Marriage with Ryouko

Yozo's marriage to Yoshiko, a seventeen-year-old virgin who worked in a tobacco shop near the Kyobashi bar where he was living as a kept man, was the most decisive attempt in his life to escape the cycle of shame, alcohol, and self-destruction. He had been drawn to her precisely because of what he perceived as her immaculate trustfulness—a quality he had never encountered before and which he naively believed could save him. The decision to marry her was made on impulse one winter night after she bandaged his bruised arm, and he promised to give up drinking. Though he broke that promise immediately, Yoshiko's refusal to believe he had been drinking—she insisted the redness in his face was merely the sunset—struck Yozo as a holy thing, and he resolved to "steal the flower" of her virginity. The joy he obtained from the marriage was not great or savage, but the suffering that ensued was staggering, far surpassing what he had imagined.

The Marriage and Its Immediate Context

Yozo married Yoshiko with the help of the Madam of the Kyobashi bar, who enabled them to rent a room on the ground floor of an apartment building near the Sumida River. For a brief period, Yozo gave up drink and devoted his energies to drawing cartoons. He and Yoshiko would go out together to see movies, stop at milk bars, or buy pots of flowers. More than any of these pleasures, Yozo found joy simply in listening to the words or watching the movements of his little bride, who trusted him with all her heart. For the first time, he entertained the faint hope that he might one day turn into a human being and be spared a horrible death. This fragile peace was shattered when Masao Horiki reappeared, and the two resumed their old pattern of drinking together. Horiki's visits reopened old wounds, and Yozo began drinking again, eventually pawning Yoshiko's clothes to fund his binges.

The Violation and Its Aftermath

The decisive blow came on a sticky summer night when Horiki visited Yozo's apartment. After a dismal party on the roof, Horiki went downstairs and discovered Yoshiko being violated by a shopkeeper—an illiterate, undersized man of about thirty who had previously commissioned cartoons from Yozo. Horiki returned to the roof to inform Yozo rather than intervening. Yozo, standing petrified on the staircase, did not think to help Yoshiko. He ran back to the roof and collapsed, weeping bitterly. The feelings that assailed him were not fury, hatred, or even sadness, but an overpowering fear—a fierce ancestral dread that left him permanently wounded. His hair turned prematurely grey from that night. He had now lost all confidence in himself, doubted all men immeasurably, and abandoned all hopes for the things of this world, all joy, all sympathy, eternally. This was the decisive incident of his life.

The Destruction of Trust

What tormented Yozo most was not the physical defilement of Yoshiko but the defilement of her trust in people. Yoshiko was a genius at trusting others—she suspected nothing of Yozo's past, not even his suicide attempt with Tsuneko. Her immaculate trustfulness had seemed to Yozo clean and pure, like a waterfall among green leaves. One night sufficed to turn the waters of this pure cascade yellow and muddy. Yoshiko began to fret over Yozo's every smile or frown, jumped when he called her, and addressed him with an excessive profusion of honorifics. Yozo, unable to forgive or refuse to forgive, felt that everything was his fault. He began to doubt whether a woman with absolutely no defenses could have yielded only that once, and suspicion poisoned his mind. His only resort was drink. His face coarsened, his teeth fell out from the interminable drinking bouts, and his cartoons verged on the pornographic. He began secretly peddling copies of pornographic pictures to obtain money for gin.

The Descent into Addiction and Institutionalization

Yozo's despair deepened until he attempted suicide by swallowing an entire box of Dial sleeping pills. He lay as one dead for three days and nights. Upon recovering, he was taken by Flatfish and Horiki to a hospital, which turned out to be a mental hospital. The key grated in the lock behind him. His delirious cry after the overdose—that he would go where there were no women—had materialized in a truly uncanny way: his ward held only male lunatics, and the nurses were also men. He was no longer a criminal but a lunatic. He had become, in his own words, "disqualified as a human being." The marriage that had begun with a dream of bicycles and waterfalls ended in the confirmation of his utter alienation from humanity.