Yozo recognizes it as Van Gogh’s self-portrait, but Takeichi says it’s a painting of a ghost.
One day, Takeichi shows Yozo a famous painting. After some false starts, he manages to bring Takeichi back to his house during a rainstorm, and he gently dries his new friend, prompting Takeichi to say that women will surely go crazy for him later in life-a comment that ends up being true, though it unsettles Yozo. He decides to get as close as possible to Takeichi, hoping this will allow him to keep an eye on him.
One day, though, he purposefully falls down at school, and while everyone is laughing, a quiet boy named Takeichi comes up behind him and whispers, “You did it on purpose.” Yozo is horrified to learn that Takeichi-whom he thought was unintelligent-can see right through his entire act. He thinks of himself as a clown who’s willing to do anything to get others to laugh, and he becomes quite good at endearing himself to people. Yozo feels unable or unwilling to let his “true nature” show, so he develops a technique of performing for the people in his life. The experience makes him feel “corrupted.” At one point, several members of his family’s waitstaff sexually abuse him, and he feels unable to tell anyone about it. As a young boy, he feels depressed by what he sees as “human dullness,” which is something he picks up on when he thinks about the logical, unaesthetic way people move through life. He has never seen the point of eating big meals, for instance, but he always eats large amounts to please other people. He begins by describing his childhood, explaining that certain things about society and humanity never made much sense to him. The novel then presents Yozo’s personal notebooks. But, the speaker says, there’s something deeply disturbing about Yozo, especially in the final picture, in which he stands in a run-down room while staring at the camera with a blank expression. The unnamed speaker finds each picture grotesque, saying he can hardly recognize Yozo as a human, even though he knows most people would find Yozo good-looking. There are three pictures of him: one as a child, one when he’s slightly older, and one as an adult.
An unnamed speaker describes pictures of a man later revealed to be Yozo.
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