No Longer Human

“The face in the second snapshot is startlingly unlike the first. He is a student in this picture, although it is not clear whether it dates from high school or college days. At any rate, he is now extraordinarily handsome. But here again the face fails inexplicably to give the impression of one belonging to a living human being.”

The revulsion that Yozo’s childhood photograph elicits gives way to a subtler feeling of wrong. A handsome young man, Yozo has nearly perfected his childhood disguise. The artificiality of his smile belies his good looks, however, indicating the depth of his isolation and rendering him unpleasant to look at.

“I think that even a death mask would hold more of an expression, leave more of a memory. That effigy suggests nothing so much as a human body to which a horse’s head has been attached. Something ineffable makes the beholder shudder in distaste. I have never seen such an inscrutable face on a man.”

The final photograph of Yozo depicts his status at the end of the novel. His health is ruined, and he is a hollow husk of a man who has given up all agency. He has turned his belief that he is disqualified as a human being into reality, and the unnamed narrator recognizes this instinctively. Yozo leaves no memory, just an indefinable distaste in the mind of the narrator.

“Mine has been a life of much shame.”

The very first sentence of the novel sets the tone for what is to come. Shame is one of the greatest motivations in Yozo’s life. His overwhelming and unwarranted sense of shame isolates him at an early age from finding happiness or a meaningful relationship.

“I have sometimes thought that I have been burdened with a pack of ten misfortunes, any one of which if borne by my neighbor would be enough to make a murderer of him.”

Reflecting on his early life, Yozo explains that his idea of happiness is at odds with what society expects of him. The “ten misfortunes” is a symbol that he returns to throughout the three notebooks—particularly during darker moments of his life. While it is a melodramatic symbol, the fact that he believes his misfortunes are finite indicates some hope that they may end.

“I thought, ‘As long as I can make them laugh, it doesn’t matter how, I’ll be all right. If I succeed in that, the human beings probably won’t mind it too much if I remain outside their lives. The one thing I must avoid is becoming offensive in their eyes: I shall be nothing, the wind, the sky.’”

To keep others at a distance, Yozo resolves to become a jester-like figure. His antics are designed to endear him to others, but he is careful not to push them too far. This act is both a blessing and a curse: He successfully isolates himself, but there are important moments in which people such as Shigeko and Yoshiko fail to take him seriously.

“Already by that time I had been taught a lamentable thing by the maids and menservants; I was being corrupted. I now think that perpetuate such a thing on a small child is the ugliest, via list, cruelest crime a human being can commit. But I endured it. I even felt as if it enabled me to see one more particular aspect of human beings. I smiled in my weakness.”

This quote reveals that the servants of the household have been violating Yozo. He does not go into detail, but the incidents seem ongoing, throughout his childhood. Being a survivor of sexual assault might explain his sense of isolation and mistrust of the world; he cannot even bring himself to confide in his parents.

“The fear of human beings continued to rise in my breast—I'm not sure whether more or less intensely than before—but my acting talents had unquestionably matured. I could always convulse the classroom with laughter, and even as the teacher protested what a good class it would be if only I were not in it, he would be laughing behind his hand. At a word from me even the military drill instructor, whose more usual idiom was a barbarous, thunderous roar, would burst into helpless laughter.

Yozo manages to perfect his humorous disguise by moving to a new city for high school, where he is unknown and has no personal connections who could see through his act. He learns to function as a human on the surface, while internally, he still suffers the same fears that he did as a child. This quote illustrates his effect on his schoolmates and teachers alike: He is the comedy relief character in their lives, the class clown, and everyone likes him.

“‘You did it on purpose.’”

Takeichi, an unintelligent boy in Yozo’s class, is ironically the one person to see through Yozo’s carefully crafted disguise at the time. This sends Yozo into a sort of existential crisis, as he culminates a feigned friendship with Takeichi that nevertheless leaves a profound impact on his life.

