Everything Passes
Everything Passes is the single truth Yozo arrives at after a lifetime of suffering, a phrase that crystallizes his final resignation and the novel's philosophical core. It appears in the Third Notebook as the only thing he has found resembling a truth in the human society he has experienced as a burning hell, and it marks his complete withdrawal from hope, struggle, and even the capacity to suffer.
Origin and Context
The phrase emerges near the end of the Third Notebook, after Yozo has been released from the mental hospital and sent to live in a dilapidated thatch-covered house on the coast, looked after by an ugly old servant named Tetsu. He has lost his father, his wife Yoshiko's trust has been shattered, and he has become a morphine addict who was committed to an asylum. In this state of utter depletion, lying on his bed after accidentally taking a laxative instead of sleeping pills, he reflects on his life and writes: "Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness. Everything passes." He adds that this is "the one and only thing I have thought resembled a truth in the society of human beings where I have dwelled up to now as in a burning hell."
Meaning and Philosophical Weight
The statement is not a comforting Buddhist insight into impermanence but a bleak, exhausted recognition that all experience—joy, suffering, love, betrayal—eventually loses its power to affect him. It represents the final stage of Yozo's long descent: he has moved from the desperate clowning of his childhood, through the violent swings of his youth (the suicide attempt with Tsuneko, the alcoholism, the morphine addiction), to a state of emotional flatness where even the distinction between happiness and unhappiness has collapsed. The phrase is the opposite of hope; it is the quietus of a man who has been burned so thoroughly that he no longer feels the fire.
Contrast with Earlier Aspirations
The truth of "Everything Passes" stands in stark contrast to the passionate, if doomed, desires that drove Yozo earlier in his life. As a high school student, inspired by Takeichi's reaction to van Gogh's self-portraits, he had yearned to paint "pictures of ghosts and devils and horses out of hell," believing that such art could capture the monstrous reality he saw in human beings. Later, living with Shizuko and her daughter Shigeko, he glimpsed a "humble happiness" and prayed to God, "grant me happiness once, only once in my whole lifetime will be enough!" And when he decided to marry Yoshiko, he dreamed of "that great savage joy, no matter how immense the suffering that might ensue"—a dream he imagined as going together on bicycles to see a waterfall framed in green leaves. All these aspirations—for artistic truth, for domestic peace, for transcendent joy—are erased by the final truth that everything, including the memory of those desires, passes.
Thematic Significance
"Everything Passes" is the novel's answer to the question of how to live in a world that Yozo experiences as a "burning hell." It is not a solution but a surrender. The phrase echoes the novel's title, No Longer Human: if to be human is to feel, to struggle, to hope, then Yozo's final state—in which he has "neither happiness nor unhappiness"—is the ultimate disqualification. The epilogue's narrator, the Madam of the Kyobashi bar, offers a different verdict when she says of Yozo, "he was a good boy, an angel," but Yozo's own last word is not about goodness or angelic nature; it is about the erasure of all meaning. The phrase thus functions as the novel's philosophical terminus, a bleak counterpoint to the epilogue's redemptive gesture, and it leaves the reader with the unresolved tension between the narrator's compassion and Yozo's own verdict on his life.
