Death By Choice

by Masahiko Shimada

  The boy had seized the nurse’s arm and said, “Suck me off.” She was appalled. He went on, “One more time, one more time before I die!”

  “Pull yourself together!” the nurse scolded him. She took hold of his penis.

  “Thank you,” he said, and lost consciousness.

  It must have felt really good, for he developed a taste for it. He managed to crash his motorbike not once but three times, and get himself brought back to the same hospital. Each time, he had the blissful expression of Saint Sebastian. The third time he came in, however, the back of his brain had been gouged out, and he died three hours later.

  “By the way, what happens to your penis if you die with an erection?”

  “I’d say you’d lose it,” the doctor replied curtly.

  “Wouldn’t it stay for a while?”

  “Who knows. Why do you ask?”

  “It’d be pretty amazing to have an erection when you’re already dead. How was it with that Saint Sebastian fellow?”

  The doctor shook his head. “It didn’t work for him that third time,” he told Kita. “The guy’s brains had spilled out, after all. There wasn’t even any point in massaging his heart.”

  After a brief silence, Kita announced, “I’ve decided how I’m going to kill myself.”

  “In a crash?” The doctor frowned, and scratched his head. “You’d already made that decision when you stole the car, hadn’t you?”

  “That thrill just drives me wild. I’m going to commit love suicide with my car, like your Saint Sebastian.”

  “But dying in a crash won’t be good for your internal organs, you know. We can’t use a liver or kidney that’s been pierced by a rib.”

  The doctor was still after his organs, it seemed. “I’ll make sure it’s OK,” Kita promised, but the doctor gazed steadily at him.

  “Are you really sure you’ll succeed first time? It’s a question of probabilities, see.”

  “You’re saying I might not die?”

  “I once saved a young man’s life even though his heart was cut open. He was struck by a truck and brought in unconscious with dreadfully heavy bleeding. I was sure he was done for, but I opened his chest up then and there, without anaesthetic, pinched the wound in his heart together and stopped the flow of blood, and spent a long time sewing him up. Six months later he left hospital and went back to work.”

  “Now you’re boasting. You’re saying if I get a hole in my heart, I should stick my finger in it and wait quietly for help? No way.”

  “I also saved a man who tried to kill himself by sticking a pistol in his mouth. The bullet pierced his upper jaw, travelled up beside his nose, destroyed his right eye, and came to rest in the cerebrum. His face was a mess, but there wasn’t much damage to the brain, so his life was saved.”

  “Goddamn stupid thing to do.”

  “Well, in his case you might be right. As soon as he was back on his feet he took himself up to the roof of the hospital and jumped off. He landed head first in a flowerbed. Died instantly.”

  “There’s nothing a doctor can do about instant death. I’m planning on having one myself. It’d be terrible not to quite manage the job. I’ve run through my money, see, and I’ve got no desire to go back into the world again. Come on, doc, promise me you won’t try and save me.”

  The doctor was silent. It seemed pretty clear Kita was up to something really tricky again. Sure he could let him die, but he needed to be sure those pre-sold organs stayed unharmed. He might have to put his skills to work repairing any organ that happened to get damaged, then wait until Kita was well again and make sure he was there for his next suicide attempt.

  “Is there some way I can do a thorough job when I crash the car, do you know? Tell me.”

  “I’ve no experience there I’m afraid. I suggest you give up the idea. It’s pretty painful, you know.”

  “No, I’ve made up my mind.”

  “You’ll burn to death if the car bursts into flames. And in that case, your organs—”

  “Would be roasted entrails, I should think,” Kita finished for him.

  “We’d have to remove the gasoline so you don’t burn. I’ll get you a cremation later.”

  Kita remarked that he didn’t mind the thought of cremation, but he quite fancied being left out for the birds to pick clean. Now it was finally Friday morning, he was having a few final wishes.

