Death By Choice

by Masahiko Shimada

  “Those vending machines are real moneyboxes, aren’t they?” said the driver, with a trace of a northern accent. He seemed to relish talk. At times when he had no passenger, he’d probably amuse himself by talking back to the radio announcer as if they were on air together.

  “Japan’s a dangerous place these days, that’s for sure. There are plenty who’ll understand you when you talk, mind you, but nowadays we’ve got a lot of foreign types who can’t follow a word you say. Get mixed up with those guys and bang, you’re done for. We cab drivers who got to work with our backs to folks are always feeling danger right behind us.”

  “So what would you do if I turned out to be a robber?” murmured the man, tapping a finger against his aluminium case.

  “Stop the bad jokes, won’t you?” responded the driver.

  “Well there you are saying you’re always sensing danger behind you, aren’t you?”

  “Ah well,” said the driver with a laugh. “Your life’s in my hands, after all.”

  “OK, you got me there. But when you think about it, the guy that robbed that store will be listening to the news somewhere right now, won’t he? What’s he going to feel when he sees his own image caught on security cameras, if he’s watching the TV news?”

  The man now turned to Kita. “I’ll bet you go to convenience stores quite a lot,” he said meaningfully.

  Oh, Kita realized at last, so there’s been news of a store robbery has there?

  “I sometimes go to them to buy dinner. And students go to read magazines, labourers go to buy drinks, gangsters go to buy ice or cat food, office girls go to buy a quick stew or some cookies.”

  “OK. I wasn’t really asking what you went for. Me, I go to use their bathrooms from time to time. Sorry, I should have introduced myself.”

  The man abruptly held out a name card. “Heita Yashiro, Executive Director, Thanatos Movie Productions,” Kita read. Checking the man’s face again, he had the impression it was shining with eager curiosity.

  “I don’t have a name card.”

  “Free men like you don’t need name cards or luggage I guess. It’s good to have your hands free for everything that comes along. Your own self is the biggest piece of baggage you own. Still, you can’t get on with the job if you leave yourself behind, can you? What’s your name, by the way?”

  Kita had had no intention of indulging in mutual introductions. On the other hand, he wasn’t prepared to be the butt of this busybody’s suspicions, so he said, “Yoshio Kita.” The man then wanted to know what characters he wrote his name with, so Kita found himself having to write his name in the man’s notebook. The man stared hard at what he’d written and seemed about to speak, so Kita cut in quickly.

  “Is that a camera you’ve got in that case?”

  Yashiro nodded as though he’d been waiting for the question. “I’ll get anything on film,” he said.

  “You’re talking adult videos and stuff like that?”

  “Porn, news, documentaries, personal stories… like I say, anything. I shoot whatever there is to shoot.”

  “And what do you do with it?”

  “I sell it. There are video cameras all over the world now. The world’s full of peepholes wherever you care to look. And there are people who can’t wait to be peeped on, what’s more.”

  “So I guess that means you’re pretty busy.”

  “My problem is I spend my life being busy and never making much money at it. The competition’s fierce. But everyone wants to believe these days that whatever’s on camera’s got to be the truth. That’s what keeps me doing it.”

  “You’re a man of conviction in your work, then.”

  Kita couldn’t bring himself to simply let the man know he had no interest in what he did for a living. He kept up the flow of casual responses while he waited for the man to realize there was no point in talking.

  “Conviction’s an important thing, you know. There’s a big difference between someone with conviction and someone without it. Your customer is moved by your conviction, see. Even a criminal, he’ll find supporters just so long as he’s got good strong convictions.”

  “Do you have anything to do with crime yourself?”

  “Good God no. Do I look like that sort of guy?”

  Kita shrank at the sudden roughness in Yashiro’s voice, and said softly, keeping a wary eye on him as he spoke, “Well, no, but you can’t always judge by appearances, can you?”

  After a moment’s pause, Yashiro let out a rather forced chuckle.

