Suicide of Chang Zi

Yozo's suicide attempt with Tsuneko, a married waitress he met at a Ginza café, is the first and most consequential of his three suicide attempts. It results in her death and his survival, and marks the definitive rupture of his family ties and his entry into a life of shame. The event crystallizes his despair over poverty, his inability to sustain human connection, and his growing conviction that he is disqualified from living among human beings. It also introduces the pattern of failed self-destruction that will define his subsequent existence, leading eventually to morphine addiction and confinement in a mental hospital.

Background and Despair

By November of his second year in college, Yozo had become exhausted by his double life. He had stopped attending classes, was deeply involved in the Marxist student movement as a leader of action groups in central Tokyo, and was chronically short of money. His father's house in Tokyo had been sold, and he lived in a gloomy lodging house in Hongo, where his monthly allowance disappeared in two or three days. Under the tutelage of Masao Horiki, he frequented pawnshops and bars. The demands of the movement had become so frenetic that he could no longer perform them in a spirit of fun, and his sickly body was not up to the frantic activity. He felt secretly that the movement was not his business, but he could not suppress his annoyance. He decided to kill himself.

The Relationship with Tsuneko

Tsuneko was a waitress at a large café on the Ginza. She was two years older than Yozo and came from Hiroshima. She had a husband who was in jail for swindling, and she had been visiting him in prison every day but had decided to stop. When Yozo lay next to her, he felt enveloped by a silent current of misery that mingled with his own gloom, freeing him from fear and uneasiness. The night he spent with her was, he wrote, a night of liberation and happiness, entirely different from the feeling of being able to sleep soundly in the arms of prostitutes. But the feeling lasted only one night. In the morning, he became impatient to leave her, spreading his usual smokescreen of farce. He did not meet her again for a whole month, and his happiness faded. He felt that he had imposed horrible bonds on himself by accepting her kindness.

The Decision to Die

When Yozo and Horiki went drinking at the end of November, Horiki insisted on continuing elsewhere. Yozo, drunk and bold, took him to Tsuneko's café. Horiki, after staring at Tsuneko with disgust, declared that not even a lecher like himself could kiss a woman who looked so poverty-stricken. This realization struck Yozo like a thunderbolt. He drank more that night than ever before, vomiting and losing consciousness for the first time in his life. When he woke in Tsuneko's room, she asked him if he had been serious when he said that love flies out the window when poverty comes in the door. She proposed that she work for him. He refused. Towards dawn, she pronounced the word "death." She too seemed weary beyond endurance of the task of being a human being. Reflecting on his dread of the world, money, the movement, women, and his studies, Yozo felt it impossible to go on living. He consented easily to her proposal.

The Act and Its Immediate Aftermath

The next morning, they wandered around Asakusa and went into a lunch stand to drink a glass of milk. When Tsuneko asked Yozo to pay, he opened his wallet to find only three copper coins. She looked inside and said, "Is that all you have?" Her voice cut him to the quick. It was a humiliation more strange than any he had tasted before, a humiliation he could not live with. He determined, this time as a reality, to kill himself. That night they threw themselves into the sea at Kamakura. She untied her sash, which she had borrowed from a friend at the café, and left it folded neatly on a rock. Yozo removed his coat and put it in the same spot. They entered the water together. Tsuneko died. Yozo was saved.

Consequences and Significance

The incident was treated prominently in the press, partly because Yozo was a college student and his father's name had news value. He was confined to a hospital on the coast. A relative came from home and informed him that his father and the rest of the family were so enraged that he might easily be disowned. Yozo thought only of the dead Tsuneko and wept; she was, he wrote, the only person he had ever loved. The hospital discovered that his left lung was affected, which proved fortunate when he was taken to the police station charged with being an accomplice to suicide: he was treated as a sick man and quartered in a special custody room. The charge was eventually suspended, but Yozo was expelled from college. He went to live in the house of Flatfish, a family retainer, where he was treated as a parasite and forbidden to leave. This confinement led directly to his escape and his subsequent life as a kept man. The suicide attempt also established a pattern: Yozo would later attempt suicide twice more, first by overdosing on Dial sleeping pills and then by morphine addiction, each time failing to die and sinking deeper into degradation. The event also foreshadows his later confinement in a mental hospital, where he would be branded a lunatic and a reject, finally concluding that he had ceased utterly to be a human being.