  “There aren’t any vultures in Hokkaido. If you want a sky burial, you should go somewhere like Tibet. Have you ever heard of the Japanese who was given a sky burial? He didn’t actually want one, it’s just that he happened to die in a hospital way up in the mountains in Tibet so his burial followed the local custom. They don’t have the wood to fuel any furnaces for cremation in Tibet, see. But they do have vultures. There are specialists in sky burial funerals, you know. They have the body carried down into the valley and placed on a large flat rock, where they cut up the flesh and break the bones. They use a rock to smash it all up, cranium, knees, the lot, so the birds can feast on the brain and marrow as well.”

  “I wonder how the guy felt. Maybe he felt all tingly when the birds were eating him.”

  “Well he’d be dead, so he wouldn’t feel anything. But I wouldn’t like a sky burial myself.”

  Kita looked at the doctor in surprise. “You got some special reason why you don’t like the idea? I had you down for the type of guy who didn’t care what happened after death,” he said.

  “I just don’t like birds,” the doctor replied shortly.

  “There’s that northern fox here in Hokkaido, isn’t there? I wonder if we could manage a fox burial. Would they eat me, do you think?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “How about I give it a try? Whatever happens, you’ll cut me up to take out the organs, won’t you? So how about dismembering my remains then like they do in sky burials so foxes can eat the rest?”

  The doctor coldly rejected this proposal. “I’m not a funeral director or a butcher, you know. I’m a doctor.”

  The guy dug in his heels over the oddest things. And here he was, harming his medical profession by turning killer and treating human life in this high-handed fashion, and he turns out to be afraid of birds!

  “I’ll bet your father would’ve liked a sky burial, you know,” Kita remarked jokingly.

  “Hmm, yes,” the doctor said, nodding thoughtfully. “He would have made a wonderfully nutritious corpse,” he added quietly.

  Friday

  Don’t Tickle my Corpse

  Five in the morning. A sense of the sea somewhere nearby. There was light all around by now, but the sky was like poured concrete.

  Kita pulled the car over to the side of the road and got out, leaving the engine running. Outside, the air was cold and grass-scented. Before him stretched a gently undulating plain. If he couldn’t get himself eaten by vultures or foxes, at least he might be able to disintegrate into particles in the wide-open spaces someplace like this, and turn to fertilizer. A spare and simple burial of this sort would suit him perfectly, thought Kita.

  The doctor had laid back his seat and was sound asleep. Kita set off into the plain, making his way among the tufts of tall grasses and plants he’d never seen before. The muddy red earth stuck to the soles of his sneakers as he walked along in search of a flat rock to lay himself down on. The chill morning air enveloped him. Suddenly seized with a need to piss, he found a suitable place and relieved himself. I’ll do this maybe twice more before I die, he thought. And I’d better make sure there’s nothing left inside me to emerge when I do die. Also, I’d really like to take a bath. And get some new clothes. And a haircut.

  Behind him he heard the sound of someone pushing through the grass. He turned to see the doctor making his way towards him, out of breath. As always, his face was expressionless, but the exhaustion of the last few days showed in the stubble on his chin and in his sunken eyes.

  “I wasn’t trying to escape,” Kita explained.

  The doctor sta
red resentfully at him, breathing hard. He held a handful of plants in each hand. There were no flowers, and each limp, drooping leaf had five fingers, like a baby’s hands. “I’d heard about this growing here, but I never really believed it,” he said proudly.

  “What is it?” Kita asked.

  “Marijuana,” the doctor replied.

  “You know about plants too, eh?” Kita said casually, turning away.

  “It relaxes you, see. You need to relax before the big event,” the doctor said, like a sports coach. Kita felt a bit like an athlete before an important race.

  They went back to the car, and the doctor laid the freshly picked marijuana on the hot hood. He launched into another unasked-for sermon.

  “You dry it like this, then roll it into a cigarette to smoke it. That way you’ll die happy.”

  “Is there a town nearby? I feel like a change of mood. There’s still a little time before the event.”

  “There’s one about ten miles on from here I think.”

  “Where are we?”

  “I’d say we’re somewhere in the Yufutsu Plain.”

  The sound of this name brought it home to Kita that there was no going back to Tokyo. He shouldn’t feel any more attachment to the place. There was no need to walk those familiar streets or climb those steep hills ever again. He’d never be back there in the crowds flowing past Shibuya Station or through the Shinjuku underground passages.

