The name means evening moon. Yuzuki was a Mutsuki-class destroyer built at the Fujinagata yard in Osaka. She was laid down on 27 November 1926, launched on 4 March 1927 and completed on 25 July 1927 as Destroyer No. 34. She received her name on 1 August 1928. In the late 1930s she covered landings in China and in French Indochina.
At Pearl Harbor she was in Destroyer Division 23 of Carrier Division 2, and sailed from the Bonin Islands for the Guam landing. She covered the Kavieng landing in January 1942 and the northern Solomons and Lae landings in March. During the Tulagi invasion on 3 and 4 May 1942 aircraft strafed her; ten men were killed, including her captain, Lieutenant Commander Hirota Tachibana, and 20 were injured. After Kikuzuki was sunk she became flagship of Destroyer Division 30.
She was repaired at Sasebo in May, then led Destroyer Division 29. She escorted construction crews to Bougainville and Guadalcanal and screened the Nauru and Ocean Island landing on 31 August 1942. In 1943 she patrolled the central Pacific and often rescued crews of torpedoed transports. In February 1944 she led the last Tokyo Express runs to New Britain and the final evacuation of Rabaul. On 27 April 1944 she helped rescue survivors of the light cruiser Yubari.
She escorted convoys to Taiwan in the fall of 1944 and took the carrier Junyo to Brunei and Manila. On 12 December 1944, escorting a troop convoy from Manila to Ormoc, Marine aircraft sank her 65 miles north-northeast of Cebu. Twenty crew were killed and 217 survivors were taken off by Kiri. She was struck from the Navy List on 10 January 1945.
Sources: Allyn Nevitt's combinedfleet.com Tabular Record of Movement for IJN Yuzuki; Wikipedia, Japanese destroyer Yuzuki, rewritten here.