Yozo and the owner of Kyobashi Bar's relationship

Yozo's relationship with the Madam of the Kyobashi bar is the most stable and least exploitative connection in his adult life, a bond defined not by passion or dependency but by a mutual, unsentimental recognition of each other's damaged humanity. She appears at his lowest moments, offering shelter without interrogation, and she alone survives the wreckage of his existence to bear witness to what he truly was.

Refuge and a New Start

After Yozo fled the apartment he shared with Shizuko in Koenji, he presented himself at the Madam's bar in Kyobashi with the simple declaration, "I've left her and come to you." That single statement was enough. From that night he lodged himself without ceremony on the second floor of her establishment, and she treated him variously as a customer, an owner, an errand boy, and a relative of the management. The regular customers, following her lead, showed him an almost painful kindness, buying him drinks and calling him by his first name. In this atmosphere, Yozo began to relax his vigilance toward the world, coming to believe that society was not such a dreadful place after all. The Madam's chivalry—a quality Yozo noted was more abundant in city women than in men, who were consumed by appearances and stinginess—enabled him to marry Yoshiko and rent a room near the Sumida River. She was the practical agent of his brief, fragile attempt at a normal life.

Steadfast Presence in Crisis

The Madam's role deepened during Yozo's most catastrophic moments. When he was hospitalized after his overdose of Dial sleeping pills, it was she who sat at his bedside alongside Flatfish. As Yozo regained consciousness and burst into tears, he blurted out, "Take me away from Yoshiko," a confession that surprised even himself. The Madam rose and breathed a barely audible sigh, but she did not abandon him. Later, when Flatfish and Horiki bundled Yozo into a car to take him to a mental hospital, she was not present for the committal itself, but her connection to him remained unbroken. Years after the war, when she had relocated to Funabashi and opened a coffee shop, she still kept the three notebooks and three photographs that Yozo had sent her anonymously around the time of his institutionalization. She had preserved them through the air raids, and when a university friend of Yozo's happened into her shop, she brought out the materials and offered them as possible material for a novel.

The Final Witness

The Madam's assessment of Yozo, delivered to the friend who would become the editor of the notebooks, is the only external judgment in the book. When asked if she had cried reading the notebooks, she replied, "No. I didn't cry . . . I just kept thinking that when human beings get that way, they're no good for anything." Yet she immediately qualified this with a more profound observation: "The Yozo we knew was so easy-going and amusing, and if only he hadn't drunk—no, even though he did drink—he was a good boy, an angel." This testimony, placed at the very end of the novel, contradicts Yozo's own self-portrait of shame and failure. The Madam, who had seen him at his most degraded and had never sought to reform or condemn him, became the sole voice to insist on his fundamental goodness. Her quiet, unadorned loyalty provides the narrative's final, redemptive counterpoint to Yozo's relentless self-condemnation.