Death By Choice

by Masahiko Shimada

  “But they say Self Defence Force guys don’t make it with the girls.”

  “Well you certainly wouldn’t. But the SDF are pretty cool, you know. They’re great when there’s an earthquake or a typhoon. If it’s a toss-up between an SDF guy and a policeman, I’d take the SDF guy. There are a lot of creepy policemen, and they use dirty tactics. And I’ve had run-ins with them before. You take good care of that man, Poo.”

  “Sure thing.”

  Poo, Calpis, and Takako checked to see they had everything on, then all turned to Kita and thanked him politely. “It’s been fun,” said Kita. He stayed sitting on the bed to see them off, but for some reason they didn’t go straight out. Poo and Takako glanced at each other and grinned. Kita waited, wondering if he ought to say something more.

  “Would you have the fare?’ said Mitsuyo. The three of them immediately shook their heads as if by agreement, and smiled at him.

  Kita realized they were after money. “How much?” he said. Takako said four thousand yen, and Poo asked for six thousand.

  “I see,” said Kita, “two thousand more if you take off your skirt.” Then he followed up by asking how much a taxi cost if you’d taken off your bra.

  Takako turned to Poo for confirmation, and held up one finger, indicating a ten thousand yen note. Poo nodded. “And panties is twelve,” she said.

  Calpis instantly turned to his girlfriend, Takako. “You’re talking about selling your body?” he asked.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Takako said, and Poo went on, “Being naked is different from having sex.”

  “Women have it good, don’t they. There’s a price on breasts and a price on pubic hair.” Daikichi spoke into the echo on the mike.

  Mitsuyo seized the mike from him. “There are guys who like guys like you! Five hundred yen a go,” she yelled.

  “Yuck! I’d rather join the SDF than sell myself to a man.”

  “Idiot. Selling yourself to the nation’s just the same as selling yourself to a man.” Mitsuyo knocked Daikichi on the head with the mike. The echo filled the room. Daikichi grabbed the mike back from her, held it to his mouth, and did a skilful imitation of a helicopter, a bazooka and a pistol shot.

  “Hey, when did you learn that? Teach me how to do it,” said Calpis, in genuine admiration of Daikichi’s talents. The praise went to Daikichi’s head, and he proceeded to grip the mike and produce a further rendition of a wild battle.

  “Hey Daikichi, you look like you’re performing fellatio.” Zombie had been silent all this while, but now she held her hand to her mouth and giggled.

  “No way! Right, I’m off too. I’ll head on home on the last train, all on my ownsome.” Daikichi flung the mike onto the bed, thrust his fat legs back into his baggy jeans, and slung his sweater round

  his shoulders.

  Kita passed a ten thousand yen note to Poo. “Divide it between you,” he said.

  “Thanks,” said Poo. “Well Kita, let’s do it again some time,” and she put out her hand. The other three did likewise, adding things like “Stay alive till we meet again, won’t you,” and “Hope you have a really cool death,” and “Give us another meal some time please,” and out they went.

  The second hand was just a fraction past eleven. During the time it took for the gap to widen to an inch or so, the sudden silence oppressed Kita, thrust by others into the position of being left alone with two women in their underwear. He climbed back into the black wool trousers he’d carefully folded to avoid wrinkles and lay down on the bed. Zombie followed his lead, and reached for her checked wrap-around skirt.

  “You going home?” Kita looked from Zombie’s face to Mitsuyo’s.

  “You won’t kill yourself tonight, will you? You’re just going to sleep, aren’t you?” Zombie inquired in a bright, breezy voice.

  “Yep, that’s the plan. Quite a bit’s happened today. That first guy I met was the problem. He goes and spreads the news around, and then he goes and introduces me to Mitsuyo.”

  “What, you mean that was bad? But you’re the one who rang me, remember. I just came along because it was work, you know.”

  “Don’t get me wrong, I’m really glad I met everyone. You in particular, Mitsuyo. And you too, Zombie. That story of the four failed suicide attempts was very useful, thanks.”

  “I see. You mean, you haven’t tried to kill yourself before?” Zombie spoke casually. She wasn’t setting herself up as superior.

  “Given that I’m going to do it, I don’t want to make a mess of it,” Kita said meekly.

  Zombie nodded deeply. “Good luck,” she said encouragingly.

