Yozo's One-sided Love for the Landlord's Daughter

The landlord's daughter at Yozo's lodging house in Hongo is one of three women who show him special affection during his college years, a period when he is already exhausted by his activities for the Marxist movement and increasingly desperate for escape. She represents a pattern of unreciprocated, clinging devotion that Yozo cannot bring himself to reject, and her persistent attentions become another source of the entangling obligations that drive him toward self-destruction.

Identity and Background

The landlord's daughter lives in the same Hongo lodging house where Yozo moves after his father sells the Tokyo house. She is a young woman who uses the transparent pretext of needing a quiet place to write letters—claiming that her sister and little brother are too noisy downstairs—to enter Yozo's room whenever he returns exhausted from his movement errands. She seats herself at his desk and writes for over an hour at a time, though Yozo suspects she is merely writing the alphabet or the days of the week and months. Her behavior betrays a desperate eagerness for his attention: her joy at being noticed is so indecent that it chills all feeling for him.

Actions and Persistence

The landlord's daughter actively seeks out Yozo's company and performs services for him. When he asks her to buy sleeping tablets from the drugstore, claiming he is over-exhausted and cannot sleep, she gets up happily, assuring him not to worry about the money. Yozo is well aware that it never offends a woman to be asked to do an errand; they are delighted if some man deigns to ask them a favor. After Yozo's suicide attempt with Tsuneko at Kamakura, she sends him a long letter consisting of a string of fifty stanzas, each one beginning with the incredible words, "Please live on for me." This outpouring of devotion arrives while Yozo is confined in a hospital on the coast, recovering from the failed double suicide that left Tsuneko dead.

Yozo's Response and the Pattern of Entrapment

Yozo feels no genuine affection for the landlord's daughter. He finds her transparent pretexts irritating and her joy repulsive, yet he cannot bring himself to refuse her attentions. His chronic lack of assurance drives him willy-nilly into desperate attempts to ingratiate himself with her, just as he does with the comrade girl from the teacher's training college. He feels bound to them by some ancient debt, unable to dodge them as he has other women in the past because they bump into one another every day. This inability to say no—the same helplessness that later prevents him from refusing morphine or Horiki's demands—traps him in relationships he does not want, adding to the accumulation of shame and obligation that makes him feel he cannot go on living.

Thematic Significance

The landlord's daughter exemplifies the pattern Yozo identifies early in his life: women instinctively detect his loneliness and are drawn to him, and this becomes one of the causes of his being taken advantage of in so many ways. Her unrequited devotion, like that of the comrade girl and later Yoshiko, is not returned but merely endured, and it contributes to Yozo's conviction that he is a burden on others and that his very existence causes harm. The fifty-stanza poem urging him to live arrives at a moment when he is longing for the dead Tsuneko, the only person he ever loved, and it underscores the tragic irony that the women who cling to him cannot save him from his despair.