  “The town will still be asleep, so we should take a bit of a rest too.” The doctor yawned, and with the fresh outdoor air in his lungs, immediately went back to sleep. Kita followed his lead, but once his eyes closed images from the past few days began to flit through his head. The face of Shinobu reading the Bible, and of Mizuho, whose days were spent with the phantom of her dead child, wafted through his brain like drifting smoke. His mother, whose mind had slipped back twenty years into the past, rose like steam before his eyes. And then he shifted into reminiscence mode.

  “So I’m going to be leaving Mum and Mizuho and Shinobu behind,” he thought, and instantly his pulse quickened, and he opened his eyes. To shake himself out of it, he turned on the car radio. Good grief, there was a voice just like Yashiro’s, giving some Buddhist sermon! He hastily turned it off again.

  Unable to stand this feeling of limbo any longer, Kita got out and collected the dried marijuana, got back in, slipped the car into Drive, and took off. This time, the doctor was soundly asleep.

  At the first sign of human life in three hours, Kita came to a halt and asked through the window where he was. But there was no response. The old lady kept her mouth clamped firmly shut. Was there a hotel nearby? he asked. Still she remained silent, and only stared at him cross-eyed.

  Giving up, he nodded to her and took off again.

  In another fifteen minutes, he could feel he was very close to the sea. He turned off onto a side road, and drove along until the sea suddenly spread before his eyes. Realizing that he was almost out of gas, he turned off the engine. There was a lone farmhouse not far away.

  “You want something there?” The doctor’s sleep had been interrupted for the third time.

  “I’ll just go check it out,” Kita said, getting out. He was sure at least that the little tiled house wasn’t empty. There was a small farm truck parked in the garden, and a crouching dog warned him off with glowering eyes. He wasn’t much of a guard dog, though. Perhaps he was the shy, retiring kind, for he merely gave a couple of low barks.

  One of the aluminium-frame windows slid open a little, and someone peered out. Before Kita could say “Good morning” the window slammed shut again, and there was the sound of running feet inside. Kita waited. Next, the window opened rather wider, and a middle-aged woman’s voice said, “What do you want, so early in the morning?”

  “I’m gathering material for a radio show,” Kita replied.

  There was a short pause. Then, “Who might you be?” the voice asked.

  “My name is Kita. From the Tokyo radio station. I just managed to make it here on time.” He wasn’t thinking at all, but he sounded quite convincing. He knew he’d be asked what sort of material he was after. “That’s funny,” he muttered, looking at the name by the door. “This is the home of the Kikuis, isn’t it? I had an arrangement to come along early this morning for a personal interview.”

  The door opened, and a middle-aged woman in an apron appeared. A girl in her mid-teens stared curiously out at Kita from behind her.

  “Is your husband here?” Kita asked.

  “He’s gone to Sapporo.”

  “Oh dear, so I’ve missed him. That’s a shame. He must have forgotten. You didn’t know? We’d fixed it for me and a Tokyo doctor to come here and spend the day with you to see how you lived, for our program.”

  “Ah.”

  “We’ve driven right through the night to get here so we’re rather tired, and the doctor’s not feeling well. Would it be too much trouble to beg a place where we could rest a little? I do apologize for making such a request.”

  Mrs. Kikui couldn’t disguise her bewilderment at being faced with this stranger, but she found herself unable to refuse the persuasive request that slipped so smoothly from Kita’s ex-salesman lips. “Well, if you don’t mind a place like this,” she said. It seemed there was no need hereabouts to lock the door even at night or while people were away. Where would her husband, who knew no one in Tokyo, have had the chance to become acquainted with Kita or the doctor? But around here, even a stranger was accepted once you’d met him, so Kita’s off-the-cuff request met with no resistance.

  He called the doctor over, and they both went in to the living room. Mrs. Kikui was in the middle of preparing breakfast. Her daughter didn’t have school that day, but she too was up bright

  and early.

