Father's death

Yozo's father died of gastric ulcers at the end of the previous month, a fact his eldest brother and Flatfish brought to the mental hospital where Yozo had been confined since the beginning of summer. The news arrived three months after Yozo's admission, when cosmos flowers were beginning to bloom in the garden. His brother delivered the information in his habitually serious, strained voice, adding that the family would ask no questions about Yozo's past and would see to his living expenses, on the sole condition that he leave Tokyo immediately and begin his convalescence afresh in the country. Yozo nodded faintly, feeling as though he could see before his eyes the mountains and rivers of his home. The word that came to him was "reject."

The Death of the Father and the Collapse of the Inner World

Yozo's father had been a familiar, frightening presence who had never left Yozo's heart for a single moment. The news of his 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. This emotional hollowing was the culmination of a life in which the father had represented the ultimate authority — the figure whose wishes Yozo had desperately tried to anticipate, as when he sneaked into the parlor at night to write "Lion Mask" in his father's notebook, and whose reprimands had struck him with the force of a thunderbolt. The father's death removed the last external anchor of Yozo's identity, leaving him adrift in a world that had already declared him mad.

The Context of Confinement

Yozo had been placed in a mental hospital after a series of self-destructive acts that followed the violation of his wife Yoshiko. He had attempted suicide by overdosing on Dial sleeping pills, then descended into morphine addiction, and finally, in a state of desperation, had written a long letter to his father confessing his circumstances fully and accurately — with the exception of his relations with women — as a last resort, a resolve tantamount to a bet on the existence of God. The answer never came. Instead, Flatfish and Horiki appeared on the very afternoon Yozo had resolved to give himself ten shots of morphine and throw himself into the river. Horiki's gentle smile, the like of which Yozo had never before seen on his face, completely shattered him, and he wept. He was bundled into an automobile and taken to a large hospital in the woods, where a young doctor with a bashful smile ushered him into a ward and locked the door behind him. Yozo realized he was in a mental hospital. His delirious cry after swallowing the sleeping pills — that he would go where there were no women — had materialized in a truly uncanny way: his ward held only male lunatics, and the nurses were also men.

The Meaning of the Death

Yozo's father had been a member of the Diet, a man whose presence was oppressive and intimidating even when days passed without their seeing each other. The father's death meant that the family structure that had both supported and terrified Yozo was now irrevocably broken. His eldest brother, acting on behalf of the family, offered a clean break: no questions about the past, financial support, but exile from Tokyo. Yozo's response was a faint nod. The news of his father's death did not drive him to further self-destruction; it emptied him of the capacity for any strong feeling whatsoever. He had wished innumerable times for a violent death, but now even that desire was gone. The father who had been the object of both fear and desperate attempts at appeasement was dead, and with him died the last possibility of reconciliation or judgment. Yozo was left as a reject, a being who had ceased utterly to be a human being.

Aftermath and the Final State

Yozo's brother scrupulously carried out his promise. He bought a house for Yozo at a hot spring on the coast, about four or five hours by rail south of the town where Yozo grew up, an unusually warm spot for that part of Japan. The house was a thatch-covered, ancient-looking structure with five rooms, its walls peeled and woodwork so worm-eaten as to seem beyond repair. An ugly woman close to sixty with horrible rusty hair was sent to look after Yozo. Some three years passed in this state. Yozo's chest ailment fluctuated; he occasionally coughed blood. The old servant, Tetsu, violated him in a curious manner several times, and they quarreled like husband and wife. In one absurd incident, Yozo sent Tetsu to buy sleeping pills, and she returned with a laxative instead; he took ten pills, suffered terrible diarrhea, and then burst out laughing at the thought that a "reject" must be a comic noun. He had taken a laxative in order to go to sleep. Now he had neither happiness nor unhappiness. Everything passes — that was the one and only thing he had thought resembled a truth in the society of human beings where he had dwelled as in a burning hell. At twenty-seven, his hair had become much greyer; most people took him for over forty.