  “OK, all those rowdy ones have gone, so why don’t we take a bath?” suggested Mitsuyo. Zombie and Kita both assented. All three found themselves looking forward to soaking in a warm spa bath and relaxing. The two girls showed no sign of planning to leave. Did this mean he had to buy them both for the night? Both of them suddenly looked like prostitutes to Kita. Without hesitating, both Zombie and Mitsuyo stripped to nothing, and began by jumping into the pool—though this “pool” was actually about the size of a storage closet. Kita watched them through the transparent synthetic glass screen as they joked about, playing at synchronized swimming together. Mitsuyo waved to him from the water, so Kita took off his clothes, climbed the diving ladder, and plunged in between the two mermaid heads.

  The mermaids had pale skin, and appeared considerably slimmer under water than they did on land. Their hair and their public hair rocked gently like waterweed. Their four breasts floated about like jellyfish, flattening, swelling, twisting.

  Mitsuyo suggested they have a competition to see who could stay underwater longest. They all sank together. Beneath the surface all was quiet. Breath held, Kita looked at the two pale, meditative faces of the girls, their cheeks bulging like squirrels. From time to time a few bubbles would go dancing up to the surface. The sound seemed to Kita like the mermaids’ murmuring voices, chattering on about this and that. The sudden humour of this made Kita suddenly expel his breath in a laugh, and pop out of the water. Mitsuyo and Zombie both poked their faces up after him.

  “OK, let’s bet something this time,” said Mitsuyo breathlessly, looking around for agreement. She apparently assumed she’d be likely to win at holding her breath.

  “What will you two bet?” asked Kita. Zombie replied she didn’t have anything to bet.

  “How about your body?” This development struck Kita as only natural, considering that he was cavorting in the water with two stark naked girls.

  “You’ve got great tits, Mitsuyo, and you’ve been in films and everything, but I’m pretty much flat-chested, and, well, I’ve never done it for money before… Poo would’ve been good. She’s prepared to sell herself for her SDF guy, after all.”

  “She can be full-on once she gets an idea into her head. And she’s so rebellious. She’s anti-school, anti-society. She really hates the way it’s just irresponsible dirty old men who lead our society. Says she sells herself to these lechers and pays what she gets as tribute money to the SDF. It’s helping protect the nation, is what she tells herself. It’s pretty weird, but the way Poo sees things I guess there’s some justice in the idea.”

  Kita agreed it was pretty weird, but still, he didn’t think it was such a bad thing really, to be naive enough to believe you were selling yourself for the sake of the nation, or society, or the disadvantaged. He’d lost that kind of naivety many moons ago. But did it mean that Poo saw him as one of those dirty old men? If that was the case, it would be too bad if he couldn’t meet her again before he died and really put on a display of being the lecher. He’d love to be able to help her in her mission of justice.

  “OK, let’s try this. If I lose, I’ll be Kita’s secretary for a day. You’ve got lots of things you want to do before you die, haven’t you? I’ll help you do them. If there’s someone you want to meet, I’ll telephone and make the appointment, or if there’s a book you want to read or a CD you want to hear, I’ll get it for you.
How about it?” said Zombie.

  “Yeah, great idea.” Kita was all for it. In return, he sounded her out on the possibility of buying her one hundred tickets in the Dream Jumbo Lottery. She liked the idea.

  “I don’t really have anything I long for,” said Mitsuyo a little morosely.

  “What about betting your own body like we were saying?” said Kita.

  Mitsuyo responded that she’d undertake to be Kita’s slave for a day if she lost. “You can do a lot more with a slave than you can with a secretary,” she added.

  “Right. I’ll get you three hundred Dream Jumbo tickets, then.”

  “I’m not interested in lotteries. What I want is for you to promise the same thing, you’ll be my slave for a day.”

  She sure seemed like she’d be a rough master, but hey, why not?

  They’d have one go. If Kita stayed under longest, he’d get twenty-four hours with Zombie as his secretary and Mitsuyo as his slave. If he lost to Zombie but won against Mitsuyo, he’d have to buy a hundred lottery tickets but he’d get a slave. If he won against Zombie and lost to Mitsuyo, he’d be a slave with sidekick secretary.

  They took a series of deep breaths, calmed themselves, and emptied their mind of thought. When the second hand on the clock moved to upright, they were to all dive together. Five, four, three, two, one. Kita held his breath and sank, checked that his two opponents were down there with him, then closed his eyes.

