Yozo's father
Yozo's father is a central yet largely absent figure in Yozo's life, a wealthy politician and landowner whose authority and emotional distance shape Yozo's deepest fears and his lifelong struggle to connect with others. As a member of the Diet and a man of considerable means, he maintains a town house in Tokyo and frequently travels there on business, leaving Yozo in the care of servants and relatives. His presence, even when he is away, is described by Yozo as "oppressive and intimidating," a force that makes the young boy tremble and feel incapable of honest self-expression. The father's power is not merely social but psychological: Yozo recalls that he "could not folly understand even my own parents" and that his father's reprimands struck him "with the force of a thunderbolt," convincing him that he had already been "disqualified from living among human beings."
The Lion Mask Incident
The most vivid early encounter between Yozo and his father centers on a gift-giving ritual that exposes the fundamental asymmetry of their relationship. One night before a trip to Tokyo, Yozo's father summons all the children to the parlor and, smiling, asks each what present they would like, carefully noting their replies in a little book. When he turns to Yozo, the boy can only stammer uncertainly; his first impulse is to answer "Nothing," because he feels that nothing will make him happy. Pressed further, Yozo remains silent and fidgeting, and his father's good humor fades. The fatal question "Wouldn't you like one?" paralyzes Yozo completely, and his brother suggests a book. The father snaps his notebook shut without writing anything, and Yozo is consumed by terror at having angered him. That night, Yozo creeps downstairs, finds the notebook, and writes "Lion Mask" in big letters—not because he wants the mask, but because he knows his father wants to buy it for him. When his father later discovers the entry, he laughs and calls Yozo "a funny kid," interpreting the act as a charming mischief rather than the desperate, fearful accommodation it truly was. The incident crystallizes Yozo's lifelong pattern: he cannot express his own desires, and he will go to extreme lengths to avoid displeasing authority, even at the cost of his own truth.
Political Hypocrisy and the Lesson of Deception
Yozo's father also inadvertently teaches him a devastating lesson about the insincerity of the human world. When a celebrated political figure from the father's party comes to speak in their town, Yozo is taken by the servants to the theatre to hear him. The house is packed with the father's friends, who applaud enthusiastically. But as the audience filters out into the snowy night, Yozo overhears these same men—his father's closest friends—complaining bitterly about how inept the opening remarks were and how difficult the speech was to follow. Yet when they stop by the house and enter the parlor, they tell Yozo's father with expressions of genuine delight that the meeting was a great success. Even the servants, when asked by Yozo's mother, answer as if it were their spontaneous thought that it had been really interesting—the same servants who had been complaining on the way home that political meetings are the most boring thing in the world. This minor example, Yozo reflects, is only one of many "pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity" that fill human life. The experience deepens his conviction that human beings are fundamentally deceptive and that he himself must continue his own clowning to survive.
Financial Control and Emotional Distance
Throughout Yozo's adolescence and young adulthood, his father maintains control through money and silence. When Yozo enters college, his father puts him into a school intended to produce a civil servant, ignoring Yozo's desire to study art. Yozo, unable to answer back, dumbly obeys. Even when they live in the same house, his father is so busy receiving guests or going out that three or four days may pass without their seeing each other. After Yozo's suicide attempt with Tsuneko, his father's name has news value, and the incident is treated prominently in the press. A relative informs Yozo that his father and the rest of the family are so enraged that he might be disowned. Later, when Yozo is living in Flatfish's house, the father sends money secretly through Yozo's brothers, never directly to Yozo, and Flatfish is instructed to keep the source hidden. This indirect, conditional support leaves Yozo feeling like a burden and deepens his sense of isolation. When Yozo, as a last resort, writes a long letter to his father confessing his circumstances and begging for help, the answer never comes. The silence is devastating: Yozo's anxiety and dread increase, and he turns more heavily to morphine.
Death and Its Aftermath
Yozo's father dies of gastric ulcers while Yozo is confined in a mental hospital. The news is delivered by Yozo's eldest brother, who comes with Flatfish to take him out of the asylum. The brother informs Yozo that his father died at the end of the previous month, and that the family will not ask questions about his past as long as he leaves Tokyo immediately. Yozo's reaction is one of profound emptiness: "The news of my father's death eviscerated me. He was dead, that familiar, frightening presence who had never left my heart for a split second. I felt as though the vessel of my suffering had become empty, as if nothing could interest me now. I had lost even the ability to suffer." The father's death does not liberate Yozo; it removes the last anchor of his identity, leaving him adrift. He is taken to a remote coastal village, where he lives as a "reject," cared for by an ugly old servant, his life reduced to a passive, meaningless existence. The father's absence, like his presence, is a form of condemnation.
Thematic Significance
Yozo's father embodies the authority, wealth, and social respectability that Yozo can neither attain nor escape. He is the source of Yozo's earliest terror of human beings, the model of the powerful adult who cannot be understood or pleased. The father's indirectness—his refusal to state plainly what he wants, his use of money as a tool of control, his silence in response to Yozo's desperate letter—mirrors the "strange, elusive complexities" that Yozo finds in all human communication. In the epilogue, the Madam of the Kyobashi bar, reflecting on Yozo's life, says simply, "It's his father's fault." The judgment is stark but not simplistic: the father's failure to offer direct love, clear guidance, or genuine acceptance is the original wound from which Yozo's lifelong shame and self-destruction flow. Yet Yozo himself never blames his father; he internalizes the failure as his own, and the father's death leaves him not with relief but with a hollow emptiness that signals the final extinguishing of his capacity for suffering—and for life.
