Yozo and the Drug Addicted Woman with One Leg of the Pharmacy

Yozo's encounter with the one-legged pharmacist woman begins on a snowy night in Tokyo, after he has coughed blood into the snow and wandered into her shop seeking medicine. She is a widow who supports herself on crutches, having been unable to move one side of her body since she was five due to infantile paralysis. Her husband died of tuberculosis, worsened by his drinking, and her only son is on leave from medical school with the same illness; her father-in-law lies bedridden with palsy. When Yozo enters, their eyes meet, and she stands rigid, her look speaking not of alarm but of longing, almost of a search for salvation. He recognizes her as a fellow sufferer: "Unhappy people are sensitive to the unhappiness of others." Without a word, he leaves, but returns the next night to confess his physical condition with a smile. She warns him he must give up drinking, but he admits he is afraid and no good for anything. She selects half a dozen medicines from her shelves, explaining each with tenderness, and finally wraps a little box, saying it is a medicine to be used when he needs a drink so badly he cannot stand it. It is morphine.

The Transition from Alcohol to Morphine

Yozo, weary of the squalor of drunkenness, accepts the morphine as a liberation. He injects it into his arm without hesitation, and his insecurity, fretfulness, and timidity are swept away; he becomes expansively optimistic and fluent, applying himself energetically to his cartoons and even bursting out laughing while drawing. He intends to take one shot a day, but it becomes two, then three, then four; he can no longer work unless he has his shots. The woman's admonition that he might become an addict only confirms to him that he already is one, and his uneasiness drives him to seek more of the drug. He begins to visit her late at night, knocking on her door, and when she appears in her nightgown hobbling on her crutches, he throws his arms around her and kisses her, pretending to weep. She hands him a box without a word. By the time he realizes that drugs are fouler than gin, he is an out-and-out addict, having reached the extreme of shamelessness.

Degradation and Dependency

To obtain the morphine, Yozo resumes copying pornographic pictures and begins a very ugly affair with the crippled woman. His debt at the pharmacy reaches a frightening figure. Whenever she catches sight of his face, tears come to her eyes; he also weeps. He paces back and forth, half in a frenzy, between his apartment and the pharmacy, thinking, "I want to die. I want to die more than ever before. There's no chance now of a recovery." He decides as a last resort to write a long letter to his father confessing his circumstances, but the answer never comes, and his anxiety and dread cause him to increase the dosage. He resolves to give himself ten shots that night and throw himself into the river, but on the afternoon of that very day, Flatfish and Horiki arrive to take him away. He is bundled into a car and brought to a hospital, where he is locked in a ward for male lunatics. The pharmacist woman's morphine has led him to the asylum, fulfilling his delirious cry that he would go somewhere without women.

The Refusal and Its Significance

At the hospital, when Yoshiko silently offers him the hypodermic needle and remaining medicine from her handbag, Yozo refuses for the first time in his life. He says, "No, I won't need it any more." This is a rare event, the one and only time he has ever refused something offered to him. He wonders if he has already ceased to be an addict at that instant, struck by Yoshiko's divine ignorance. The morphine addiction, which began with the pharmacist woman's kindness and ended in the asylum, represents the final stage of Yozo's degradation, a dependency that strips him of all will and leaves him a "reject." The pharmacist woman herself, a figure of mutual unhappiness and desperate tenderness, becomes the last of the women who have looked after him, but her care only accelerates his fall into madness.