  Occasional bubbles broke the stillness. At last they all signalled to each other that they were at the end of their tether, and all broke surface with a burst of bubbles, barely a moment apart.

  The mermaids gasped for air. “God, that was scary!” “I thought I was going to die!” they declared in shaky voices. The first up had been Zombie, next Kita, and last Mitsuyo. Kita found himself slave-with-sidekick.

  As they warmed their chilled bodies in the 40°C Jacuzzi tub, the three of them discussed how things should begin. It was already past midnight, so there was no avoiding their various roles. Mitsuyo, whose breathtaking skills had won her the crown, immediately began by ordering a beer and an oil massage after the bath. Kita told his secretary Zombie she needn’t do anything until morning. Both the queen and the secretary were exhausted. The secretary curled up on the sofa with a blanket and fell asleep, and the queen began to snore as Kita massaged her. Left to his own devices, Kita became turned on, and found his little feller suddenly standing up. He hesitated to take the prone queen from behind in case she got mad, but there was insubordination in the ranks below, so he slipped on a condom and thrust in his cock. The queen curled away from him for a moment and said, “Don’t,” but once she’d established that he was wearing a condom she turned lazily over, opened her legs, and let her slave do as he would. Zombie was peeking from under her blanket while Kita used Mitsuyo’s body to masturbate. He stretched his hand out beyond the pillow, and turned off the light.

  Kita woke to the sound of splashing water. Secretary Zombie was lying in the bottom of the pool. Fearing that she was up to her old suicide tricks again, Kita rushed to the poolside, beat on the transparent screen, and shouted, “Are you alive?”

  She was. The now wet Secretary Zombie announced that it was Saturday and enquired what she could begin by doing for him.

  “Let’s go out somewhere,” he replied. First, however, he must learn the opinions of the queen. There was still no sign of Mitsuyo waking. Still wet, Secretary Zombie went over to her and hugged her. “Ergh!” moaned the queen in a pathetic voice, evidently dreaming that a snake was twining itself round her. Her eyes opened. Secretary Zombie leaned close to her ear and whispered, “I was a bit lonely last night. Don’t leave me alone too much.”

  Mitsuyo placed a light kiss on Zombie’s lips. “Right,” she said, and rose to her feet. “Let’s go to the seaside.”

  At the word from Mitsuyo, both the others hurriedly set about getting things ready. Kita remembered that he had a camera, and took a picture of the two naked girls snuggling up together.

  They paid at the desk and stepped outside to find a light rain was falling. Kita had used about one hundred thousand yen the previous evening. The three ten thousand yen notes that Yashiro had given him as funeral money were still in his pocket. Just outside the hotel there happened to be a lottery ticket booth, so he bought thirty thousand yen worth of tickets and presented half each to the secretary and the queen. He tried to give Queen Mitsuyo an extra thirty thousand on the grounds that he’d slept with her the night before, but she shook her head. “No charge,” she told him with a smile.

  Saturday

  A Seaside Health Resort

  The three of them joined the pleasure-seeking crowds on the train bound for the resort town of Atami. Each sank greedily into a doze inside the carriage, and when they got off at the station an hour later, they were all hungry.

  “Atami’s famous for its dried fish, isn’t it?” said Mitsuyo, so they hopped in a taxi and asked the driver to take them somewhere where they could have some sake and dried fish.

  They settled themselves down in the tidy little restaurant and put in an order for a grill of the dried fish they’d selected from the display outside the door, along with various top grade sakes. Dried fish by itself would be pretty boring, they decided, so they added sashimi and seasoned boiled vegetables to the order. They had such a fine time eating and drinking that pretty soon they attracted wry smiles from the other customers and the lady behind the counter.

  “Dining in fine style, eh?” A skinny old man remarked in the direction of the three, who had by now settled down to idle the time away around the table. He was sitting alone at the corner of the counter, sipping sake as he picked at a dish of dried mackerel. He had the air of one who was indulging in one of the modest pleasures of old age. “The great thing about dried fish is you can nibble away at ’em like a pauper,” he went on. “One of these little things only costs me eighty yen. My great grandfather used to love ’em.”

  “Wow, so this is a really old restaurant,” said Mitsuyo, in response to the old man’s monologue. He immediately turned to her, as if he’d been just waiting for someone to talk to.

