Poverty

Poverty is not merely a financial condition in Yozo's life; it is a corrosive, defining force that accelerates his descent into shame, dependence, and self-destruction. From the moment he is cut off from his family's wealth, poverty becomes the material ground on which his deepest humiliations are enacted, the catalyst for his suicide attempt, and the final seal of his status as a social outcast. It is the tangible expression of his disqualification from human life.

Origins and Onset

Yozo grows up in a wealthy, educated family, insulated from material want. His father, a Diet member, maintains a Tokyo townhouse and provides a fixed monthly allowance that disappears in two or three days, but until college, Yozo never has to think about money: cigarettes, liquor, books, and clothing can be charged at shops his father patronizes. This cushion collapses when his father sells the Tokyo house and Yozo moves to a gloomy lodging in Hongo, suddenly forced to make ends meet on a monthly dole. He is immediately at his wit's end, sending barrages of telegrams begging for money from his father, brothers, and sisters, fabricating absurd stories to make them laugh while asking for favors. Under the tutelage of Masao Horiki, he begins frequenting pawnshops, yet remains chronically short of cash. The transition from protected wealth to unprotected poverty is abrupt and traumatic, leaving him without any practical skills for survival.

The Humiliation of the Three Copper Coins

The most acute humiliation poverty inflicts on Yozo occurs during his love suicide with Tsuneko. After a night of drinking, the two wander Asakusa and stop at a lunch stand for milk. When Tsuneko asks him to pay, Yozo opens his wallet to find only three copper coins—money so negligible it does not count at all. The moment crystallizes his entire condition: he is a rich man's son who has never known hunger, yet now stands exposed as utterly destitute. Tsuneko's innocent voice—"Is that all you have?"—cuts him more deeply than any reproach. It is a humiliation more strange than any he has tasted before, one he cannot live with. This single instant of shame, born directly from poverty, solidifies his resolve to die. That night at Kamakura, he and Tsuneko enter the sea together; she dies, and he is saved, but the poverty that drove him to the act remains.

Dependence and Degradation

After the suicide attempt, Yozo becomes a kept man, first with Shizuko in Koenji, then with the Madam of the Kyobashi bar. His poverty forces him into a position of utter dependence. He pawns Shizuko's clothes to buy liquor, steals her underrobes and sashes for the same purpose, and spends nights away from home. When he returns after a two-day drinking binge, he overhears Shizuko and her daughter Shigeko talking about him with a tenderness that makes him feel like an intruder on their humble happiness. He leaves, not out of anger, but because he recognizes that his poverty—and the behavior it enables—makes him a destructive presence. Later, living with Yoshiko, his financial desperation deepens. He begins copying pornographic pictures to sell secretly, needing money for gin. The poverty that once drove him to suicide now drives him to the most degraded forms of labor, each act piling another layer of shame onto his already burdened conscience.

Poverty as Social Exile

Poverty also functions as a mark of social exclusion. When Horiki brings Yozo to the café on the Ginza and refuses to kiss Tsuneko because she looks "poverty-stricken," the judgment is devastating. Yozo realizes that Tsuneko is, in the eyes of the world, a wretched woman who smells of poverty, and this recognition strikes him like a thunderbolt. Yet instead of distancing himself, he feels a welling-up of comradeship for this fellow sufferer. Poverty becomes the bond that ties him to the most marginal figures—prostitutes, a criminal's wife, a crippled pharmacist—all of whom share his condition of being outside the normal human economy. His own poverty, however, is never merely material; it is existential. He reflects that his unhappiness stems entirely from his own vices, and that he has no way of fighting anybody. When he thinks of the world as composed entirely of unhappy people, he knows that his own unhappiness is different: it cannot be fought with society, because society would be flabbergasted by his audacity in complaining.

The Final Shape of Poverty

By the end of the notebooks, poverty has become a permanent state. After his release from the mental hospital, Yozo's elder brother buys him a dilapidated thatch-covered house on a remote coast, with worm-eaten woodwork and peeling walls. An ugly old servant named Tetsu is sent to look after him. He has neither happiness nor unhappiness; everything passes. The poverty that began as a financial shock has become the texture of his entire existence—a life stripped of ambition, connection, and even the capacity to suffer. The final image is of a man who has been reduced to nothing, living in a house that is itself falling apart, tended by a woman with whom he occasionally quarrels like a married couple. Poverty, in the end, is not something he experiences; it is what he has become.