Attend a Leftist Book Club

Yozo's participation in a leftist Reading Society, an episode that unfolds during his college years in Tokyo, marks a paradoxical phase in his life: a period when he outwardly engaged with a political movement while inwardly remaining utterly detached from its ideology. The society was introduced to him by Masao Horiki, a cynical acquaintance who treated the secret Communist meetings as just another of Tokyo's entertainments, a way to display his own "modernity." At Horiki's urging, Yozo attended a meeting where he was introduced to the "comrades," obliged to buy a pamphlet, and subjected to a lecture on Marxian economics delivered by an extraordinarily ugly young man. Though Yozo found everything said to be exceedingly obvious and undoubtedly true, he felt certain that something more obscure and frightening lurked in the hearts of human beings—something not reducible to economics. Terrified by this inexplicable element, he assented to materialism as naturally as water finding its own level, but materialism could not free him from his dread of human beings, nor could he feel the joy of hope a man experiences when he opens his eyes on young leaves.

Attraction to Irrationality

Despite his lack of ideological conviction, Yozo regularly attended the Reading Society's meetings, finding it uproariously amusing to see his "comrades," their faces tense as though discussing matters of life and death, absorbed in theories so elementary they were on the order of "one and one makes two." He tried to take some of the strain out of the meetings with his usual antics, and gradually the oppressive atmosphere of the group relaxed. He became so popular that he was considered indispensable, and the simple people perhaps fancied him an optimistic, laughter-loving comrade—but he was deceiving them completely. He attended every single meeting and performed his full repertory of farce, not because of any common affection derived from Marx, but because he liked to, because those people pleased him. What truly appealed to Yozo was not the movement's basic aims but its personality—its odor of irrationality. He found the logic of the world frightening, its mechanism incomprehensible, and though outside lay the sea of irrationality, it was far more agreeable to swim in its waters until he drowned. For someone like Yozo, the atmosphere of an underground movement was curiously soothing and agreeable.

Role and Consequences

Yozo's involvement deepened beyond mere attendance. He was considered a promising comrade and entrusted with various jobs fraught with a ludicrous degree of secrecy. Curiously docile, he performed whatever they asked with such unruffled assurance that the police suspected nothing, and he was never so much as picked up for questioning. Smiling and making others smile, he punctiliously acquitted himself of all their "dangerous missions," though the missions were of a stupefying inconsequentiality. He felt that if he became a party member and got caught, not even the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison would bother him; it occurred to him that prison life might actually be pleasanter than groaning away his sleepless nights in a hellish dread of the "realities of life" as led by human beings. However, the movement's demands soon became so frequent and frenetic that he could no longer perform them half in the spirit of fun. He was chosen leader of all the Marxist student action groups in the schools of central Tokyo, racing about here and there maintaining liaison, with a little knife in his raincoat pocket for use in an armed uprising. His fondest wish was to drink himself into a sound stupor, but he hadn't the money. A sickly body like his wasn't up to such frantic activity. His only reason all along for helping the group had been his fascination with its irrationality, and to become so horribly involved was a quite unforeseen consequence of his joke. Unable to suppress his annoyance, he escaped—but it gave him no pleasure, and he decided to kill himself. This episode directly precedes his love suicide attempt with Tsuneko, marking a critical turning point where his flirtation with political irrationality gives way to a more desperate search for oblivion.