Fictitious autobiographical memoir of a modern Japanese failson alcoholic. I was disinterested in reading about a sop, but the incisive descriptions of the peculiar expression of escapism quickly pulled me in.

The book opens with

Mine has been a life of much shame.

and right away I'm trying to determine if it's real or imagined shame. Seems to be some combination of both to be sure. The narrator is a boy with no self-esteem and zero preferences other than to please, even if that means playing the clown:

Whenever I was asked what I wanted my first impulse was to answer "Nothing." The thought went through my mind that it didn't make any difference, that nothing was going to make me happy.

It is implied, then revealed at the end of the first notebook (the book consists of three notebooks), that a source of shame was sexual abuse at the hands of a servant:

In short, I believe that the reason why I did not tell anyone about the loathesome crime perpetrated on me by the servants was not because of distrust. for human beings, nor of course because of Christian leanings, but because the human beings around me had rigorously sealed me off from the world of trust or distrust.

The second notebook describes his (mal)formation as an adolescent weirdo:

I continued on the surface making everybody laugh with my miserable clowning, but now and then painful sighs escaped my lips.

These passages are marked by a sense of fear of being found out – that it will come to light that his clumsy antics are executed on purpose so that he can get some laughs, even as the butt of the joke, for that would be more humiliating even than falling flat on his face. He suspects that one of his classmates may be on to him, and spazzes out:

If it were possible, I felt, I would like to keep a twenty-four hours a day surveillance over Takeichi, never stirring from him, morning, noon or night, to make sure that he did not divulge the secret. I brooded over what I should do: I would devote the hours spent with him to persuading him that my antics were not "on purpose" but the genuine article; if things went well I would lie to become his inseparable friend; but if this proved utterly impossible, I had no choice but to pray for his death. Typically enough, the one thing that never occurred to me was to kill him. during the course of my life I have wished innumerable times that I might meet with a violent death, but I have never once desired to kill anybody.

The youth is a textbook incel:

Women led me on only to throw me aside; they mocked and tortured me when others were around only to embrace me with passion as soon as everyone had left. Women sleep so soundly they seem to be dead. Who knows?

Upon going to uni, he befriends a curious devilish by named Horiki who pretty much only seems interested in school for the freedom it offers. As for education itself, in response to Yozo's (narrator) admission that he might like to attend art school, Horiki reprimands him:

Don't be silly. They're useless. Schools are all useless. The teachers who immerse themselves in Nature! The teachers who show profound sympathy for Nature!

Shortly after hsirking his academic responsibilities and hanging out with Horiki some more:

I soon came to understand that drink, tobacco and prostitutes were all excellent means of dissipating (Even for a few moments) my dread of human beings. I cam even to feel that if I had to sell every last possession to obtain these means of escape, it would be well worth it.

And so the abused clown who could not previously look a woman in the face embarks on an apprentice of the streets at the hands of prostitutes and at the cost of his soul:

With all of them I had been extremely negative and the stories had gone no further, remaining undeveloped fragments But it was an undeniable fact, and not just some foolish delusion on my part, that there lingered about me an atmosphere which could send women into sentimental reveries. It cause me a bitterness akin to shame to have this pointed out by someone like Horiki at the same time I suddenly lost all interest in prostitutes.

He becomes involved in the secret communist students union/party, post-ironically, but by making fun of them he quickly becomes their leader.

I came to be so popular that I was considered indispensable at the meetings. These simple people perhaps fancied that I was was as simple as they– an optimistic, laughter-loving comrade–but if such was their view, I was deceiving them completely. I was not their comrade. Yet I attended every single meeting and performed for them my full repertory of farce.

Just as with the prostitutes, he looks down on his chosen companionships. He is a habitual people-pleaser with no semblance of identity for himself:

I was incapable of living all by myself in those lodgings where I didn't know a soul. It terrified me to sit by myself quietly in my room. I felt frightened, as if I might be set upon or struck by someone at any moment.

Almost all his social interactions at this point are forced, obligatory, and performative:

The circumstances were such that I had no way of avoiding the landlord's daughter or this "comrade." Every day we bumped into one another; I could not dodge them as I had various other women in the past. Before I knew what was happening, my chronic lack of assurance had driven me willy-nilly into desperate attempts to ingratiate myself with both of them. It was just as if I were bound to them by some ancient debt.

