1935

1935 is the year in which the epilogue of No Longer Human takes place, the moment when Yozo's private notebooks pass from the hands of the Madam of the Kyobashi bar into those of an unnamed narrator who will eventually publish them. This year anchors the novel's frame narrative, transforming a sealed confession of shame into a document that reaches an outside reader and completes the story's transmission from first-person testimony to public record.

The Epilogue's Temporal Setting

The epilogue explicitly dates itself to 1935, a year when the Japanese military clique was first beginning to rampage in the open, as the narrator notes. The unnamed narrator visits a friend who had been evacuated during the war to Funabashi in Chiba Prefecture, hoping to ask his help in arranging the marriage of a relative and to buy fresh seafood to take home. He carries a rucksack on his back and, finding himself unable to locate his friend's house, is drawn by the sound of violin music into a coffee shop. There he recognizes the Madam of the Kyobashi bar, whom he had not seen for about ten years, since he last drank highballs at her establishment in Tokyo around 1930.

The Transmission of the Notebooks

During their conversation, the Madam asks if the narrator ever knew Yozo. When he answers that he never did, she goes inside and brings out three notebooks and three photographs, which she hands to him with the words, "Maybe they'll make good material for a novel." The narrator is initially inclined to return them without examination, but the photographs fascinate him, and he decides to accept the notebooks. That night, after drinking with his friend, he becomes so immersed in reading the notebooks that he does not sleep a wink until morning. He concludes that the events described, though years old, would still interest people today, and that it would make more sense to publish the whole thing as it was rather than attempt any clumsy improvements.

The Madam's Perspective and Yozo's Fate

When the narrator returns to the coffee shop to ask if he may borrow the notebooks, the Madam reveals that about ten years earlier—which would place the mailing around 1925, a decade before 1935—someone sent her a parcel containing the notebooks and photographs to her place in Kyobashi. She is sure it was Yozo who sent it, but he did not write his address or even his name on the parcel. The parcel got mixed up with other things during the air raids, but miraculously the notebooks were saved, and she read through them for the first time only recently. When the narrator asks if she cried, she answers, "No. I didn't cry . . . I just kept thinking that when human beings get that way, they're no good for anything." She adds, unemotionally, "It's his father's fault," and describes the Yozo she knew as easy-going and amusing, a good boy, an angel.

The Broader Context of 1935 in Yozo's World

Although 1935 is the year of the epilogue's frame, the social and intellectual conditions that shaped Yozo's life belong to the same era. The narrator observes that the events in the notebooks relate mainly to the Tokyo of 1930 or so, but the patterns of thought Yozo exhibits—his distrust of political rhetoric, his attraction to the irrationality of left-wing movements, his terror of scientific statistics—are characteristic of the modern Japanese society of the 1930s. Yozo recalls attending a political speech by a celebrated figure of the party to which his father belonged, only to hear the same audience that had applauded enthusiastically later complain bitterly about the meeting on the snow-covered roads home. He is introduced to a secret Communist meeting, where he hears a lecture on Marxian economics delivered by an extraordinarily ugly young man; everything said seems exceedingly obvious and undoubtedly true, but Yozo feels that something more obscure and frightening lurks in the hearts of human beings, something not reducible to economics. He finds the irrationality of the movement faintly pleasurable and feels at ease with it, preferring to swim in the sea of irrationality until he drowns rather than remain closeted in the windowless, bone-chilling room of logic. Later, he comes to understand that his terror of scientific statistics—the millions of germs floating everywhere, the hypothetical waste of rice grains and paper handkerchiefs—was a fear of lies of science, lies of statistics and mathematics, and he feels pity and contempt for the self that had accepted such hypothetical situations as eminently factual truths. These episodes, though set in the years before 1935, define the intellectual climate that the epilogue's 1935 frame retrospectively illuminates: a world in which Yozo's alienation from society, his inability to trust human beings, and his desperate search for escape through clowning, alcohol, and drugs have already run their course, leaving only the notebooks as a record of a life disqualified from being human.