“I have always found the female of the human species many times more difficult to understand than the male. In my immediate family women outnumbered the men, and many of my cousins were girls. There was also the maidservant of the ‘crime.’ I think it would be no exaggeration to say that my only playmates while I was growing up were girls. Nevertheless, it was with very much the sensation of treading on thin ice that I associated with these girls. I could almost never guess their motives. I was in the dark; At times I made indiscrete mistakes which brought me painful wounds. These wounds, unlike the scars from the lashing a man might give, cut inwards very deep, like an internal hemorrhage, bringing intense discomfort. Once inflicted it was extremely hard to recover from such wounds.”

Takeichi’s prediction that many women will fall for Yozo (which Yozo interprets as a kind of curse) causes him to reflect on his relationship with women thus far. It is evident that his view is clouded by his experience as a survivor of sexual assault (the “crime”). The view that women are subtler, more inscrutable than men will haunt Yozo throughout his adult life, undercutting his relationships and scarring him further.

“There are some people whose dread of human beings is so morbid that they reach a point where they yearn to see with their own eyes monsters [...] Painters who have had this mentality, after repeated wounds and intimidations at the hands of the operations called human beings, have often come to believe in phantasms—they plainly saw monsters in broad daylight, in the midst of nature. And they did not fob people off with clowning; They did their best to depict these monsters just as they had appeared. Takeichi was right: they had dared to paint pictures of devils. These, I thought, would be my friends in the future. I was so excited I could have wept.”

Takeichi calling Vincent Van Gough’s self-portrait a “ghost” is a revelation to Yozo, and it leads to his one and only calling in life: that of an artist. Yozo finds kindred spirits in artists who can experience the horrors of humanity in an analogous way as he has. What he admires about these artists is their ability to embrace and reflect the ugliness of humanity in their art, rather than shy away from it. This leads to Yozo painting his “ghost portraits,” his one outlet for faithful expression of his true inner self.

“I despised him as one fit only for amusement, a man with whom I associated for that sole purpose. At times I even felt ashamed of our friendship. But in the end, as a result of going out with him, even Horiki proved too strong for me.”

When Yozo meets Horiki, he views him as someone who can initiate him into the urban lifestyle of Tokyo. Their relationship ultimately proves destructive for Yozo, but the two seem inextricably linked because, deep down, they are very similar. Yozo suspects that Horiki is the same as him, but the latter lacks the self-awareness to realize that his personality is an act.

“It was entirely different from the feeling of being able to sleep soundly which I had experienced in the arms of those idiot-prostitutes (for one thing, the prostitutes were cheerful); the night I spent with that criminal’s wife was for me a night of liberation and happiness. (The use of so bold a word, affirmatively, without hesitation, will not, I imagine, recur in these notebooks.)”

For the first (and perhaps only) time, Yozo is able find happiness in the arms of the miserable Tsuneko. Tsuneko’s misery resonates with his own, and though he does not tell her much about himself, he feels understood for once in his life. Despite this, fear and shame drive Yozo away; they do not reunite for some time.

“She died. I was saved.”

Yozo’s suicide pact with Tsuneko is the climactic moment of his young adulthood. Yozo found in Tsuneko a kindred spirit, someone as weary of the world as he was. However, Yozo was not committed to the idea of suicide until he suffered the financial humiliation of being unable to pay for a glass of milk. The aftermath of Tsuneko’s death will haunt him in the third notebook.

“How much better things would have been if only Flatfish had said something like this, ‘I’d like you to enter a school beginning in the April term. Your family has decided to send you a more adequate allowance once you have entered school.”

Flatfish speaks in a cryptic manner to make himself sound more important. Lacking any understanding of the subtleties of human behavior, Yozo realizes, too late, that Flatfish was offering him a sort of salvation, an alternate path that would have led him away from his destructive habits.

“A sense of loss which was doomed to remain eternally unmitigated stealthily began to take shape. Whenever I spoke of painting, that undrunk glass of absinthe flickered before my eyes. I was agonized by the frustrating thought: if only I could show them those paintings they would believe in my artistic talents.”

Yozo’s ghost paintings were lost during one of his moves. He eulogizes them using the metaphor of an undrunk glass of absinthe—symbolic of missed opportunity. It is ironic that these paintings are the only representation of Yozo’s true self, implying that he will never again be able to reveal his true self to the outside world.

“From then on, however, I came to hold, almost as a philosophical conviction, the belief: What is society but an individual?”

