Kanda

Kanda, a district in Tokyo, appears throughout Yozo's notebooks as a place of transition and degradation, a stage for the rituals of drinking, political farce, and the slow erosion of his will. It is neither a home nor a refuge but a liminal space where Yozo's clowning gives way to raw despair, and where the city's cheap bars and backstreets become the setting for his most self-destructive episodes.

Drinking and the Descent into Alcoholism

It was in Kanda that Yozo, already adrift after his father's Tokyo house was sold and he was forced into lodgings, began his serious drinking career. At the end of November, he went drinking with Horiki at a cheap bar in Kanda, and it was from there, drunk and bolder than usual, that he proposed they continue to a café on the Ginza, a decision that led directly to his reunion with Tsuneko and the suicide attempt at Kamakura. The Kanda bar was the starting point of a chain of events that would define Yozo's life of shame. Later, after his marriage to Yoshiko, Kanda reappears as a place of solitary, desperate drinking. On a snowy night, after returning from a fruitless trip to the hot springs of Izu, Yozo drunkenly wandered along the rows of saloons behind the Ginza, singing to himself, and then vomited blood for the first time, forming a rising-sun flag in the snow. This moment of physical collapse, a direct consequence of his alcoholism, occurred in the streets of Kanda, marking a point of no return in his physical decline.

The Reading Society and Left-Wing Thought

Kanda was also the location of the secret Communist meetings that Horiki introduced Yozo to, a "Reading Society" where Yozo found a perverse pleasure in the irrationality of the movement. He attended regularly, performing his clowning for the comrades, and was eventually entrusted with dangerous missions. The atmosphere of the underground movement, with its life-and-death tensions and its absurd secrecy, was curiously soothing to Yozo, who felt more at ease in this irrational world than in the world of rational gentlemen. Kanda, then, was not only a place of drinking but also of political farce, where Yozo's fear of human beings was momentarily displaced by the comforting absurdity of the movement.

The Final Wanderings and the Pharmacy

In his final, desperate days before being committed to a mental hospital, Kanda became the setting for Yozo's morphine addiction. After the Dial overdose and his failed attempt at recovery, he returned to Tokyo and began frequenting a pharmacy in the district, where the crippled woman who ran it supplied him with morphine. He would knock on her door late at night, pretending to weep, and she would hand him a box without a word. The pharmacy, with its shelves of medicines and the clacking of her crutches, became a place of mutual misery and addiction. It was in Kanda that Yozo's last hope of escape—a long letter to his father confessing his circumstances—was met with silence, driving him to increase his dosage and plan a final suicide. The district, which had once been the site of his first drunken adventures, became the stage for his complete moral and physical collapse, a place where the line between seeking help and seeking oblivion dissolved entirely.