  “True enough, true enough. It’s the guy who wears a nice-guy mask who’ll turn around and commit the most cold-blooded crime. That’s the kind of perfectly average face you get the feeling you’ve seen somewhere before. It’s the same with evil these days, you don’t even notice it any more. It happens absolutely naturally. But the good, well that’s often artificial. If you shoot real evil on camera, you can’t really tell what it is you’re seeing. But good comes across real pretty. It’s made itself up to look great, see. Same as a naked woman. But real good’s a thing you don’t even notice. That’s why you won’t catch it on camera. That’s what I want to shoot.”

  Kita could see what Yashiro was saying. He nodded with a sigh. “I’m a serious guy too, though I don’t put on any solemn airs,” he said. It wasn’t just a joke or some kind of excuse; in his own way he meant it. But he wondered if it would make sense to his sermonizing companion.

  Heading up Dôgenzaka, just after the traffic lights Yashiro announced he’d stop there. He asked Kita whether he was going on, so Kita said this was fine with him too. He sat back and waited for Yashiro to pay and get out. When he proffered a couple of notes as his share of the fare, Yashiro waved them away, then glanced at his watch.

  “Well then, what do you say to a cold beer?” Yashiro pointed towards a drinking place that had just opened its doors.

  Kita hesitated. There was no reason why he should keep this man company, but on the other hand he couldn’t think how to excuse himself.

  “Sorry, but would you mind carrying the camera for me?” Yashiro continued. “My neck’s kinda sore.” And so Kita found himself acting as porter, and following Yashiro in. The place was completely empty. They sat at the counter, and as the cook was busy writing up the day’s menu on the blackboard before them, Yashiro set about ordering. He asked for one dish after another – flounder sashimi, deep-fried tofu, salted squid, boiled potato and mincemeat, and finally beer.

  Well, thought Kita, it wouldn’t matter if he put off carrying out his plan until he’d had two or three beers and evening had come. His impulses would be able to flow unchecked with alcohol and darkness on his side, after all. But was Heita Yashiro the right companion to give him the boost he needed? A company director is generally the kind of guy who’s brimming with self-confidence, who can dupe you all too easily. They put all the failures down to the other guy, and the successes down to their own foresight. Kita had worked for three directors in his life, and it was due to his own foresight that he’d managed to leave the company before it folded. He couldn’t claim to have been lucky exactly, but he did manage to get through it all without giving in to despair. He’d managed this by telling himself this was what happened to everyone else too. Gangsters, office girls, students, housewives, directors, labourers, foreigners – they all felt the same hopelessness, he told himself. It soothed him. Sure there must be labourers who wondered where the joy was in having to slave away on the roads under a broiling midsummer sun, but after ten bottles of beer they’d have forgotten all about their problems. A student who failed to get a job at the end of his studies would feel pretty depressed about the future, but he could always comfort a friend who was even worse off than him. Kita believed his own limited experience had taught him how to come to terms with despair. He also had a fair understanding of how to deal with the despair of others. You listened to their woes with warmth and concern. The death of a relative, the death of a child, a friend’s betrayal, a broken heart, illn
ess – if you’d had a similar experience yourself, you could exchange stories at least. A kind of bartering on the troubles market. Then in the end you could both laugh together, united by your sorrows. That laughter was the special prerogative of people in that situation, the reward for having managed to produce some sort of comfort and friendship from the dregs of despair.

  He’d done all this from time to time, but now he found he’d somehow grown sick of getting along so well with despair. He’d begun to feel that even that special humour that despair breeds was kind of empty. It was in fact quite scary to cross over to the far shore and leave despair behind, and Kita was disturbingly aware of feeling himself tumbling into the muddy depths of his own unconscious. Perhaps Yashiro intuited this, or perhaps it was just a passing remark, but as he wiped his face with the warm towel provided by the establishment, Yashiro said, “You’re a weird sort of guy, I must say.”