Horiki tells Yozo that society will not stand for his womanizing. This causes Yozo to reflect on society and who comprises it. He concludes that society is an individual, and this helps him cope: It is easier for him to deal with society if it functions as an individual rather than an innumerable collection of individuals.

“Why does he drink?”

“It’s because he likes liquor. It’s because he’s too good, because…”

Yozo overhears young Shigeko question her mother Shizuko about his behavior. Shigeko’s response that Yozo drinks because he is “too good” foreshadows the madame’s assessment of Yozo at the end of the novel. Yozo either ignores or does not register her remark. Giving into shame and self-doubt, he abandons the two, worried he will ruin their happiness.

“A comic strip artist, and at that an unknown one, knowing no great joys nor, for that matter, any great sorrows. I craved desperately some great savage joy, no matter how immense the suffering that might ensue, but my only actual pleasure was to engage in meaningless chatter with the customers and to drink their liquor.”

The savage joy that Yozo craves is never obtained. However, this quote foreshadows his marriage with the trusting Yoshiko, the closest he ever comes to finding true happiness; he later remarks that the suffering caused by his marriage will be immense.

“Horiki and myself.

“Despising each other as we did, we were constantly together, thereby degrading ourselves. If that is what the world calls friendship, the relations between Horiki and myself were undoubtedly those of friendship.”

According to Yozo, his and Horiki’s mutually degrading relationship is based on the fact that deep down, Horiki is just like him. However, Yozo is characteristically unable to define what friendship is, isolated as he is from “normal” life. This is perhaps the reason why he clings to his unhealthy relationship with Horiki, when he would be better off cutting ties with him and moving on.

“It was less the fact of Yoshiko’s defilement than the defilement of her trust in people which became so persistent a source of grief as almost to render my life insupportable. For someone like myself in whom the ability to trust others is so cracked and broken that I am wretchedly timid and I'm forever trying to read the expression on people's faces, Yoshiko’s immaculate trustfulness seemed clean and pure, like a waterfall among green leaves. One night suffice to turn the waters of this pure cascade yellow and muddy. Yoshiko began from that night to fret over my every smile or frown.”

After Yoshiko’s rape, Yozo realizes how much he had prized the virtue of her trust in others. His metaphor comparing her to a pure waterfall turned muddy shows her trust has been tarnished in two ways: She no longer trusts unconditionally, and more perversely, Yozo can no longer trust her, even though she is a victim, because her virtue is sullied.

“She said that it was no more harmful than liquor, and I believed her. For one thing, I was just at this stage where I come to fuel squalor of drunkenness, and I was overjoyed to be able to escape after such long bondage to the devil called alcohol. Without a flicker of hesitation I injected the morphine into my arm. My insecurity, fretfulness and timidity were swept away completely; I turned into an expansively optimistic and fluent talker. The injections made me forget how weak my body was. I applied myself energetically to my cartoons. Sometimes I would burst out laughing even when I was drawing.”

Yozo jumps from one vice to another, substituting alcoholism for morphine addiction. His health continues to degrade during this time: His tuberculosis worsens, and his physical health deteriorates. Unable to bear the weight of morphine addiction, Yozo decides to take his life once again.

“I had wept at that incredibly beautiful smile Horiki showed me, and forgetting both prudence and resistance, I had got into the car that took me here. And now I had become a madman. Even if released, I would be forever branded on the forehead with the word ‘madman,’ or perhaps, ‘reject.’

“Disqualified as a human being.

“I have now ceased utterly to be a human being.”

Being admitted to a psychiatric hospital completes Yozo’s isolation from society. He is labelled a “madman,” and he uses it to justify the unfair way that he has always viewed himself since he was a child. Cut off from the world mentally and physically, Yozo’s fate is unknown.

“Everything passes.

That is the one and only thing I have thought resembled a truth in the society of human beings where I have dwelled up to now as in a burning hell.

Everything passes.”

By the end of the third notebook, Yozo has declined (both mentally and physically) to the point of renouncing what remains of his willpower to Flatfish, Horiki, Yoshiko, and Tetsu. Giving up his agency has disqualified him as a human being. The only knowledge that Yozo gleaned in his life of misery is that everything is temporary; everything passes.