Yozo and Shoji's Love and Suicide

Yozo's relationship with Tsuneko is the first and only genuine love he experiences, yet it is also the event that most decisively accelerates his descent into self-destruction. Tsuneko, a waitress at a Ginza café, is a married woman two years older than Yozo whose husband is in prison for swindling. From their first meeting, she offers Yozo something no one else has: the freedom to drop his clowning. When he sits beside her, he drinks in silence, not bothering to hide the taciturnity and gloom that are his true nature, and she does not intimidate him or demand performance. Lying next to her, he feels enveloped by a silent current of misery that mingles with his own harsher gloom like a withered leaf settling to rest on the stones at the bottom of a pool. For one night, he experiences liberation and happiness—a word he uses affirmatively and without hesitation, a boldness he knows will not recur in his notebooks.

The Course of the Affair and the Suicide Pact

After that single night, Yozo avoids Tsuneko for a month, frightened by the bonds he feels he has imposed on himself. When he finally returns to the café with Masao Horiki, the encounter takes a devastating turn. Horiki, drunk, refuses to kiss Tsuneko, declaring her too poverty-stricken even for a lecher. This public humiliation strikes Yozo like a thunderbolt: he sees Tsuneko as a tired, wretched woman smelling of poverty, yet this realization wells up a feeling of comradeship and, for the first time in his life, a positive movement of love. He drinks until he vomits and loses consciousness for the first time. Waking in her room, Tsuneko asks if he was serious when he said love flies out the window when poverty comes in the door, and proposes that she work for him. He refuses. Towards dawn, she pronounces the word "death," and Yozo, reflecting on his dread of the world, money, the movement, women, and his studies, consents easily to her proposal, though an element of make-believe still lurks in his resolution.

The next morning, wandering around Asakusa, they stop at a lunch stand for milk. When Tsuneko asks Yozo to pay, he opens his wallet to find only three copper coins. The humiliation is more strange than any he has tasted before—a humiliation he cannot live with. It is then that he determines, this time as a reality, to kill himself. That night at Kamakura, Tsuneko unties her sash, borrowed from a friend at the café, and folds it neatly on a rock; Yozo removes his coat and places it beside hers. They enter the water together. Tsuneko dies. Yozo is saved.

Consequences and Aftermath

The incident is treated prominently in the press, partly because Yozo is a college student and his father's name has news value. Confined to a hospital on the coast, Yozo learns from a relative that his family is so enraged he might be disowned. But these matters do not concern him; he thinks only of the dead Tsuneko and weeps, longing for her. He realizes that of all the people he has ever known, that miserable Tsuneko was the only one he loved. The suicide attempt leads to his expulsion from college, the severing of ties with his family, and his placement under the guardianship of Flatfish. It also results in a suspended sentence, but the experience leaves him with a permanent wound: the memory of the district attorney's quiet smile when he faked a cough of blood, a gentle contempt worse than any punishment. The relationship with Tsuneko becomes the template for all his subsequent failures—a brief, genuine connection destroyed by poverty, shame, and his own inability to sustain happiness. Even years later, when he attempts suicide again with an overdose of Dial sleeping pills, the first words he murmurs as he regains consciousness are "I'm going home," though it is not clear what place he means. The memory of Tsuneko haunts him, and his longing for her never fully fades, becoming one of the few authentic emotions in a life otherwise defined by performance and despair.