Yokohama

Yokohama is the coastal city where Yozo and Tsuneko attempt their double suicide, an event that shatters his remaining ties to conventional life and sets him on a path of irreversible decline. The city appears in the narrative as the site of a single, catastrophic night, but its consequences radiate through the rest of the story: arrest, public scandal, family disownment, and the first official labeling of Yozo as a criminal. Yokohama functions not as a place of residence or return but as a threshold—a point of no return after which Yozo can no longer pretend to belong to the world of ordinary human beings.

The Suicide Attempt and Its Immediate Aftermath

On a night in late autumn, Yozo and Tsuneko throw themselves into the sea at Kamakura, a coastal town near Yokohama. Tsuneko dies; Yozo is rescued. The incident is treated prominently in the press, partly because Yozo is a college student and his father is a public figure. Yozo is confined to a hospital on the coast, where doctors discover that his left lung is affected—a diagnosis that later proves fortunate when he is transferred from the hospital to the police station. Because of his illness, he is treated as a sick man rather than a criminal, and is quartered in a special custody room instead of with the general prison population.

The Legal Process in Yokohama

The legal proceedings take place in Yokohama. The police chief, a young, dark-complexioned man with a university education, conducts the real examination. He comments that Yozo's mother is to blame for bringing such a handsome boy into the world, a remark that makes Yozo feel as wretched as if he had been born deformed. The chief fills out a form to send to the district attorney's office and advises Yozo to telephone or telegraph a guarantor to come to the district attorney's office in Yokohama. Yozo calls Flatfish, the antique dealer who serves as his guarantor, and Flatfish agrees to come. Later, Yozo is tied up with a thin hemp rope and taken to Yokohama on a streetcar, a young policeman gripping the end of the rope. The experience does not upset Yozo; he feels relieved, even calm, when tied up as a criminal.

The District Attorney's Interrogation

In the dimly lit office of the district attorney in Yokohama, Yozo faces a man of about forty with an intelligent, calm demeanor that Yozo calls "honest good looks." Yozo lets down his guard and listlessly recounts his story. When he is seized with a fit of coughing, he takes out his handkerchief, sees the blood stains, and with ignoble opportunism adds a couple of extra, exaggerated coughs, hoping the cough will prove useful. The district attorney asks with a quiet smile, "Was that real?" The question, gentle but contemptuous, becomes one of the two great disasters in Yozo's lifetime of acting—worse, he thinks, than being sentenced to ten years in prison. The charge against him is suspended, but Yozo feels utterly wretched as he sits on a bench in the corridor outside the district attorney's office, waiting for Flatfish. Through the tall windows he sees the evening sky glowing in the sunset and seagulls flying by in a line that somehow suggests the curve of a woman's body.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

Yokohama is the place where Yozo's life of shame becomes a matter of public record. The suicide attempt, the arrest, the interrogation, and the suspended sentence all converge here, transforming a private crisis into a social fact. The city marks the moment when Yozo is officially designated a criminal, even though the charge is suspended. It is also the place where his acting finally fails him: the district attorney sees through his feigned coughing with devastating clarity. Yokohama thus becomes the site of Yozo's first formal disqualification from human society, a prelude to his later confinement in a mental hospital. The city itself is never revisited in the narrative; it exists only as the location of a single, decisive rupture after which Yozo can never return to his former life.