From Here It's Hundreds of Miles to Home

From Here It's Hundreds of Miles to Home is a fragment of a song that Yozo murmurs to himself on a snowy night in Tokyo after vomiting blood, crystallizing his sense of exile, homelessness, and the impossibility of return.

Origin and Context

The phrase appears in the Third Notebook of Yozo's memoirs, during the bleakest period of his life. After his wife Yoshiko is violated and his trust in her innocence is shattered, Yozo descends into alcoholism and morphine addiction. He travels alone to the hot springs of southern Izu in a futile attempt to recover, but returns to Tokyo only sicklier. On the night of his return, heavy snow is falling. Drunkenly wandering the rows of saloons behind the Ginza, Yozo sings to himself over and over again, so softly it is only a whisper: "From here it's hundreds of miles to home." He walks along kicking the accumulating snow with the point of his shoes. Suddenly he vomits, and the blood forms a large rising-sun flag in the snow. He squats there, scoops up clean snow with both hands to wash his face, and weeps.

Thematic Resonance

The song fragment functions as a compressed expression of Yozo's lifelong condition: he is irreparably separated from any place that could be called home. Throughout the novel, Yozo's relationship with his family home in the Northeast is marked by dread and alienation. He describes the gloomy ritual of meals there, the terrifying presence of his father, and his inability to understand the ordinary life of human beings. After his suicide attempt with Tsuneko, he is expelled from college and effectively severed from his family. He lives as a kept man with Shizuko in Koenji, then with Yoshiko near the Sumida River, but each domestic arrangement collapses. The phrase "hundreds of miles" is not merely a geographical measurement; it registers the psychological and moral distance Yozo feels from any state of belonging or peace. The song is sung in a whisper, as if even the act of naming his exile is too painful to voice aloud.

Connection to Death Drive and Self-Destruction

The moment when Yozo murmurs this song is immediately preceded by his vomiting blood, a physical symptom of his deteriorating health, and followed by his continued descent into morphine addiction and further suicide attempts. The song thus marks a threshold: Yozo recognizes his physical and spiritual exhaustion but cannot stop his trajectory toward self-annihilation. Earlier in the novel, he has wished for death, consented to a suicide pact with Tsuneko, and later overdoses on Dial sleeping pills. The song's repetition—"over and over again"—suggests a compulsive, almost ritualistic acknowledgment of his hopelessness. It is a moment of bleak clarity that does not lead to change but to further dissolution.

Contrast with the Epilogue's Judgment

The epilogue, narrated by an unnamed acquaintance, offers a radically different perspective on Yozo. The Madam of the Kyobashi bar, who knew Yozo, describes him as "a good boy, an angel." This judgment stands in stark contrast to Yozo's own self-portrait as a "reject" who has been "disqualified as a human being." The song fragment "From Here It's Hundreds of Miles to Home" belongs entirely to Yozo's self-understanding: it is the voice of a man who believes he is beyond redemption, cut off from the human community. The epilogue's counter-narrative does not erase this voice but places it within a larger, more compassionate frame. The song remains as a testament to Yozo's subjective experience of absolute isolation, even as the novel as a whole suggests that his self-condemnation may be incomplete.