It's so tragically telling how vulnerable the narrator is willing to be about his own depravity but refuses to divulge details about the traumas he was subjected to as a child. Without trying to justify his behavior (for not even he attempts this – he recognizes himself to be morally hopeless), it is easy to overlook how much the abuse likely shaped his whole character:

It was a cold autumn night. I was waiting at a sushi stall back of the Ginza for Tsuneko (that, as I recall, was her name, but the memory is too blurred for me to be sure: I am the sort of person who can forget even the name of the woman with whom he attempted suicide) to get off from work.

After abandoning Tsuneko and then running into her with Horiki who immediately sets his eyes upon her, Yozo expresses mild guilt and discomfort at the awkward reuiniting:

It was because I felt sorry for Tsuneko, sorry that she should be obliged to accept Horiki's savage kisses while I watched. Once she had been defiled by Horiki she would no doubt have to leave me. But my ardor was not positive enough for me to stop Tsuneko. I experienced an instant of shock at her unhappiness.

They're both broke, relatively in loce, and fucked.

As I stood there hesitating, she got up and looked inside my wallet. "Is that all you have?"

Her voice was innocent, but it cut me to the quick. It was painful as only the voice of the first woman I had ever lved could be painful. "Is that all? No, even that suggested more money than I had–three copper coins don't count as money at all. This was a humiliation more strange than I had tasted before, a humiliation I could not live with. I suppose I had still not managed to extricate myself from the part of the riuch man's son. It was then I myself determined, this time as a reality, to kill myself.

WE threw ourselves into the sea at Kamakura that night. She untied her sash, saying she had borrowed a it from a friend at the café, and left it folded neatly on a rock. I removed my coat and put it in the same spot.

We entered the water together. She died. I was saved

There is no debate or soul searching between his determination and her death. His mind had been made up since childhood.

In Notebook three, tarnished with guilt, he is questioned by the police for the would-be-double-suicide, and Yozo reverts to his clownish ways, trying to flee from the consequences:

No doubt he was secretly hope to while away the long autumn evening by extracting from me a confession in the nature of a pornographic story. I guessed hi intent at once, ad it was all I could do to restrain the impulse to burst out laughing in his face. I knew that I had the right to refuse to answer inquiries put me by the policeman in an "informal interrogation" of this sort, but in order to lend some interest to the long night ahead, I cloaked myself in a kind of simple sincerity, as if I firmly, unquestioningly believed that this policeman was responsible for investigating me, and that the degree of severity of my punishment depended solely on his decision. I made up a confession absurd enough to satisfy–more or less–his purient curiosity.

He goes to live a friend of the family's house nicknamed Flatfish where he is basically believed to be a threat to himself who must be watched. When pressed by Flatfish about his aspirations for "recovery" and leading a normal life in the near future (out of his flat), Yozo wavers still:

I suddenly became nostalgic for the days when I used to go from bar to bar drinking, and even for Horiki. I yearned with such desperation for "freedom" that I became weak and tearful.

He yearns for freedom of the bondage from himself. He dismisses Flatfish's suggestion that he go back to school, complaining about lack of money despite that fact that his father would be paying for it all. At his bottom, he remains blameful and greedy, even writing this notebook in hindsight he is more upset that the money for tuition was not just offered to him directly (this, perhaps more so even than the consistent self-deprecation, indicated to me that this was not going to have a happy ending. Not even just a sad ending, but an addict's death ending: writing from a vantage point to be honest and critical of his past self, but still resentful towards his father who was trying to help him get back on his feet...)

He meets a journalist by the name of Shizuko who never knows that he may be lying straight to her face. Her trustworthiness highlights Yozo's flaws of being comedic/clownish when worried about things that are serious to him, and being serious about things that are meant to be entertaining:

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.

"Do you really? You're adorable when you joke that way with a serious face"

Shizuko is a widow, and Yozo befriends her and assumes the role of uncle to her son. He eventually marries Shizuko and during one of the discussions with Shigeko:

I casually changed the subject. "Shigeko, what would you like from God?"

