Izu

Izu, a hot-spring region on the southern coast of Japan, serves as the terminal landscape of Yozo's recorded life. After his release from a mental hospital and the death of his father, Yozo is sent there by his elder brother to begin a "convalescence afresh in the country." The house provided for him is a thatch-covered, ancient-looking structure on the outskirts of a village, with five rooms, peeled walls, and woodwork so worm-eaten as to seem almost beyond repair. An ugly woman close to sixty, with horrible rusty hair named Tetsu, is sent to look after him. This setting, far from the urban chaos of Tokyo, becomes the stage for the final, exhausted phase of Yozo's decline.

A Failed Retreat

Yozo's journey to Izu is not a chosen escape but an imposed exile. His brother, acting on the family's decision, buys the house and installs the servant, stipulating only that Yozo leave Tokyo and have no worries about living expenses. Yozo, who has just lost the "familiar, frightening presence" of his father and feels as though "the vessel of his suffering had become empty," nods faintly and obeys. The hot springs, intended for recuperation, hold no interest for him. He does not change into sports clothes, does not take the waters. Instead, he rushes out to filthy little bars that look like souvenir stands and drinks gin until he swims in it. The trip only makes him sicklier.

The Return to Tokyo and the Coughing of Blood

On the night he returns to Tokyo from Izu, the snow is falling heavily. Drunkenly wandering behind the Ginza, Yozo sings softly to himself, "From here it's hundreds of miles to home," and kicks at the accumulating snow. Suddenly he vomits, and for the first time brings up blood, which forms a rising-sun flag in the snow. He squats, scoops clean snow to wash his face, and weeps. This hemorrhage, a direct consequence of his drinking and his deteriorating health, marks a turning point. He stumbles into a pharmacy, where the proprietress—a woman on crutches, herself deeply unhappy—recognizes his suffering. Their exchange, wordless at first, is one of mutual recognition: "Unhappy people are sensitive to the unhappiness of others." This encounter leads directly to his introduction to morphine, which he initially believes is a harmless substitute for alcohol.

The Final Notebook: Life in the Izu House

Three years pass in the Izu house. Yozo's chest ailment fluctuates; he occasionally coughs blood. The old servant Tetsu, with whom he sometimes quarrels like a husband and wife, has "several times violated him in a curious manner." His only recorded action is a comic, pathetic mistake: he sends Tetsu to buy sleeping pills, but she returns with a laxative. He takes ten pills, cannot sleep, and is seized with stomach cramps and diarrhea. Lying on his bed staring at the ceiling, a hot water bottle on his stomach, he considers complaining but instead bursts out laughing. He reflects, "I think 'reject' must be a comic noun. I had taken a laxative in order to go to sleep." This moment crystallizes the absurdity of his condition. He concludes his notebooks with the statement, "Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness. Everything passes." At twenty-seven, his hair is much greyer, and most people take him for over forty.

Narrative Significance

Izu is not merely a geographical endpoint but the physical correlative of Yozo's final state: a place of decay, isolation, and the cessation of all striving. The hot-spring house, with its worm-eaten wood and peeling walls, mirrors his own deteriorating body and mind. The servant Tetsu, ugly and old, replaces the series of women who had previously looked after him, but now there is no affection, only a strange, violated cohabitation. The landscape itself—the mountains and rivers of home that Yozo sees before his eyes when his brother speaks of the country—offers no solace, only a blank backdrop for his slow dissolution. It is here that the "reject" completes his transformation into a being who has ceased to be human, a living ghost in a decaying house, waiting for everything to pass.