forehead between the eyebrows. From that night, his hair turned prematurely grey. The true catastrophe, however, was not the physical act but the defilement of Yoshiko's immaculate trustfulness, the one virtue Yozo had prized. After the incident, Yoshiko began to fret over his every smile or frown, jumped when he called her, and addressed him with excessive honorifics. Yozo, who had no authority to forgive or condemn, felt that everything was his fault. He lost all comprehension of the world around him and surrendered himself entirely to drink, his face coarsening and his teeth falling out from the interminable bouts.

The Descent into Addiction and Final Collapse

Yozo's despair deepened into a morphine addiction, obtained from a crippled pharmacist woman with whom he also began an ugly affair. He copied pornographic pictures to pay for the drug. His final attempt to escape was a long letter to his father confessing his circumstances, but no answer came. He resolved to give himself ten shots of morphine and throw himself into the river, but on the afternoon of the planned event, Horiki and Flatfish arrived to take him away. Horiki showed him a gentle smile, the like of which Yozo had never seen on his face, and Yozo was completely shattered by it. He wept helplessly and obeyed without resistance. He was taken to a mental hospital, where his delirious cry to go somewhere without women was grotesquely realized: the ward held only male lunatics and male nurses. He had become a reject, disqualified as a human being. The marriage to Yoshiko, which had begun as a desperate hope for redemption, ended by confirming his utter alienation from the human world.