Cartoonist

The Cartoonist is the degraded professional identity that Yozo assumes after his expulsion from college, a role that marks his descent from a promising artist into a hack producing cheap comic strips and pornographic drawings for third-rate magazines. It is the concrete manifestation of his failure to realize Takeichi's prophecy that he would become a great painter, and it becomes the vehicle through which he sustains his alcoholism, morphine addiction, and utter dependence on others. The Cartoonist is not a career but a symptom of Yozo's progressive disqualification from human life, a role he performs with mechanical despair rather than creative joy.

Identity and Descent into the Role

Yozo never managed to become anything more impressive than an unknown, second-rate cartoonist employed by the cheapest magazines. This outcome directly contradicted Takeichi's prediction that he would become a great painter, a prophecy that had once inspired Yozo to paint his secret "ghost pictures"—self-portraits so harrowing they stupefied even himself. After his suicide attempt with Tsuneko and his expulsion from college, Yozo's artistic ambitions withered. Living as a kept man with Shizuko, he began drawing cartoons for her children's magazine, producing "The Adventures of Kinta and Ota" as a monthly comic strip. The work brought in a surprising amount of money, enough to buy liquor and cigarettes, but his gloom and depression grew only more intense. Sometimes when he was drawing, he would suddenly think of home, and his pen would stop moving as he looked down through brimming tears.

The Work and Its Degradation

As a comic strip artist, and an unknown one at that, Yozo experienced no great joys nor any great sorrows. He craved desperately some great savage joy, no matter how immense the suffering that might ensue, but his only actual pleasure was to engage in meaningless chatter with customers and to drink their liquor. The work itself was mechanical and soulless. Orders gradually started coming in from other publishers, all of an even lower class than Shizuko's company—third-rate publishers. Yozo drew with extremely, excessively depressed emotions, deliberately penning each line, only to earn money for drink. When Shizuko came home from work, he would dash out as if in relay with her and head for the outdoor booths near the station to drink cheap, strong liquor. Later, his cartoons appeared not only in children's magazines but also in the cheap, pornographic magazines sold at railway stations. Under a silly pseudonym, he drew dirty pictures of naked women, to which he usually appended appropriate verses from the Rubaiyat. After Yoshiko's violation, the cartoons he drew verged even further into the pornographic, and he began copying pornographic pictures which he secretly peddled, wanting money to buy gin.

The Cartoonist as a State of Being

The Cartoonist is not merely a job but a state of being that encapsulates Yozo's entire life of shame. His work is a direct expression of his inability to connect with others or to find meaning. When Horiki mocked him, saying he had "just enough talent to get along," Yozo reflected bitterly that a man who dreads human beings, shuns and deceives them, might on the surface seem strikingly like another man who reveres the clever, worldly-wise rules for success. The Cartoonist is the mask he wears to survive, a role that requires him to suppress his true self and produce empty, commercial art. It is a role born of desperation, not ambition, and it ultimately leads him to the morphine addiction that lands him in a mental hospital. In the end, the Cartoonist is the final, degraded form of the clown he has always been, a figure who has lost even the capacity to suffer meaningfully, reduced to a "reject" who has neither happiness nor unhappiness.