Enter the psychiatric hospital

The commitment to the mental hospital marks the terminal point of Yozo's long descent. After years of clowning, alcoholism, a failed love suicide, morphine addiction, and the shattering of his marriage, he is no longer merely a social outcast or a criminal suspect—he becomes a certified lunatic, stripped of the last shred of his humanity in the eyes of the world. The event is the brutal fulfillment of his own delirious wish to go "somewhere where there aren't any women," and it seals his identity as a "reject."

The Circumstances of the Commitment

Yozo's addiction to morphine, obtained from the crippled pharmacist woman, had spiraled out of control. He was injecting the drug four times a day, unable to work without it, and his debt at the pharmacy had reached a frightening figure. In desperation, he wrote a long letter to his father confessing his circumstances, hoping for salvation, but no answer ever came. He resolved to give himself ten shots of morphine that night and throw himself into the river. On the very afternoon he had chosen for this act, Flatfish appeared with Masao Horiki in tow, having seemingly sniffed out his plan with diabolical intuition. Horiki, with a gentle smile the like of which Yozo had never seen on his face, said, "I hear you've coughed blood." That single gentle smile shattered Yozo completely; he averted his face and wept. He was bundled into an automobile, weeping helplessly, obeying whatever Flatfish and Horiki decreed like a man bereft of all will. Yoshiko came along as well. About dusk they pulled up at the entrance to a large hospital in the woods.

The Admission and the Locked Ward

A young doctor with a bashful smile gave Yozo a careful, almost unpleasantly considerate examination and told him he would need to rest and recuperate there for a while. When Flatfish, Horiki, and Yoshiko were about to leave, Yoshiko silently offered Yozo the hypodermic needle and the remaining morphine from her handbag, still believing it was an energy-building medicine. In a rare moment of refusal—the one and only time in his life he had ever said no to something offered—Yozo said, "No, I won't need it any more." The young doctor immediately ushered him to a ward. The key grated in the lock behind him. He was in a mental hospital. His delirious cry after swallowing the sleeping pills—that he would go where there were no women—had now materialized in a truly uncanny way: his ward held only male lunatics, and the nurses were also men. There was not a single woman.

The Meaning of the Confinement

Yozo's own reflection on his confinement is stark and devastating. He writes, "I was no longer a criminal—I was a lunatic. But no, I was definitely not mad. I have never been mad for even an instant." He recognizes the circular logic of institutional power: most lunatics claim the same thing, and what it amounts to is that people who get put into this asylum are crazy, and those who don't are normal. He had wept at Horiki's incredibly beautiful smile, forgotten both prudence and resistance, and got into the car that took him there. Now he had become a madman. Even if released, he would be forever branded on the forehead with the word "madman," or perhaps "reject." The final sentence of this section of his notebooks declares, "Disqualified as a human being. I had now ceased utterly to be a human being." The commitment is not a medical intervention but a social verdict: the world has judged him unfit for human society, and he accepts that judgment as the truth of his existence.

The Aftermath and Release

Yozo entered the hospital at the beginning of summer, watching waterlilies blossom in the little pond through the iron bars over the windows. Three months later, when the cosmos were beginning to bloom in the garden, his eldest brother and Flatfish came to take him out. His brother informed him that his father had died of gastric ulcers at the end of the previous month. The news of his father's death eviscerated Yozo; he felt as though the vessel of his suffering had become empty, as if nothing could interest him now. He had lost even the ability to suffer. His brother bought him a thatch-covered house at a hot spring on the coast, far from Tokyo, and sent an ugly old woman named Tetsu to look after him. There, Yozo lived out the remaining years of his recorded life, occasionally coughing blood, occasionally violated by the old servant, and finally arriving at the only truth he could hold: "Everything passes."