The Incident of Liangzi's Sexual Assault
The violation of Yoshiko by a shopkeeper, witnessed by Yozo and Horiki, is the decisive incident of Yozo's life, shattering his last hope of trust and plunging him into irreversible despair, addiction, and madness.
Background and the Marriage of Trust
Yozo had married Yoshiko, a pale seventeen-year-old girl with crooked teeth who worked in a tobacco shop, after a drunken promise to give up drinking. He was drawn to what he perceived as her immaculate trustfulness, a quality he likened to a waterfall among green leaves. Yoshiko was a genius at trusting people; she suspected nothing of Yozo's past, not even his relations with the Madam of the Kyobashi bar or his suicide attempt with Tsuneko. For a time, Yozo gave up drink, devoted himself to drawing cartoons, and enjoyed simple pleasures with his bride—watching movies, buying pots of flowers, and listening to her words. He began to entertain the faint hope that he might one day become a human being and be spared a horrible death. This fragile peace was shattered when Horiki, the bird of ill-omen, reappeared, and the two resumed their old friendship, drinking together and visiting the bar in Kyobashi.
The Event: Discovery and Collapse
On a sticky hot summer's night, Horiki came to Yozo's apartment wearing a tattered summer kimono, claiming an emergency and asking to borrow money to redeem his suit. Yozo, having no money, sent Yoshiko to the pawnshop with some of her clothes. With the remaining money, Yozo bought gin, and the two men went up on the roof to drink. They played a guessing game of tragic and comic nouns, and then a game of antonyms, which degenerated into drunken, oppressive banter. Horiki, drunk, staggered downstairs, saying he would go get something to eat from Yoshiko. Moments later, he returned, his voice and color changed, and whispered to Yozo to look. Through a small window over Yozo's room, Yozo saw two animals: Yoshiko and the shopkeeper, an undersized runt of about thirty who used to ask Yozo to draw cartoons. Yozo's eyes swam, but he murmured to himself that this was just another aspect of human behavior. He stood petrified on the staircase, not even thinking to help Yoshiko. Horiki noisily cleared his throat, and Yozo ran back up to the roof to escape, collapsing there.
Consequences: The Wound and the Fall
The feelings that assailed Yozo as he looked up at the summer night sky were not of fury, hatred, or even sadness, but of overpowering fear—a fierce ancestral dread, something like encountering the white-clothed body of the god in a sacred grove. His hair turned prematurely grey from that night. He lost all confidence in himself, doubted all men immeasurably, and abandoned all hopes for the things of this world, all joy, all sympathy, eternally. This was truly the decisive incident of his life; he had been split through the forehead between the eyebrows, a wound that would throb with pain whenever he came in contact with a human being. Horiki, after expressing a hollow sympathy, left, saying the place was a perfect hell. Yozo wept bitterly, crying aloud. Yoshiko, standing haplessly behind him with a platter of beans, said the shopkeeper had told her he wouldn't do anything. Yozo, unable to contradict anyone, told her it was all right and that she didn't know enough to distrust others. They sat down side by side and ate the beans.
The Deeper Wound: The Defilement of Trust
Yozo felt less hatred for the shopkeeper than for Horiki, who had returned to inform him instead of clearing his throat when he first discovered them. But the most persistent source of grief was not the fact of Yoshiko's defilement, but the defilement of her trust in people. For Yozo, whose ability to trust others was so cracked and broken, Yoshiko's immaculate trustfulness had seemed clean and pure. One night sufficed to turn the waters of this pure cascade yellow and muddy. Yoshiko began to fret over Yozo's every smile or frown, jumped when he called her, and addressed him with an excessive profusion of honorifics. Yozo, unable to become enraged or utter a word of complaint, felt that everything was his fault. He began to doubt the one virtue he had depended on, and lost all comprehension of everything around him. His only resort was drink. His face coarsened, his teeth fell out from the interminable drinking bouts, and his cartoons verged on the pornographic. He began to copy pornographic pictures which he secretly peddled for money to buy gin. He also began to suspect that Yoshiko might have yielded to others, including Horiki, but he lacked the courage to question her. He would inflict on her an abominable, hellish caressing before dropping into a dead sleep.
The Final Descent: Addiction and Madness
The incident directly precipitated Yozo's final descent. Unable to bear the oppressive atmosphere of the apartment, he drank heavily and eventually coughed blood in the snow. He sought help from a pharmacist woman, who gave him morphine, claiming it was no more harmful than liquor. Yozo became an out-and-out addict, and his debt at the pharmacy reached a frightening figure. He wrote a long letter to his father confessing his circumstances, but the answer never came. He decided to give himself ten shots of morphine and throw himself into the river, but Flatfish and Horiki appeared, having sniffed out his plan. Horiki showed Yozo a gentle smile, the like of which he had never before seen, and Yozo, completely shattered, wept. He was bundled into an automobile and taken to a hospital, which turned out to be a mental hospital. The key grated in the lock behind him. His delirious cry after swallowing sleeping pills—that he would go where there were no women—had now materialized in a truly uncanny way: his ward held only male lunatics, and the nurses were also men. He had become a madman, a reject, disqualified as a human being.
