The End of the Year

The end of the year recurs in Yozo's life as the season of his most desperate acts, a temporal landmark that marks the convergence of his accumulated despair with the social pressure of the holiday season. Twice he chooses this period to attempt suicide, and each time the timing draws comment from those who must deal with the aftermath, underscoring how his personal crisis collides with the ordinary rhythms of the world.

The First Suicide Attempt at Year's End

Yozo's first suicide attempt, the double drowning with Tsuneko at Kamakura, takes place at the end of the year. The exact date is not specified, but the incident is treated prominently in the press, partly because Yozo is a college student and his father's name has news value. After he is saved and confined to a hospital on the coast, a relative comes from home to inform him that his father and the rest of the family are so enraged that he might easily be disowned. The timing compounds the scandal: the end of the year is a period when families gather and accounts are settled, making Yozo's act a public rupture with his family at a moment of expected reunion. The nurses who visit his sickroom laugh gaily and squeeze his hand when they leave, but the season's festive atmosphere only heightens the isolation he feels as he lies in bed longing for the dead Tsuneko, the only person he has ever loved.

The Second Suicide Attempt at Year's End

Years later, after his marriage to Yoshiko and the devastating violation of her trust, Yozo again attempts suicide at the end of the year. This time he swallows an entire box of Dial sleeping pills, which he discovers in the sugar bowl after coming home blind drunk. The seal of the box is unbroken; he must have hidden it there at some earlier time, after scratching off the Japanese part of the label so that Yoshiko, who cannot read Western letters, would not know what it was. He pours the whole contents into his mouth and calmly drains a glass of water before switching off the light and going to bed. For three days and nights he lies as one dead. The doctor considers it an accident and is kind enough to postpone reporting to the police. When Yozo begins to recover consciousness, his first murmured words are "I'm going home," accompanied by profuse weeping—though it is not clear even to himself what place he means by "home."

Flatfish's Reaction and the Pattern of Repetition

When Flatfish arrives at Yozo's bedside after the Dial overdose, his first words are a complaint about the timing: "The last time was also at the end of the year, wasn't it? He always chooses the end of the year, just when everybody is frantically busy. He'll prove the death of me if he keeps on doing such things." Flatfish's remark reveals that he connects the two suicide attempts by their seasonal recurrence, and that he interprets Yozo's actions through the lens of his own inconvenience rather than Yozo's suffering. The end of the year, a time when Flatfish is busy with his own affairs, becomes for him a period of dread because it is when Yozo's crises erupt. This pattern of repetition—the same season, the same type of crisis, the same exasperated response from those around him—reinforces the sense that Yozo is trapped in a cycle he cannot break, and that the world's rhythms continue indifferently around his private catastrophes.

Thematic Significance: The End as a Recurring Threshold

The end of the year functions in Yozo's narrative as a threshold between one phase of his life and the next, a moment when the accumulated weight of his failures becomes unbearable and he seeks to exit altogether. It is also a time when the social world is most insistently present—families gathering, accounts being settled, everyone frantically busy—which throws Yozo's isolation into sharp relief. His attempts are not impulsive but occur at a predictable interval, suggesting a cyclical pattern of despair that returns with the calendar. The fact that both attempts fail, and that each failure leads to a new form of confinement (first a hospital and police custody, later a mental asylum), means that the end of the year does not bring closure but rather a continuation of suffering into the new year. The season becomes a symbol of the inescapable return of his misery, a temporal trap from which he cannot free himself.