Yoshiko

Yoshiko is the pale, seventeen-year-old girl with crooked teeth who works in a tobacco shop across from the bar in Kyobashi where Yozo spends his nights. She is defined by an immaculate trustfulness that Yozo at first finds holy and redemptive, but which later becomes the source of his most devastating wound. Her uncorrupted virginity and her earnest, unsmiling concern for Yozo's drinking—she repeatedly pleads with him to give it up—represent for him the possibility of a life free from the dread and deceit that have marked his existence. When he falls into a manhole in front of her shop one winter night, she hauls him out and bandages his bruised arm, and in that moment he resolves to marry her, believing that her purity can save him. Their marriage, however, becomes the stage for a catastrophe that confirms Yozo's conviction that he is disqualified from human life.

Identity and Introduction

Yoshiko is introduced as a girl of about seventeen, pale and with crooked teeth, working in a small tobacco shop across from the bar in Kyobashi. She is distinguished by her earnest, unsmiling manner when she admonishes Yozo about his drinking, telling him, "You can't go on, drinking every day from morning to night that way." When Yozo, drunk, falls into a manhole in front of her shop, she pulls him out and bandages his arm, showing a practical kindness that contrasts with the manipulative or desperate women he has known. Her response to his joking proposal of marriage—"Natch"—reveals a straightforwardness that Yozo interprets as the mark of a virgin who has never been defiled. He sees in her a "holy thing," a living proof that the beauty of virginity is not merely a sentimental illusion but a real presence in the world.

Marriage and the Dream of Redemption

Yozo marries Yoshiko with the help of the Madam of the Kyobashi bar, and they rent a room on the ground floor of an apartment building near the Sumida River. For a time, Yozo gives up drinking and devotes himself to drawing cartoons, and the couple enjoys simple pleasures: going to movies, stopping at milk bars, buying pots of flowers. Yozo finds deep pleasure in listening to Yoshiko's words and watching her movements, for she trusts him with all her heart. He begins to entertain the faint hope that he might one day become a human being and be spared a horrible death. Yoshiko's trustfulness is so complete that she suspects nothing of Yozo's past—not his relations with the Madam of the Kyobashi bar, nor his suicide attempt with Tsuneko. When Yozo tells her these things bluntly, she takes them as jokes. This genius for trusting people becomes, for Yozo, a clean and pure thing, "like a waterfall among green leaves."

The Violation and Its Aftermath

The decisive incident occurs on a sticky summer night when Masao Horiki visits Yozo's apartment. After a dismal party on the roof, Horiki goes downstairs and discovers Yoshiko being violated by the shopkeeper, a small, illiterate man of about thirty who had commissioned cartoons from Yozo. Horiki returns to the roof and shows Yozo the scene through a small window. Yozo, paralyzed, does not intervene; he runs back to the roof and collapses, weeping bitterly. The event cleaves him "between the eyebrows," a wound that throbs whenever he encounters a human being. His hair turns prematurely grey from that night. Yoshiko, standing haplessly behind him with a platter of beans, can only say, "He told me he wouldn't do anything." Yozo does not blame her; instead, he recognizes that her violation was not an act of love or desire but a consequence of her inability to distrust. He asks himself, "Is trustfulness a sin?" and the question haunts him. Yoshiko's immaculate trustfulness, which he had prized, is defiled, and she begins to fret over his every smile or frown, jumping when he calls her, addressing him with excessive honorifics. The pure cascade turns yellow and muddy.

Decline and Separation

After the violation, Yozo loses all confidence and abandons himself to drink. His face coarsens, his teeth fall out, and he begins copying pornographic pictures to sell secretly for money to buy gin. He suspects that Yoshiko may have been violated by others, including Horiki, but he lacks the courage to question her. His only resort is alcohol, and he inflicts on Yoshiko "an abominable, hellish caressing" before falling into a dead sleep. Towards the end of the year, Yozo discovers a box of Dial sleeping pills that he had hidden and forgotten; he swallows the entire contents in a suicide attempt. After three days unconscious, he wakes to find the Madam of the Kyobashi bar at his bedside, and he blurts out, "Take me away from Yoshiko." Yoshiko, believing the overdose was an atonement for her sin, becomes even more uncertain and fearful. She never smiles and can hardly be persuaded to open her mouth. Yozo finds the apartment oppressive and spends his days drinking. When he is later committed to a mental hospital, Yoshiko accompanies him and, as she leaves, silently offers him the hypodermic needle and remaining morphine, still believing it to be an energy-building medicine. Yozo refuses it—a rare act of refusal—and is taken away. Yoshiko is not mentioned again in the notebooks, but her fate is sealed by the destruction of her trustfulness, which Yozo identifies as the source of his final, irredeemable grief.