  “I don’t mean that negatively,” he went on. “Hey, I make my living with the camera after all, and I’m used to relying on my own intuition. I’m pretty good at guessing right. I can at least look at a face and guess whether this is just an average guy or not.”

  “I’m an average guy.”

  “Anyone who says that about themselves has got to be weird.”

  Kita twisted his head around and smiled. “Sure enough, we’re not going to get along, are we? It was a funny kind of meeting,” he said.

  At this, Yashiro brought his prying face up so close that Kita could feel his breath, and said, “Look here. I’m not letting on what’s on my mind, you know.”

  When Kita failed to take the bait, Yashiro tried to call his bluff. “You looked away just then, you know. See, you can’t meet my eyes.”

  “Well anyone would want to look away if they were being stared at by your goggly deep-sea fish eyes.”

  “Deep-sea fish eyes, that’s a good one,” Yashiro said jauntily, backing off, and he offered to pour Kita another beer. “Hey, companionship on the journey, kindness in life, as the saying goes. Let’s treat this like a once-in-a-lifetime chance, hey? They say that’s what keeps two people connected into the next life, after all.”

  People who like proverbs and sermonizing will talk just the same whoever they’re speaking to. They probably talk the same way to themselves too. Yashiro opened his notebook and stared at the page where Kita had written his name. “Yoshio Kita, eh?” he murmured.

  “I’ve gone pretty deeply into the science of names,” he said, “and yours is a really fine one, I must say. You’re a good man and full of joy, these characters say, right? You can sense the way your parents felt when they gave you this. Mind you, you’ll often find someone betrays the meaning of their name. All you have to do is just change your way of thinking a bit, and you’d have the life your name suggests, mind you.”

  “I’d prefer you not to go messing about with my name please.”

  “Oh come on, don’t be like that. If you don’t like it I’ll happily apologise. No, the fact is, I can’t help being interested in you. Besides, you’re a handsome guy.”

  Yashiro seemed about to add, “I could be looking at my younger self.” Kita felt quite sickened. He clenched his stomach muscles to control himself.

  “I can just tell. You’ve taken the sins of the world on yourself. But you don’t let on, do you? No, you sit there pretending nothing’s going on, and worrying about what crazy thing the other guy might suddenly spring on you. How old are you, by the way? You’d be around twenty-five I’d say. You can still pull the girls. Older ones, younger ones. Once you’re past fifty you don’t want older ones, you know. But at your age, you’ll still find some good women even fifteen years older. Life can change for you if you go around with a mature woman. And you can hang out with a girl in her teens without having to pay for the pleasure too. Boy, I envy you.”

  “I’ve no idea what you’re envying.”

  “Sure you do. You go at it hammer and tongs while you’re young and still have the books balance out in the end. Go ahead and have the time of your life, no regrets, that’s my advice.”

  Did he really look like someone who wanted to be preached at like this? Surely all this amounted to a form of sexual harassment. An embarrassing memory from his high school years began to surface in his mind like a dead fish. Riding the train to school, he’d regularly had his bottom fondled by a middle-aged man with gold-rimmed spectacles who reeked of nicotine. The man had greying hair parted in the middle and pasted down with pomade, and always carried a briefcase tucked under his arm. He had the habit of sniffing his own fingers. He’d rub his fingers against Kita’s dusty school uniform, then greedily devour the faint scent left on his fingertips. He was never deterred by rush hour platform crowds or packed carriages. He’d push his way through the polite commuters, in dedicated pursuit of the bottom he was after, then press up close behind and use the train’s swaying to let his hand caress the bottom of his chosen darling as he thrust his half-erect penis against him. Young Kita had changed carriages to escape him, and taken later trains or earlier ones, but the man had always sniffed him out and was already there in wait for him, grinning. Kita had agonized over the problem. It was shameful enough for a girl to come out and accuse a man of feeling her up, but far worse for a boy to go looking for help because some parasitic middle-aged guy was getting off on your backside. But one day he finally made up his mind. He borrowed from the school’s Flower Arranging Club a little metal plate covered in spikes, used for pinning flowers in place at the bottom of vases, and bound it firmly onto his palm with a bandage. Then he lured the guy over. It turned out to be a more powerful weapon than he’d anticipated. “Urgh!” said the guy, giving a quick groan. Then, clutching his briefcase to his crotch, he scuttled off in defeat, glaring bitterly up at the gloating Kita.

