Yozo and Ryouko's marriage

Yozo's marriage to Yoshiko, a pale seventeen-year-old girl with crooked teeth who worked in a tobacco shop near the Kyobashi bar, was his last attempt to grasp a normal human existence. He had been living as a kept man, first with Shizuko and then at the bar, drawing cheap cartoons and drinking heavily. When Yoshiko, with her uncorrupted virginity and trusting nature, agreed to marry him, Yozo believed he had found a way out of his despair. He gave up drinking and devoted himself to his work, finding pleasure in simple domestic routines: after dinner they would go to a movie, stop at a milk bar, or buy pots of flowers. Listening to his little bride, who trusted him with all her heart, gave him a faint hope that he might one day become a human being and be spared a horrible death.

The Marriage and Its Fragile Happiness

The marriage was made possible by the chivalry of the Madam of the Kyobashi bar, who enabled Yozo to rent a room on the ground floor of an apartment building near the Sumida River. Yozo stopped drinking and focused on drawing cartoons, while Yoshiko managed the household. Yozo was struck by Yoshiko's genius for trusting people: she suspected nothing of his past with the madam or his suicide attempt with Tsuneko, and even when he spoke bluntly, she took everything as a joke. This immaculate trustfulness seemed to Yozo like a waterfall among green leaves, clean and pure. For a time, he allowed himself to believe that he might escape his fate.

The Violation and Its Aftermath

The fragile peace was destroyed when Horiki, Yozo's old companion in dissipation, came to visit on a sticky summer night. After a dismal party on the roof, Horiki went downstairs and discovered Yoshiko being violated by a shopkeeper, an illiterate runt of about thirty who had commissioned cartoons from Yozo. Horiki returned to the roof to inform Yozo, who stood petrified on the staircase, not even thinking to help. The sight split Yozo's forehead between the eyebrows, a wound that would throb whenever he came in contact with a human being. His hair turned prematurely grey from that night. He lost all confidence in himself, doubted all men immeasurably, and abandoned all hopes for the things of this world.

The Destruction of Trust

What destroyed Yozo was not the fact of Yoshiko's defilement but the defilement of her trust in people. Yoshiko had been violated not out of love or desire but simply because she trusted the shopkeeper. Yozo came to see her trustfulness as a source of sin. He looked up novels about violated wives but found no instance so lamentable as Yoshiko's. He felt that everything was his fault, that his own lack of authority had caused the disaster. Yoshiko, now anxious and fearful, began to fret over his every smile or frown, and Yozo could no longer find comfort in her presence. His only resort was drink, and his face coarsened, his teeth fell out, and his cartoons became pornographic.

Descent into Addiction and Madness

Yozo's despair deepened into a morphine addiction. He began copying pornographic pictures to obtain money for the drug, and had an ugly affair with the crippled pharmacist woman who supplied it. He attempted suicide by overdosing on Dial sleeping pills, but survived. After his recovery, he was taken to a mental hospital, where he realized he had become a lunatic, a reject. The marriage was effectively over. Yozo was taken out of the hospital by his elder brother after his father's death and sent to a remote coastal village, where he lived with an ugly old servant, Tetsu, and continued to cough blood. The marriage to Yoshiko, which had promised salvation, ended in complete ruin, leaving Yozo with neither happiness nor unhappiness, only the conviction that everything passes.