Yozo and the New Party's Relationship with Women

Yozo's relationship with the Comrade girl emerges directly from his participation in the Marxist Reading Society, a group he joined not out of political conviction but because of his fascination with its irrationality and his desire to escape his dread of human beings. The Comrade girl is a student at a teacher's training college, and Yozo's activities in the movement oblige him to see her every day, a duty he finds distasteful from the outset. Even after the day's tasks are completed, she doggedly follows him, buying him presents seemingly at random and offering them with the affected words, "I wish you would think of me as your real sister." Yozo, wincing at her affectation, forces a sad little smile and answers, "I do," his only thought being to temporize and put her off. He is afraid of angering her, and this fear drives him to spend more and more time dancing attendance on this ugly, disagreeable girl, accepting her presents—which are without exception in extraordinarily bad taste and which he usually disposes of immediately by giving them to the postman or the grocery boy—and trying to look happy while making her laugh with his jokes.

The Forced Intimacy

The relationship reaches a critical point one summer evening when the Comrade girl simply refuses to leave him. In a desperate hope of persuading her to go, Yozo kisses her when they come to a dark place along the street. This act triggers an uncontrollable, shameful excitement in her. She immediately hails a taxi and takes him to the little room the movement secretly rents in an office building, where they spend the whole night in a wild tumult. Yozo's internal reaction is one of wry, detached self-mockery; he tells himself, "What an extraordinary sister I have." The encounter is not born of desire or affection but of his chronic inability to refuse or to assert his own will, a pattern that defines his interactions with nearly everyone. He feels bound to her not by love but by a sense of obligation, as if tied by some ancient debt, a feeling he also experiences with the landlord's daughter at his lodging house.

A Relationship of Unequal Investment

The Comrade girl's investment in the relationship is entirely one-sided. She is the pursuer, the gift-giver, the one who initiates physical intimacy. Yozo, by contrast, is a passive recipient, his participation a performance of reluctant compliance. He accepts her presents only to discard them, he feigns happiness only to mask his inner turmoil, and he submits to her sexual advances only as a means of escape. This dynamic mirrors his broader strategy of survival: he plays the clown to please others, but the performance is always a desperate act of self-preservation, never a genuine offering of self. The Comrade girl, like so many women in Yozo's life, is drawn to him by an instinctive sense of his loneliness, a quality he notes earlier in his notebooks, but she mistakes his vulnerability for an invitation to intimacy, not realizing that his capacity for genuine connection has been crippled by his profound fear of human beings.

Thematic Significance: A Pattern of Failed Connection

The relationship with the Comrade girl is a microcosm of Yozo's larger failure to form meaningful bonds. It is characterized by his passive service, his inability to say no, and his profound emotional absence even in the midst of physical intimacy. The Comrade girl, like Tsuneko, Shizuko, and Yoshiko, is another woman who attempts to care for him, but his own internal hell of shame and fear prevents him from reciprocating. The relationship is not a source of comfort or growth but another burden, another obligation that exhausts him and reinforces his conviction that he is fundamentally different from other human beings. It is a relationship built on a lie—his performance of affection—and it contributes to the accumulation of shame that defines his "life of shame."