Death By Choice

by Masahiko Shimada

  Takako: Hey come on guys, we’re eating!

  Calpis: Well it’s not that I…hey, you’re having me on. And anyway, who was it who dropped all his spare cash in Kinshicho the other day?

  Mitsuyo: Daikichi! You may not be a hit with the girls, but that doesn’t mean you should go living it up in cabarets you know.

  Daikichi: Well if that’s how you’re going to be, come on and scout me for one of your movies then. You promised you’d use me as the male star in one of those clips of yours, didn’t you?

  Mitsuyo: Hey, what do you think of Poo?

  Poo: Eh? I’m an out and out people hater, you know.

  Zombie: Oh wow, you guys are all really living hard, aren’t you?

  Takako: Seems like there’s something wrong with living hard.

  Zombie: You don’t want me around?

  Takako: I didn’t say that. You were behind Mitsuyo in the same high school, weren’t you Zombie?

  Zombie: Yeah. I wrote to her when I saw her in one of her videos. And she really looked after me when I came to Tokyo.

  Daikichi: But you’re smart, Zombie. Didn’t you do literature or something at Keio University?

  Takako: There were lots of really unusual, talented people at Mitsuyo’s school.

  Zombie: There’s also this really sharp-tongued guy who you see on discussion programs, he’s from our school too.

  Mitsuyo: And there’s that actress who used to be in one of those morning drama series on TV a while back, who does whiskey commercials now – she was about five years ahead of me at school. And I heard of another girl about fifteen years older, she attacked the American embassy with a stick of dynamite.

  Takako: That’s the kind of place Hokkaido is.

  Mitsuyo: Whaddya mean?

  Takako: I mean there are actresses and critics, and literary types like Zombie, and I guess terrorists… you get a lot of people who throw dynamite at the American embassy up that way?

  Mitsuyo: What school were you at?

  Takako: I was at a mission school in Yokohama.

  Mitsuyo: You mean like Felaccio Girls School? Well then, I guess you’d only find office girls and housewives from there.

  Takako: No way. You ever heard of the manga artist Hiyoko Kannazuki?

  Zombie: I know her! She did that story about the girl who had one hundred eight disastrous love affairs.

  Takako: You read Kannazuki’s latest?

  Zombie: Sure. The girl starves to death from anorexia.

  Daikichi: You could find one or two odd guys who graduated from my school too, if you looked.

  Calpis: We had that weird headmaster, didn’t we?

  Daikichi: Oh yeah, old Jomon. Named after that prehistoric Japanese period. He was really weird.

  Poo: What kinda guy was he?

  Daikichi: He graduated from the Nakano Military College.

  Poo: Eh? What kinda school is that?

  Daikichi: The place Onoda went to.

  Takako: Onoda? Who’s Onoda?

  Daikichi: That soldier who didn’t know the war had ended and stayed holed up in the jungle in Sumatra for thirty years.

  Calpis: It wasn’t Sumatra, it was Lubang.

  Poo: You mean he went on fighting all by himself for thirty years?

  Daikichi: He lived like they did back in the Jomon Period. The Nakano Military College is the kinda place where you’re taught to survive anywhere, even in the jungle. Our headmaster was like a Jomon guy too.

  Calpis: He used to teach his students weird stuff. Like how to dig a tunnel just with a stick, or how to make a house by cutting down a single tree, or how to get water from grass, or how to tell which herbs and stuff you can eat.

  Daikichi: It’s called “survival technique”. He always said it would come in handy some time.

  Mitsuyo: You’ll probably find it useful when you turn into tramps on the street.

  Zombie: Or when your house is destroyed in an earthquake.

  Calpis: But there isn’t any jungle round here.

  Daikichi: There’s grass and trees, at least.

  Mitsuyo: “Survival” means knowing how to live all alone without anything, yeah?

  Daikichi: You can do that just by using that lovely body of yours, can’t you Mitsuyo?

  Mitsuyo: And as for you, you’re so scruffy you don’t know what to do with yourself. Anyway, there are people like Zombie here who don’t care about survival. What about you, Kita?”

