Comrade girl

The Comrade girl is a student at a teacher's training college who enters Yozo's life through the Marxist Reading Society, a political group he attends not out of conviction but because of his fascination with its irrationality. She embodies the kind of relationship Yozo most dreads: one from which he cannot escape, because their shared political activities force them into daily contact. Unlike the women who merely pass through his life, she is a constant, inescapable presence, and her aggressive pursuit of him exposes the fundamental helplessness that governs all his human interactions.

Identity and Introduction

The Comrade girl is introduced as a student in a teacher's training college, a "comrade" within the Marxist Reading Society that Yozo attends. Her appearance is described as ugly and disagreeable, and her manner is marked by an affectation that Yozo finds deeply irritating. She buys him presents seemingly at random, offering them with the words, "I wish you would think of me as your real sister"—a sentiment that makes Yozo wince at its falseness. Despite his distaste, he forces a sad little smile and answers, "I do," because he is afraid of angering her. His only thought is to temporize and put her off, but this strategy only ensnares him further.

Arc Through the Plot

The Comrade girl's pursuit of Yozo escalates from persistent companionship to physical intimacy. Even after the day's political arrangements are completed, she doggedly tags along after him. One summer evening, when she simply refuses to leave him, Yozo—in a desperate attempt to persuade her to go—kisses her in a dark place along the street. This gesture, intended as a dismissal, has the opposite effect: she becomes uncontrollably, shamefully excited. She hails a taxi and takes him to a small room the movement secretly rents in an office building, where they spend the whole night in a wild tumult. Yozo reflects on the situation with a wry smile, thinking, "What an extraordinary sister I have." The encounter does not satisfy her or free him; it binds him more tightly. He feels as if he is bound to her by some ancient debt, and his chronic lack of assurance drives him into desperate attempts to ingratiate himself with her, just as it does with the landlord's daughter at his lodging house.

Relationships and Conflict

The Comrade girl's relationship with Yozo is defined by a fundamental asymmetry: she pursues, he evades; she gives, he accepts with hidden resentment. The presents she buys him are in extraordinarily bad taste, and he usually disposes of them immediately by giving them to the postman or the grocery boy. Yet he tries to look happy when he is with her and makes her laugh with his jokes, performing the same clowning that has always been his shield against human beings. The conflict is not between them but within Yozo himself: he cannot refuse her, cannot tell her the truth, and cannot escape the daily contact that their shared political activities make unavoidable. She is one of three women who show him special affection during the period when he is exhausted by his work for the movement, short of money, and contemplating suicide. Along with the landlord's daughter and the waitress Tsuneko, she represents a form of human connection that Yozo experiences not as comfort but as another burden.

Change and Ending

The Comrade girl's story does not have a dramatic conclusion. She fades from the narrative after Yozo's suicide attempt with Tsuneko, which changes everything in his life. Her role is to illustrate a pattern that recurs throughout Yozo's life: women are drawn to him, and he, unable to refuse, becomes entangled in relationships that bring him no joy and only deepen his sense of entrapment. She is one of the many women who, as Yozo notes, instinctively sniff out his loneliness—a loneliness he confides to no one—and this becomes one of the causes of his being taken advantage of in so many ways. The Comrade girl's aggressive, possessive affection is a particularly vivid example of this dynamic, because it combines the inescapability of daily political contact with the emotional demands of a woman who will not take no for an answer.

Thematic Significance

The Comrade girl embodies several of the novel's central themes: the impossibility of genuine human connection for Yozo, the way his inability to refuse others leads to his degradation, and the role of women as both pursuers and victims in his life. She is not a fully realized character in her own right but a function of Yozo's psychology—a mirror that reflects his helplessness and his fear. Her presence in the narrative underscores the idea that Yozo's relationships are not chosen but endured, and that the very qualities that attract women to him—his sensitivity, his apparent vulnerability, his clowning—are the same qualities that make him incapable of responding to them with genuine feeling. She is, in this sense, one of the many "kindred" spirits Yozo encounters, but their kinship is one of mutual misunderstanding and exploitation, not of true sympathy or love.