  There was something about Yashiro that reminded him of this guy. Whenever he spoke he touched Kita’s shoulder, or grabbed his arm, breathing heavily at him. Was he after Kita’s ass too? Or maybe he just liked being physical. True, men in Korea or Pakistan often went round together arm in arm or hand in hand. Brazilians and Russians went so far as to kiss each other. Maybe this was just their way of swapping unhappy stories and forging comfort and friendship between them.

  Kita turned to face Yashiro, and asked with calculated bluntness, “Are you gay?” Beer in hand, Yashiro froze, his mouth open. Bingo, thought Kita, suppressing a grin and glaring at him.

  “Well, I guess that’s one way to see things,” Yashiro replied with an innocent air. “If that’s what you’re after.”

  “Are you crazy? No way!”

  “Well in that case, don’t try to come on to me.”

  “I’m not coming on to you. I was just a bit worried, so I thought I’d check.”

  “What’s the point of worrying over stupid stuff like that? Anything’s possible in this world, after all.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “If some guy told you he’d kill you if you refused, you’d sleep with him, wouldn’t you?”

  Kita was about to indignantly deny he’d do any such thing, but Yashiro silenced him and went on, “What I mean is, you won’t achieve anything in life unless you can act as resolutely as that.” He’d neatly shifted the conversation back to sermonizing again.

  “By the way, what are you doing right now?”

  Kita didn’t feel inclined to let Yashiro in on the answer to that. The fact was, he was planning to commit suicide. Round about next Friday. He’d made the final decision the evening before last. There was still a week to go before Friday. After all, the world had been created in seven days with one off for rest, so he calculated most things could surely be achieved in the same amount of time. There must be all sorts of things he wanted to do before he died. But when he settled down to really put his mind to the question, all he could think of was the usual stuff – sleeping with two gorgeous girls at once, spending all his money on delicious food in a three-day orgy of eating, doing something so monstrous
it would make everyone gape, that sort of thing. He ended up simply depressed by the obvious poverty of his imagination. With a certain amount of courage and money he could do all that anyway, without the excuse of dying. Mind you, though, most people usually indulged such delusions by reading popular novels and comics, or watching television, and hardly ever so much as dreamed of being the star of the action themselves.

  But come to think of it, they weren’t planning on suicide, were they?

  This was a pretty convincing rationale, but Kita still felt somehow cheated. The usual order of things was that first of all you decided to die. Next came the plan to do all you could before you killed yourself. Even if your dreams of debauchery were impossible, there was no need to despair. You still got to die. In other words, it didn’t matter if you did nothing, and simply died without any particular motive. You’d be hard put for an answer if asked why you were killing yourself, of course. The simple fact was, you were doing it because you wanted to die.

  When Kita remained mute, Yashiro pushed the sashimi and potato mincemeat dishes over towards him, and said quietly, “You should eat.” Suddenly, with the aroma of deep fry oil, Kita found his old teacher’s voice echoing in his head.

  “Choose your own pace of life.”

  Well he was half taking her advice at least, by choosing to die at his own pace, Kita told himself. There was no need to be afraid of other people’s prying questions, no one could change his mind about dying in a week’s time. Suddenly he laughed.

  “Actually,” he said, “I was planning on throwing everything to the winds even before your advice. But it’s no good simply deciding. I haven’t had any experience, so I’m not quite sure just how to go about it.”

  “Ah yes, I can see that would be so. The most important question is, what do you want to do? Is it sex you’re after?”

  “Among other things.”

  “Murder? You must have someone you’d like to murder.”

  “I don’t like murder. And I don’t have anyone I want to kill.”