Hongo

Hongo, a district in Tokyo, becomes the setting for a decisive turning point in Yozo's life after his father sells the family's town house in Ueno. It is here, in a gloomy rented room in an old lodging house, that Yozo first experiences the full weight of financial insecurity, the escalating demands of the Marxist underground, and the loneliness that pushes him toward his suicide pact with Tsuneko.

A Room of His Own, and of Despair

When Yozo's father decides to sell the Ueno house and retire from politics, Yozo is forced to move to a "gloomy room in an old lodging house in Hongo." The shift is immediate and brutal: where before he could charge books, stationery, and clothing at shops patronized by his father, he now must live on a fixed monthly allowance that disappears in two or three days. He sends frantic telegrams begging for money to his father, brothers, and sisters, following them with letters full of absurd fabrications designed to make people laugh while asking for favors. Under the tutelage of Masao Horiki, he begins frequenting pawnshops, yet remains chronically short of cash. The Hongo room itself becomes a cell of terror: Yozo finds it impossible to sit quietly by himself, frightened that he might be set upon or struck at any moment. He rushes out either to help the Marxist movement or to drink with Horiki, neglecting both his schoolwork and his painting.

The Movement and the Spiral

It is from his Hongo lodgings that Yozo's involvement with the Marxist Reading Society intensifies beyond the half-joking fascination that first drew him. He is chosen as leader of all Marxist student action groups in the schools of central Tokyo, racing about to "maintain liaison" with a little knife in his raincoat pocket—a blade so delicate it could hardly sharpen a pencil. The jobs become so frequent and frenetic that he can no longer perform them in a spirit of fun. His sickly body is not up to the frantic activity, and he feels secretly that this is not his business, that the party should get a regular man. Unable to suppress his annoyance, he escapes—but the escape gives him no pleasure, and he decides to kill himself. The Hongo room, with its absolute emptiness save for his school uniform and bedding, becomes the mental image that crystallizes his hopelessness: when he opens his wallet at a lunch stand and finds only three copper coins, he sees that bleak cell before his eyes and perceives with clarity that he cannot go on living.

The Women Who Come to the Room

Three women show Yozo special affection during his Hongo period, and each enters his room in ways that deepen his entrapment. The landlord's daughter visits under the pretext of writing letters, seating herself at his desk for over an hour while he lies in bed, desperate for her to leave. He sends her on errands for sleeping tablets, knowing that women are delighted to be asked favors. A second woman, a "comrade" from the teacher's training college, tags along after him even after the day's work is done, buying him tasteless presents that he immediately gives away. When she refuses to leave one summer evening, he kisses her in a dark place, and she takes him to a secret room the movement rents, where they spend the night in a "wild tumult." Yozo feels bound to both women by an ancient debt, unable to dodge them as he has others. The third is Tsuneko, the waitress from a Ginza café, whom he meets after learning to navigate Tokyo alone. Their night together in her rented room gives him a liberation and happiness he has never known—but it lasts only one night, and the morning after, he spreads his usual smokescreen of farce and flees.

The Path to Kamakura

The Hongo room is the physical and psychological launching point for the suicide attempt that changes everything. Yozo's financial desperation, his exhaustion from the movement, his inability to extricate himself from the women who cling to him, and his chronic lack of money all converge in that gloomy lodging. When he and Horiki go drinking in Kanda and then to the Ginza café where Tsuneko works, the humiliation of seeing her treated as unworthy even of a drunkard's kiss drives him to drink more than ever before in his life. He vomits and loses consciousness for the first time. Waking in Tsuneko's room, he consents easily to her proposal of death. The next morning, wandering around Asakusa, he opens his wallet to pay for milk and finds only three copper coins—and the image of his Hongo room, empty and bleak, rises before him. It is then that he determines, this time as a reality, to kill himself. That night at Kamakura, Tsuneko dies and Yozo is saved, but the Hongo period has already sealed the trajectory of his life of shame.