"I would like my real Daddy back."

:thumbs-up-step-dad: moment and the precipice of catastrophic relapse looms on probably just the next page after that. Right on time Horiki shows up to chide Yozo for still aspiring to be an artist (working as a cartoonist for Shizuko's magazine):

"If all you've got is just enough talent to get along, sooner or later you're betray yourself."

As Horiki descends from the rooftop, he sees Shizuko being raped returns to tell Yozo after it's too late. Yozo quickly falls back into old ways, consumed with shame once more:

Sometimes I spent the night ou. at bars I acted the part of a ruffian, kissed women indiscriminately, did anything as long as it was not in accord with "accepted usage," drank as wildly–no more so–as before my attempted suicide, was so hard pressed for money that I used to pawn Shizuko's clothes.

After a severals-day long spree, he sneaks back home ashamed and sees his wife and step-son playing with a rabbit in the apartment. They seem peaceful enough, so he runs away, abandoning them and seeking the vapid companionship of another woman to T-bone with his antics. His inner monologue becomes increasingly jaded, viewing existence as a competition. Not in any athletic or glorifiable manner, but in a Hobbesian manner:

Human beings cannot conceive of any means of survival except in terms of a single then-and-there contest. They speak of duty to one's country and suchlike things, but the object of their efforts is invariably the individual, and, even once the individual's needs have been met, again the individual comes in. the incomprehensibility of society is the incomprehensibility of the individual.

He seduces the tobacco shop keep owner who says she'll marry him if he stops drinking. He promises that he'll stop, knowing it to be a lie, and shows up hammered the next day. She doesn't believe him. Again, Yozo is awestruck by her purity and trustingness:

[Her] pale face was smiling as she sat in the dimly lit sHop. What a holy thing uncorrupted virginity is, I thought. I had never slept with a virgin, a girl younger than myself. I'd marry her. I wanted once in my lifetime to know that great savage joy, no matter how immense the suffering that might ensue. I had always imagined that the beauty of virginity was nothing more than the sweet, sentimental illusion of stupid poets, but it really is alive and present in this world. we would get married. In the spring we'd go together on bicycles to see waterfalls framed in green leaves . .

Not long afterwards we were martrred. The joy I obtained as a result of this action was not necessarily great or savage, but the suffering which ensued was staggering–so far surpassing what I had imagined that even describing it as "horrendous" would not quit cover it. The "world," after all, was still a place of bottomless horror. It was by no means a place of childlike simplicity where everything could be settled by a single then-and-there decision.

What follows is a hazy mix of more drinking and Gin-riffing with Horiki leading into one of the most enjoyably philosophic riffs of the novel hwerein he and Yozo try to name antonyms of various words/concepts and assign them tragic or common noun "genders":

I began questions. "Are you ready? What is tobacco?"

"Tragic," Horiki answered priomptly.

"What about medicine?"

"Powder or pills."

"Injection."

"Tragic."

"I wonder. Don't forget, there are hormone injections too."

"No, there's no question but it's tragic. First of all, there's a needle–what could be more tragic than a needle?"

"you win. But, you know, medicines and doctors are, surprisingly enough, comic. What about death?"

"Comic. And that goes for Christian ministers and Buddhist priests, too."

He is unable to even look at Yoshiko and goes back to the well:

Had she been also with Horiki? Or with someone I didn't even know? I hadn't the courage to question her; writhing in my usual doubts and fears, I drank gin. Sometimes when drunk I timidly attempted a few sneaking ventures at indirect questioning. In my heart I bounded foolishly from joy to sorrow at her responses, but on the surface I never ceased my immoderate clowning.

He gets on morphine and quickly becomes addicted. It's astonishing how short the story is from here on out, speaks to how quickly that can accelerate a spiral. Begging the shopkeep to advance him credit for more morphine, he says:

"I can't do any work unless I have the medicine. It's a kind of energy-builder for me"

"How about hormone injections?

wonder if he's hallucinating this dialog since she offers the antonym of the tragic connotation of a needle to him. The story reads like a speaker tape.

This year I am twenty-seven. My hair has become much greyer. Most people would take me for over forty.

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