  Twelve eyeballs turned as one to stare at him. Kita hadn’t said a word about himself so far. Now their attention turned at last to the fellow who’d been sitting there all along, simply taking in the conversation as it bounced back and forth over the round table. A vague uneasiness hovered in the air – would he suddenly come out with some deep remark under his breath? Would he lose his temper over how boring they were all being?

  “Well I don’t really understand about life…” Kita protested with a wry little self-deprecating grin.

  “Come on now,” said Daikichi.

  “Kita wants to die, see,” Mitsuyo said, looking at him gently, and after the tiniest pause the rest of them nodded gravely. Only Zombie sat looking down at her lap, somehow shy.

  “Why do you want to die?” Takako asked, helping Kita to some Lao-chu. “You’re still young.” Beside her, Poo had tucked her chin in and was gazing earnestly at Kita from under her brows. When their eyes met, for some reason she clapped her hand to her mouth and burst out laughing. When she realized no one else was joining in, she blushed and murmured “Sorry.”

  “No, no, you can laugh if you like,” said Kita. “It’s funny enough, after all,” and at this everyone obligingly laughed.

  “Seems a bit dangerous to me,” Poo remarked lightly.

  “Now listen, girl,” said Takako in a reproving voice.

  “What’s the danger? I feel like I’m acting perfectly normally,” said Kita.

  “I mean, once you’ve decided to die, you can do pretty much anything you want, right?” Poo flapped her hands about to illustrate her point.

  “I don’t think deciding to die makes you all that free to act. After all, it’s tough work dying. You don’t have much leeway to think about other things,” muttered Zombie. For once, she spoke in a tone of deep conviction. Kita had to take his hat off to her – failing to kill yourself four times was no mean feat. “It’s just not that easy to do it at your own pace,” she went on. “You’ve got to have your act together or you get half way and it all fizzles out.”

  The two of them were cool as cucumbers. You’d think the topic of dying was the thing of the moment.

  “And how do you want to die, Kita?” Takako cut in.

  “Well I haven’t quite decided. What do you think’s the best way?” said Kita, falling in with the general tone.

  “I’d go for hara kiri myself,” said Daikichi.

  “What, with that belly of yours?” Mitsuyo shot back mockingly. “You’d better tone up the muscles first.”

  A sunny laughter filled the table again. Through the hilarity, Calpis shouted, “I’d like to just drop dead suddenly.”

  “Me too,” said Takako.

  Poo thought for a moment. “I think I’d go for double suicide with a guy,” she said.

  “I’m not wild about the idea of dying, myself,” Mitsuyo threw in.

  Everyone was waiting with interest for what Zombie would say, but she threw everyone completely by ducking the issue and casually remarking, “I wonder what I’ll try next time?”

  Takako gazed into her eyes with a serious expression, and inquired about suicide methods. At this, Zombie gleefully replied, “I was still in sixth form at elementary school the first time I tried it, so I hadn’t done much research on methods. I didn’t really think about it, I just jumped into a freezing swimming pool in winter. I thought the shock would stop my heart, but I guess my heart was pretty strong, so all I got from it was a cold.”

  “Why did you want to kill yourself?”

  “When I thought
about how I was going to have to leave all my friends when we went off to new schools, suddenly there just didn’t seem any point in living.”

  “Did you write some kind of a will?”

  “Uh-huh. I kept a diary back then, and the day before I committed suicide I wrote ‘I’m so sorry Mum and Dad, I can’t face going on living so I have to go to heaven ahead of you.’ But no one believed I’d committed suicide, so afterwards I tore it up and threw it away. Everyone had the idea I’d fallen in by mistake, see. There was a big fuss at the PTA meeting about how the school was negligent over safety, and it just wasn’t a situation where it would’ve felt right to explain I was trying to kill myself.”

  “You always did have bad timing,” Mitsuyo remarked. “So what about the second time?”

  “Well that was in third grade at Middle School. I had this good friend, and we used to exchange diaries. When that rock singer Ozaki died she got real depressed, and said a world without Ozaki was like Japan without the emperor, and there was no point being alive. And then she started talking about following him into death like the loyal retainers used to do in the old days. Well of course I already had experience from the time I tried to kill myself when I was twelve, so we started getting excited about dying together, and ended up deciding to hang ourselves in the store room of the school gym. We were just about to put our heads through the noose when the gym teacher walks in naked from the waist up and yells ‘Hey you two, what’re you doing messing about in here at this hour? Go on home this minute!’ so the whole thing went kinda flat for us.”

