The River Flows, the Flowing Life

The River Flows, the Flowing Life is a fragment of a drunken song that Yozo sings repeatedly during his daily routine of drinking and drawing cartoons while living with Shizuko in Koenji, a phrase that encapsulates his passive drift through a life emptied of will and meaning.

Origin and Context

The phrase emerges during the period when Yozo is living as a kept man in Shizuko's apartment in Koenji, supporting himself by drawing comic strips for children's magazines. Each evening, as soon as Shizuko returns from work, Yozo dashes out to drink cheap, strong liquor at outdoor booths near the station. After a bout of drinking, somewhat buoyed, he returns to the apartment and begins to sing. The song appears in his speech as a kind of automatic, half-conscious refrain: "Man's life is like a flowing river. What is there to fret over? On the river bank a willow tree..." He then corrects himself, stumbling over his own words: "'Man's life is like a flowing river. Man's river...' no, I mean 'the river flows, the flowing life.'" The fragment is never completed; it trails off into incoherence as Shizuko calmly takes off his clothes and puts him to bed.

Thematic Significance

The phrase functions as a kind of existential lullaby, a verbal gesture that dissolves all agency into the image of a current that carries a person without resistance. Yozo's inability to finish the song or even to keep its wording straight mirrors his larger condition: he is a man who has surrendered to the flow of events, who drinks not out of pleasure but because he cannot do otherwise, who draws cartoons mechanically to earn money for the next bottle, and who lets Shizuko manage every practical aspect of his life. The river metaphor stands in stark contrast to the "then-and-there contest" that Yozo later adopts as his philosophical model of society—the idea that life is a series of immediate struggles between individuals. Here, instead of struggle, there is only submission to a current that is neither resisted nor chosen.

Contrast with Other Recurring Motifs

The song belongs to a constellation of repeated verbal fragments that mark Yozo's descent. Earlier, during his wanderings after the Dial overdose, he whispers "From here it's hundreds of miles to home" as he walks through the snow, vomiting blood. That phrase carries a specific geography and a longing for a place that might offer shelter. "The River Flows, the Flowing Life," by contrast, has no destination; it is pure motion without arrival. It also echoes the Rubaiyat verses that Yozo copies into his pornographic cartoons during his Kyobashi period—"Better be merry with the fruitful Grape than sadden after none, or bitter, Fruit"—but where those verses counsel a deliberate hedonism, the river song expresses only a passive, exhausted letting-go. The phrase is the verbal equivalent of the toad that Yozo identifies with after reading Guy-Charles Cros's poem: an animal that sluggishly moves, that is all.

Narrative Role

The song appears at a moment when Yozo's life has settled into a grim routine that he himself describes as a daily cycle: Shizuko goes to work, he looks after Shigeko and draws, she returns, he drinks, he sings, she undresses him, he sleeps. The phrase is the soundtrack of this routine, a refrain that marks the absence of any real change or progression. It is also one of the few moments in the notebooks where Yozo's voice breaks into something like song, however broken and slurred—a rare, almost involuntary expression of feeling that bypasses the elaborate clowning he usually deploys. The fact that Shizuko does not take it seriously, that she simply puts him to bed, underscores how completely his despair has become ordinary, a predictable part of the household's evening.