  Kita and the doctor drank down the miso soup with tofu and spring onion that Mrs. Kikui made for them, and tucked into fermented beans and seaweed in soy. They downed two bowls of rice each. Finally, as they sipped their tea, she ventured a question. Just what kind of personal interview was it that her husband had agreed to? she asked, searching their faces.

  “The theme of the program is How to Enjoy Life,” Kita explained. “I should confess that I myself am at the end of life. I’m going to die this afternoon. The plan was to consult with your husband about how to make the most out of one’s final time on earth.”

  “He’s going to give the advice?”

  “That’s right. I’m the one who’s going to die, see.”

  In the airless silence that followed, Mrs. Kikui stiffened. It

  was her daughter who gathered the courage to remark that Kita looked pretty healthy, and didn’t seem like someone about to die. Indeed mother and daughter were looking a lot paler than him by now.

  “Well, people can die or kill for no reason, you know,” Kita said in a low voice.

  Mother and daughter swung round to stare at him. “There’s no money in the house,” the mother said, her voice trembling as she pulled her daughter to her.

  “I’m pretty low myself. I’ve only got two thousand five hundred ninety. Mind you, I have a feeling the doctor there has quite a bit.”

  The daughter gazed quizzically at Kita, face to face. “What are you here for?” she demanded. The doctor, meanwhile, was taking out his wallet. He produced twenty thousand yen, and laid it on the table.

  “Thanks for the excellent food,” Kita said. Then he rolled over on the floor where he sat, settled himself in a prone position, and became engrossed in the television. A singer was playing reporter, chatting to the local fishermen in some seaside village.

  The doctor finally opened his mouth. “Don’t worry about us, we’re just normal guys.”

  But the mother and daughter looked incredulous. These two men in front of them were surely anything but normal. Whatever they were up to, robbery or sexual assault, the two women felt a definite danger in the air.

  “We’d very much appreciate being able to take a bath and catch some s
leep, if that’s okay with you.”

  Mrs. Kikui’s worried face forced itself into a polite smile. “Well, we’re not a B&B, I’m afraid,” she said.

  “I’m aware of that,” the doctor replied coldly. “We’ll pay ten thousand each,” he added.

  “You’re going to, er, stay the night?” Desperate to protect herself and her daughter, she’d decided to do her awkward best not to aggravate these men.

  “I’m just asking you to provide some rest for this gentleman before he dies. All we need is for you to draw us a bath, lay out some bedding, and keep quiet. We’ll be gone this afternoon.”

  Mother and daughter looked at each other, seeming to read each other’s minds. The mother set about clearing up the breakfast dishes, while the daughter went off to run the bath.

  While Kita was in the bath, the doctor apologized to the Kikuis for the sudden visit, and explained that he was there to try to talk Kita out of committing suicide. He had no intention of causing any harm to them, he explained. After all, they had nothing to do with Kita and his problems. Still, this was a man facing his own imminent death, and he was unpredictable. If they could help to soothe his nerves, he may calm down enough to see the folly of his suicide plans. Kita had no doubt come into the house on impulse, but his motive was surely a desire to spend a few last peaceful hours before he died. They didn’t need to do anything really, just let him rest. “I’ll guarantee your safety,” he finished.

  Mother and daughter nodded as they listened, then laid out bedding in the guest room, plus some beer and two jerseys. The doctor asked the daughter if she could lend him either a Bible or a dictionary. She hesitated over the choice, then brought in a Bible, having decided this would work best to calm the heart of the intruder. The doctor proceeded to find a page of psalms that had a substantial margin of white page around the print, then tore it out and cut it into four. On each piece he laid some of the marijuana leaf that he’d picked back there on the plain and dried on the car hood, and these he deftly rolled into four joints. His idea was that a good bath, a drink of beer and a hit of marijuana would soothe and relax Kita physically and mentally, and inevitably lead to a weakening of the suicidal impulse. Then, when the moment was right, he’d telephone Shinobu and get her to talk Kita out of the whole thing. It was sheer chance that he’d found that marijuana, and that Kita had rocked up to the Kikuis’ home, but the doctor was following the ninja rule of seizing the opportunity as it arose.