  “You gave up, huh? Suicide was just a kind of fooling about.”

  “But third time lucky in third year high school. I meant business that time. I cut my wrists and there was blood everywhere. It was quite a shock, so I panicked and dialled the 110 emergency number, but they said ‘Wrong number miss. Ambulance is 119.” Anyhow, the blood was still pouring out and my brand new dress was all red with it, and I was just feeling like I was going to faint from lack of blood when my boyfriend called up. ‘Get an ambulance and come quick!’ I yelled, and that’s the last I remember. Next thing I was in the hospital, and my boyfriend was being grilled by a policeman. He said he was dead scared about what I might come out with when I woke up. We’d had a quarrel, see.”

  “So how did you explain it? They must’ve asked what the motive was?” Everyone was listening agog. Zombie simply went on calmly with her story.

  “I said I’d just felt it was all kind of pointless somehow, and the policeman really told me off. I only thought that if I said it was disappointment in love, it would’ve made things tricky for my boyfriend, see. But we split up anyway. He said he didn’t want to hang out with a girl who committed suicide at the drop of a hat.”

  “That was honest of him.”

  “Really was. And what about the fourth time?” Mitsuyo demanded, urging her on with the story.

  “There’s more?” muttered Kita, with a wry smile.

  “This time I was determined I wouldn’t cause anyone trouble and no one would get in my way, so I decided to give my heart an electric shock. I cut the lamp cord, and stuck one end onto my back with sticking plaster and the other between my breasts, and attached it up to a timer I’d bought at the electrical shop and set it to go off and kill me while I was asleep. I thought I’d be so tense I wouldn’t be able to sleep, so I drank lots of that stuff you take to avoid motion sickness, and off I went. I left a will on my desk. I was sure the electric current would hit my heart just as dawn broke and I’d die, but I woke up again near noon next day. I just lay there for a while in some kind of stupor, then I finally realized I’d left the plug out of the socket, so I’d failed again.”

  “You forgot to plug it in before you went to bed?”

  “No, I distinctly remembered plugging it in. But I guess I must’ve pulled it out without knowing. I toss and turn a lot in my sleep.”

  “And when was that?”

  “Last year maybe. When I was twenty-one.”

  “So you’ve failed to kill yourself every three years since you were twelve, huh?”

  “Yeah, I guess it’s just turned out like that.”

  “So if you keep to pattern, the next time’s the year after next.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  Daikichi and Mitsuyo and Poo all turned to look at each other and grinned. Zombie smiled shyly too. “You’re putting a lot of pressure on me with all this anticipating,” she said, and she smiled over at Kita as if looking for support. At this, everyone’s smiling faces turned to him again, as if waiting for him to add the final word on the subject.

  “You did well to get through death four times,” said Kita with a straight face. “No matter how you look at it, seems like you’re made to survive.”

  “Mm, could be,” Zombie answered, blushing and covering her face with her hands.

  His cheeks bulging with fried rice, Daikichi broke in, “But it’s a real waste to go using up your luck like that you know. Come on Zombie, let’s go to the races together. If you use up your luck at the races, you’ll actually get to die next time, you know.”

  “Listen Daikichi,” Mitsuyo pointed out. “That name of yours already means ‘excellent luck’ if you think of how it’s written. I’d say your name’s swallowed all your luck.”

  Daikichi nodded deeply. “Hisao Daikichi,” he commented. “That’s me. ‘Man of long life and excellent luck.’ I was born on New Year’s Day, see.”

  Kita turned to Zombie, and casually asked how her real name was written. “Maybe you’ve got a name that’s unlucky for future suicide attempts,” he added. “Let’s see what the characters reveal.”

  “Izumi Mizusawa,” she said. “Watery Stream Fountain.” The wet connotations struck Kita as just right for her.

