Landlord's daughter

The Landlord's daughter is a young woman who lives in the lodging house where Yozo takes a room after his father sells the Tokyo house. She is one of three women who show him special affection during the period when he is overworked by the Marxist movement, desperately short of money, and contemplating suicide. Her persistent, transparent attentions embody the kind of unwanted, clinging human connection that Yozo finds both inescapable and exhausting, and her presence in his daily life adds to the pressure that drives him toward self-destruction.

Identity and Introduction

The Landlord's daughter lives with her family in the same lodging house in Hongo where Yozo moves after his father sells the Ueno house. She is a young woman who uses the pretext of writing letters to enter Yozo's room. When he returns from his exhausting errands for the movement and collapses into bed without eating, she invariably visits him, carrying a writing pad and a pen. She seats herself at his desk and writes for over an hour, claiming that it is too noisy downstairs with her sister and little brother for her to concentrate. Yozo sees through this transparent excuse immediately, suspecting that she is merely writing the alphabet or the days of the week and the months.

Relationship with Yozo

Yozo finds her presence oppressive. Though he has no desire to speak, he feels compelled by his habitual spirit of passive service to engage with her. He turns over on his belly and begins talking, making up a story about men who heat their bath water by burning love letters. The girl responds with eager flirtation, asking him to use her letters next time. When Yozo asks to see what she has written, she protests with exaggerated delight, and her joy strikes him as indecent enough to chill all feeling for her. To get rid of her, he invents an errand: he asks her to go to the drugstore to buy sleeping tablets, claiming he is over-exhausted and cannot sleep. She agrees happily, and Yozo reflects that it never offends a woman to be asked to do an errand; they are delighted if some man deigns to ask them a favor.

After the Suicide Attempt

After Yozo survives the double suicide with Tsuneko and is confined to a hospital on the coast, the Landlord's daughter sends him a long letter consisting of a string of fifty stanzas. Each stanza begins with the incredible words, "Please live on for me." The letter arrives while Yozo is still recovering, longing for the dead Tsuneko and weeping. The nurses visit his sickroom, laughing gaily, and some squeeze his hand when they leave, but the Landlord's daughter's letter stands out as a desperate, almost hysterical plea from someone he had only ever tried to escape. The letter, like her earlier visits, represents a form of love that Yozo cannot reciprocate and that only deepens his sense of isolation and guilt.

Thematic Significance

The Landlord's daughter exemplifies a pattern that recurs throughout Yozo's life: women are drawn to him by an atmosphere he cannot control, and their affection becomes another burden he must bear. He is unable to refuse their attention or to hurt their feelings, so he endures their presence with a mixture of fear, irritation, and passive compliance. The Landlord's daughter, like the Comrade girl and the waitress Tsuneko, is one of the women who "flock to him" because of the offensive atmosphere of the "lady-killer" that he has acquired through his apprenticeship with prostitutes. Her persistent, unrequited love contributes to the suffocating pressure that makes Yozo feel that he cannot go on living, and her letter, with its repeated plea for him to live, only underscores the tragic irony that the love he inspires cannot save him.