Dial Sleeping Pills
The Dial Sleeping Pills appear in Yozo's narrative as the instrument of his second, nearly successful suicide attempt, an act that crystallizes his complete surrender to despair and leads directly to his institutionalization. The box of Dial, a brand of barbiturate sleeping pills, had been hidden by Yozo himself at some earlier point, its label partially scratched off—the Japanese characters obliterated, but the Western letters "Dial" left legible. This detail underscores Yozo's characteristic ambivalence: he had prepared the means of self-destruction but then buried it, as if deferring the decision. The pills resurface on a night late in the year, when Yozo comes home blind drunk and, searching for sugar for a glass of water, discovers the box in the kitchen sugar bowl. The seal is still unbroken. Yozo realizes at once that the contents are "unquestionably more than sufficient to cause death." He fills a glass of water, deliberately breaks the seal, pours the entire contents into his mouth, and swallows them in one gulp before switching off the light and going to bed. The act is calm, methodical, almost domestic—a stark contrast to the chaotic, impulsive quality of his earlier suicide attempt with Tsuneko at Kamakura.
Discovery and Circumstances
The discovery of the Dial box is itself a small revelation of Yozo's domestic life and his wife Yoshiko's character. Yoshiko, whom Yozo describes as a "genius at trusting people," cannot read Western letters; she had apparently kept the box in the sugar bowl without any suspicion of its contents. Yozo notes that he must have hidden it there after scratching off the Japanese part of the label, thinking it sufficient to prevent her from understanding what it was. The box thus becomes a silent witness to the couple's fundamental misalignment: Yoshiko's innocent trustfulness, which Yozo once treasured as a "waterfall among green leaves," now coexists with his secret hoard of death. The act of swallowing the pills is also an act of silence—Yozo makes no noise, leaves no note, offers no explanation. He simply lies down and waits.
Consequences and Aftermath
The overdose does not kill Yozo. He lies "as one dead" for three days and nights, but he revives. The doctor, treating the incident as an accident, refrains from reporting it to the police. Yozo's first murmured words upon regaining consciousness are "I'm going home"—though it is unclear even to him what place he means by "home." He weeps profusely. The aftermath is devastating in a different register: Yozo is taken not to a prison or a general hospital but to a mental institution, where the key grates in the lock behind him. His delirious cry after the first suicide attempt—that he wanted to go "somewhere where there aren't any women"—has now materialized in a "truly uncanny way": his ward holds only male lunatics, and the nurses are men. The Dial pills thus serve as the pivot between Yozo's life as a free agent—however degraded—and his life as a certified madman, a "reject" branded on the forehead. The object itself, a simple pharmaceutical product, becomes the agent of a transformation that Yozo had long feared and, in a sense, courted.
Thematic Significance
The Dial Sleeping Pills are more than a plot device; they condense several of the novel's central themes. They represent Yozo's recurring attraction to chemical oblivion—first alcohol, then morphine, now barbiturates—as a means of escaping the unbearable weight of human interaction. The pills are also a token of his passivity: he does not fight, does not argue, does not even choose a dramatic method; he simply takes what is at hand and lies down. The fact that the box is found in the sugar bowl, a vessel for sweetness, ironically underscores the perversion of domestic comfort into a vehicle for death. Finally, the survival from the overdose—the failure even to die properly—reinforces Yozo's sense of being "disqualified as a human being," unable to succeed even at self-annihilation. The pills, in their mute materiality, become the objective correlative of a life that has lost all direction and meaning.