  “When I say ‘my great grandfather,’ you realize the man I’m referring to is the great gang boss Hatayama the Third, don’t you.”

  What? So the supreme boss of the Hatayama Gang, the biggest gangster organization in Japan, was mad about dried mackerel? It wasn’t only Kita who was tickled by this story. Mitsuyo and Zombie also suppressed a smile as they exchanged glances.

  “So you used to be a gangster?” asked Mitsuyo in her usual carefree way.

  The old man turned his faded eyes to her and stared hard. “I did a lot of wicked things in my youth,” he muttered.

  Mitsuyo invited him to join them, and poured him some sake. The old man raised his hand to his forehead in a brief gesture of thanks, as sumo wrestlers do before accepting their winnings in the ring, and settled himself down beside Kita.

  “You’re all down from Tokyo, aren’t you? I can tell from the accent.”

  “And where are you from?”

  “Sunpu originally. Village in Tokugawa. These days I’m in an old folks’ home in Atami. Death’s got a set against me and won’t kill me off, so here I am, condemned to a long life.”

  “What a weirdo,” Mitsuyo murmured in a tiny voice, then carefully turned a smile on him and said, “There’s someone here who’s just the opposite, you know. He’s been lured by Death. Right here,” and she pointed impudently at Kita. There she went, using him again. Kita waved his hand to tell her not to pursue the subject, but Zombie chipped in, “He says he’s going to die by next Friday.”

  The old man furrowed his brow and turned his gaze on Kita. “Some illness?” he said.

  “Well yeah, a kind of illness I guess,” Kita replied casually. The old man didn’t seem interested. He blew his nose once, then set forth in a long-winded monologue.

  “All through my youth I survived all the daredevil antics I got u
p to. When I gets back in one piece after the war I thinks to meself, here’s a bit of luck! Ill weeds grow apace, you know the saying, so I sets out to be an ill weed, and I raised hell I can tell ya. Young folks these days can’t raise hell like that, poor things.”

  “What hell did you raise?”

  “Damned if I’m going to go plugging away at some stupid job, I thinks. I’m gonna have fun making money, and use it to debauch meself in fine style. I’m gonna get me a thousand lovers, says I, so out I go and pick up whatever woman comes to hand. Sold off all I got when I left the army, and used the money to hang out in the whorehouses. But I soon got sick of that, so I bought up some girls from the country and set up shop meself. So I was runnin’ the joint, and thought I was really somethin’ I can tell you, but hey, it always happens eh? Started steppin’ on other people’s turf, and not paying me dues to the lads, so pretty soon I’d fallen in with the yakuza. Ends up I exchange sake cups with the big boss and I’m into the gang. I’d slept with over five hundred girls by that time, but comes a time when you get sick of women. I’ll get me a wife and see what it feels like to live a normal life, thinks I, but I’d gotten old, and then along comes the anti-prostitution law. Just my luck not to have a buddy inside the police department, so they nabbed me. And on top o’ that, my trusted head clerk made off with the money, and the gambling debts were mountin’ up, and the whole thing’s goin’ ass over tits. And then a woman does the dirty on me. My first wife, she was. A real little worker, always lookin’ after people. Five years older than me, never married, but she was born in the downtown area and good with the customers. Ran a little restaurant down in Totsuka, did pretty well out of it too. Didn’t waste money. She had a million yen saved up when I married her. Well I quit work for a bit, got the others to do whatever needed doin’, hung around waitin’ for my lucky break. But then one of the girls went and got pregnant, it was my kid, so things got pretty sticky with the wife, she was really losin’ it, and right around then that head clerk that made off with the whorehouse takings gets run to earth down in Kawasaki. The bastard’d set hisself up runnin’ a massage parlor in Horinouchi, and he was rakin’ it in. I was a hot-headed young fool, I was. Well so I decide on the spot I’m gonna half kill this guy, but I got him on the wrong bit of the head, and didn’t just half kill the guy, I went the whole way. Got five years for it. When I gets out, the wife’s closed up shop an’ disappeared. The girl’d gotten rid of the kid and gone back home. Right, let’s start all over again, says I to meself, when I gets a call from the big boss, and he gives me the job of runnin’ a billiard joint in the old part of town by the gates of Ise Shrine and trainin’ up the retired cops who join the gang. When those guys come in with us they get a real good salary, see.”