Just suppose you had a million or so yen in the bank and knew you only had one week before departing this world – how would you spend your remaining time?
This may be a tired old theme, but I don’t imagine many have actually thought the question through to the bitter end. I’d guess everyone’s first thoughts would turn to the pleasures of the flesh. How about, for instance, a dish of boiled shark’s fin plus abalone steak plus underbelly of bluefin tuna, all you can eat, followed by sleeping with three rabidly sexy ladies and a champagne bath to top it off? But the pleasures of the flesh can get pretty wearying. Next morning you’re in the grip of heartburn and a hangover, not to mention a sore groin. OK, why not go take a break at a hot spring resort? And meet up again with an old lover before you die, maybe kidnap the star you’re crazy about, and since you’re going to die anyway you could donate your organs to someone who wants them, and do something remarkable that will make good and sure your life in this world will be remembered? You just have to set your mind to it for a moment and you’ll uncover a tangle of all manner of desires, impulses good and bad, and vanities. People don’t usually give a thought to what happens after they die, but when death is finally approaching, your mind can suddenly rush frantically to the question of that future time when you’re no longer around. People in their forties contemplating suicide will think of the family they’d be leaving behind, and take out some insurance. If more than a year has elapsed since you signed the form, the insurance company will pay out in the event of suicide – and apparently there are quite a few cases where someone does kill themselves after the year is up. How to imagine the world you’ll leave behind you – this is the real ethical question. It’s wrong to decide that you can get away with anything since you’ll soon be dead anyhow. We have the freedom to choose to die, but this freedom of choice is a cruel thing. Understand this, and you’ll feel increasingly inclined to put off the actual deed once you’ve had your fill of the pleasures of the flesh.
To be honest, when I began this novel my plan was to write up the theme of suicide in a kind of muscular comedy form à la Chaplin, Lloyd, or Keaton. The idea was to address those youths who mystify suicide in their pallid novels, and say to them Come on guys, enough. It’s really just a comedy, you know. At any rate, that was the plan until I got as far as THURSDAY.
When I launched into FRIDAY, things took a new direction. Then I put off the publication deadline, and added another chapter called SOMEDAY.
Once the Friday deadline is passed, what Yoshio Kita confronts is death itself.
If I can claim to have understood anything in the process of writing this novel, it’s that there’s another kind of urge besides the urge to eat, the sex urge, and the urge to know – and that’s the urge to die. Freud was right.
Masahiko Shimada
Death By Choice Page 29