Kyobashi

Kyobashi, a commercial district in central Tokyo, serves as the backdrop for the most degraded and desperate phase of Yozo's life. It is here, after fleeing the domestic stability offered by Shizuko in Koenji, that Yozo installs himself without ceremony on the second floor of a bar, becoming a kept man dependent on the bar's madam. This location marks the point at which Yozo's long descent into self-destruction accelerates beyond any possibility of recovery, transforming him from a clowning student and struggling cartoonist into a confirmed alcoholic, a morphine addict, and finally a patient in a mental hospital.

A Refuge from Society and a New Form of Bondage

When Yozo leaves Shizuko's apartment, he goes directly to the bar in Kyobashi and tells the madam, "I've left her and come to you." That single statement is enough to secure him lodging, and from that night he lives on the second floor of the establishment. The bar provides a peculiar kind of refuge: Yozo is treated variously as a customer, an owner, an errand boy, and a relative of the management, and the regular customers buy him drinks and call him by his first name. For a time, this environment allows Yozo to relax his vigilance toward the world, and he begins to feel that society is not such a dreadful place. Yet the freedom is illusory. Before he can even meet the customers, Yozo must fortify himself with a glass of liquor, and his nights are spent proclaiming drunken, bungling theories of art. The bar becomes the setting for a life of "no great joys nor, for that matter, any great sorrows," a debased existence in which Yozo's only actual pleasure is to engage in meaningless chatter and drink the customers' liquor.

The Meeting with Yoshiko and the Promise of Redemption

It is from the Kyobashi bar that Yozo first notices Yoshiko, a pale seventeen-year-old girl with crooked teeth who works in a tobacco shop across the street. She repeatedly pleads with him to give up drinking, and after he falls into a manhole in front of her shop one winter night, she bandages his bruised arm. In a moment of drunken impulse, Yozo asks her to marry him, and she accepts with the slang word "Natch." The madam of the Kyobashi bar, displaying what Yozo calls a woman's chivalry, enables the marriage by helping him rent an apartment near the Sumida River. For a brief period, Yozo gives up drink and devotes himself to drawing cartoons, finding pleasure in the simple trust of his young bride. But this fragile happiness is shattered when Horiki reappears, and the two old companions resume their rounds of drinking, eventually visiting the Kyobashi bar together and rekindling the destructive friendship that will lead to Yozo's final ruin.

The Return of Horiki and the Decisive Incident

After Yozo's marriage, Horiki becomes a regular visitor to the apartment, and the two men often go drinking together at the Kyobashi bar. It is during one of these drinking sessions that Horiki accompanies Yozo home and discovers Yoshiko being violated by a shopkeeper. The incident, which Yozo describes as the decisive moment of his life, splits him "through the forehead between the eyebrows" and turns his hair prematurely grey. From that night onward, Yozo loses all confidence in himself and abandons all hope. His only resort is drink, and his face coarsens markedly as his teeth fall out from the interminable drinking bouts. The cartoons he draws verge on the pornographic, and he begins secretly peddling copies of pornographic pictures to obtain money for gin.

The Descent into Morphine Addiction and the Final Collapse

Yozo's alcoholism eventually leads him to cough up blood in the snow behind the Ginza. A pharmacist woman, herself a crippled and unhappy widow, gives him morphine as a substitute for liquor, claiming it is no more harmful. Yozo begins injecting the drug, and within a short time he is taking four shots a day, unable to work without them. His debt at the pharmacy reaches a frightening figure, and he begins a sordid affair with the crippled woman. In desperation, he writes a long letter to his father confessing his circumstances, but no answer ever comes. He resolves to give himself ten shots and throw himself into the river, but on the afternoon of the chosen day, Flatfish and Horiki arrive and bundle him into an automobile. They take him to a large hospital in the woods, where a young doctor with a bashful smile ushers him into a locked ward. The key grates in the lock, and Yozo realizes he is in a mental hospital. His delirious cry after swallowing sleeping pills—that he would go where there were no women—has now materialized in a truly uncanny way: the ward holds only male lunatics, and the nurses are all men. There is not a single woman.

The End of the Kyobashi Connection

The madam of the Kyobashi bar survives the war and eventually runs a coffee shop in Funabashi, Chiba Prefecture. It is there, about ten years after the events of the notebooks, that she gives the three notebooks and three photographs to a visitor who turns out to be the epilogue's narrator. She tells him that the parcel was sent to her Kyobashi address without a return address, and that it got mixed up with other things during the air raids but was miraculously saved. When asked if she cried reading the notebooks, she replies, "No, I didn't cry... I just kept thinking that when human beings get that way, they're no good for anything." Yet she also offers a final, unexpected judgment: "The Yozo we knew was so easy-going and amusing, and if only he hadn't drunk—no, even though he did drink—he was a good boy, an angel." Kyobashi, the site of Yozo's deepest degradation, thus becomes the place from which the only surviving witness to his humanity speaks.