  The food on the table had largely disappeared by now. Occasional garlicky burps and sighs scented the air. Everyone was in need of a little light exercise after the meal. Kita glanced over at Mitsuyo. Would he be able to share her bed tonight? She sent him back a little smile.

  “Death is ridiculous.”

  Her abrupt remark startled Kita. “Eh?” he said. Gripping Zombie’s hand, Mitsuyo went on.

  “Here she is, almost died four times, and she’s learned nothing. She doesn’t understand a thing. You feel a fool for listening to her. It turns you right off any idea of suicide, there’s that to be grateful for. Thanks for saving me, Zombie! Now how about saving Kita while you’re at it?”

  Zombie seemed suddenly uncomfortable. Her eyes skimmed here and there around the room like a couple of flies. The others were grinning vaguely, having no idea what Mitsuyo was really trying to say. It suddenly struck Kita that he wanted to avoid being left alone with Zombie tonight. He agreed that death was ridiculous, and he could see just how bad Zombie’s luck was. Whether she managed to kill herself or not, others would only treat it as a farce. This was perfectly clear to him. And… and that’s precisely what he couldn’t stand. Death isn’t absolute. It doesn’t even teach you the nature of infinity. Zombie probably knew this, and that’s why she was putting it on.

  “What’ll we do next?” Daikichi looked inquiringly at Kita to see how he was feeling. “How about heading off to a karaoke joint and really hitting it? Or maybe you got some other plan?”

  Daikichi sure knew how to suck up. Kita picked up the bill that had been placed before him, and stood up. The others all thanked him and set off to follow, assuming there’d be more to the evening. After he’d paid, Kita lined them all up in front of the entrance, and took a commemorative photo with the camera Yashiro had given him.

  Walpurgis Night

  After they’d done the rounds of a few game centres, shot dead a gang of forty-five, crashed seventeen cars, rescued two stuffed toys, and battled twenty-three combatants into unconsciousness, they polished off three games of bowls, and finally all tumbled into a love hotel that had a pool and karaoke machine.

  They weren’t wasting a moment. No sooner were they in
than they’d flung themselves into a singing competition. They divided up into two mixed sex teams and took turns to sing, using the electronic grading system to see who won. Losing meant taking off an item of clothing – not just the singer but everyone on the team. The plan was that the game would go on until everyone on one team lost all their clothes. Then they’d be flung in the pool. When Kita’s turn came, he sang ‘Cape Erimo,’ but he lost to Zombie’s rendition of ‘My Way’ so he and Calpis had to take off their trousers, while Mitsuyo was already faced with having to remove her bra. The competition was reaching its climax and Calpis had a bulge in his underpants, when Takako refused to take off her skirt and suddenly declared she had to go home before her curfew.

  “I’ll see you home,” cried Calpis, struggling quickly back into the trousers he’d recently taken off, but the crotch was too tight and he couldn’t do up the zipper. Everyone laughed.

  “What’s this? You’re off already? Before you’ve had a swim?” Daikichi stood there feet apart, the mike firmly gripped in his hand.

  Then Poo also reached for her skirt, declaring she had to leave. Daikichi clicked his tongue reprovingly. “Why?” he demanded obstinately.

  “But my boyfriend’s coming back tomorrow. From Mt. Fuji.”

  “That’s tomorrow. You’re still free tonight.”

  “But if we lose one more time I’ll have to take off my slip. I’d feel guilty about him.”

  “You don’t know what he’s up to at Mt. Fuji, do you?”

  “He’s on army exercises. He’s in the Self Defence Force. I want to be a good girl for him. He’s protecting our nation, right? If I serve him well, that means I’m serving the nation, see.”

  As she spoke, Poo was getting back into her clothes with the speed of a soldier under orders.

  “Self Defence Force, eh? Oh well, too bad,” sighed Daikichi, without any clear idea of just what was too bad. He gave up trying to hold her back, and turned to Mitsuyo. A chill had descended on the entertainment, and Mitsuyo had also slipped her breasts back into her bra.

  “Come on, let’s keep hitting it!” Daikichi said to her, tossing back his beer.

  “You oughta head down and hit it at Mt. Fuji yourself, Daikichi.”