There were kids running all over the place in the lobby. Anxious parents were calling names all around, and in among them Kita heard one he recognized.
Mizuho – that was the name of the woman who’d left him six years ago and gone off and gotten married. Suddenly he found himself wondering just what sort of life she was leading these days. It hadn’t worked out between them, but if his plan to die went according to plan, she was the only woman in his life who could’ve been his wife. But in all these six years he’d never tried to imagine how that phantom life with her might have been. He’d simply done everything he could to forget her. It would be a lie to say he didn’t feel anything for her any more. But he knew it only made you miserable to go on yearning for someone, so he’d done his best to tell himself that he’d never had a relationship with her.
Six years ago, Mizuho had chosen to marry a bureaucrat on her father’s advice. There would certainly have been calculations about the future involved in her decision – she would have assessed her probable future with the both of them. But Kita had been fool enough not to notice the third party in this triangle until she passed her judgment on him. It embarrassed him to remember how he’d half mistaken as a sign of acceptance that little smile on her face when he brought up the subject of marriage. That was no smile, he told himself, it was a sneer. “Marry you?” it was really saying. “You must be joking.”
Ever since, whenever he saw a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, he was sure she was actually mocking people. It made him angry. It was useless to add a moustache to her lip, or rearrange the portrait so her teeth were exposed. He couldn’t shake the belief that cruel malice lurked behind that subtle smile.
One day as he was walking around the Shinjuku area, he came across a signboard with a Mona Lisa who had an astonished look on her face. It was actually an advertisement for a shop selling artists’ supplies at reduced price, but it made Kita think that he’d like sometime to freeze that little sneering smile of Mizuho’s and change it to just this shocked expression. All such thoughts of revenge faded after about six months, however. He fell ill, and during the two months he spent in hospital even his hatred for her disappeared and he finally moved on. It was easier to just tuck his tail between his legs and accept defeat, he decided. He got to thinking that in fact, once this bureaucrat husband of hers had made his mark in the world, Kita would be able to feel pride in the fact that he’d once been in a love triangle with the fellow.
From Mizuho’s point of view, he could see he must have been a piece of cake to handle. First off, she announces her parents are making her go through a meeting with a prospective arranged marriage partner; next, it’s “Alas, my parents are dead set against me marrying you,” declaimed in the tones of a tragic heroine; and finally, all she has to do is round things nicely off with the punch line, “When I’m married I’ll still treasure the memories of our time together.”
He caught up with Mitsuyo and Zombie enjoying a game of mini golf in a garden overlooking the sea. When they noticed him, they both paraded their matching dresses for him to admire.
“What’s with the matching clothes?” he asked, and Mitsuyo replied, “We got them in the hotel boutique shop. On your bill.”
“Hot springs resort geishas numbers one and two!” Zombie proclaimed, striking a pose.
“It looks like I’m going to get to meet Shinobu Yoimachi, girls.”
“Congratulations, your wish has been granted,” said geisha number one. “You’re a big boob boy, aren’t you Kita,” added geisha number two.
“The boobs were too expensive for me, actually. But that’s OK. Hey, hot springs resort geisha number two, I’ve got another favour to ask you. I want news of the girl I split with six years ago. Her name’s Mizuho Nishi. Her married name’s Higashi. The husband works for the Ministry of Finance.”
“So we should check out the address of a Higashi in the Ministry of Finance, right? I know someone in the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, so I’ll ask him on Monday.”
“Please.”
Geishas one and two looked at each other with cheerful, easygoing smiles. Those smiling faces were worth ten Mona Lisas.
“My you’re a romantic, aren’t you Kita? Wanting to meet up one more time with an old sweetheart who’s married someone else. She must have been a fine woman. But hey, good women get snapped up by money and status in no time, don’t they? You still love her? If you do, the only thing to do is snatch her back.”
He felt no hatred for her any more. He’d had no unrealistic thoughts of getting back together with her or being a candidate for adultery. He’d simply done his best to get used to the fact he’d been ditched. Still, there’d been dreams. In those dreams, he’d tried to reconstruct the honeymoon time with Mizuho that had lasted less than two months, or brought her up to his dream flat as she might have been when there was no rival in love and it was only him she cared for. He also used her in his masturbation fantasies. Just for those brief moments, she was his and his alone. So was that some kind of lingering attachment? After all, he’d gone right on secretly cultivating this fantasy relationship after she jilted him. Suddenly, Kita came to himself, and what he realized was that when it came down to it Mizuho Nishi and Shinobu Yoimachi were the same thing, just fantasy women.
They went back to the hotel lobby, and there Kita found the little boy he’d bought the toy for being scolded by his mother.
“Tell me the truth! Where did you get this money?” “A man gave it to me.” “What man? There’s no such man here. You’re lying to me.” “But a man gave it to me.” The little boy caught sight of Kita. Sure he’d be in for a tongue-lashing, Kita made a dash for the elevator.
His Sixth Last Supper
The evening’s meal was Mediterranean style. Abalone salad, a fish terrine with caviar on the side, seafood paella with squid ink, grilled lobster etc., washed down with Dom Perignon and Chablis. Once they were full, there was a karaoke nightclub, followed by the hot spring bath. By the time Kita got back to his room, both the night-time Pacific Ocean outside the window and the chandelier were spinning.
At dawn, he was woken by the tiny squishing sound of mucous membranes rubbing together. The dead television screen opposite mirrored the room behind him, and looking closely he realized that the two naked hot springs resort geishas were locked in an embrace in there. He sat up, intending to go and get in on the action, but the moment he did so his gorge rose, and he turned and vomited into the drawer of his bedside table. His stomach heaved up its contents remorselessly, the bile burning in his throat.
“Hey Kita, you OK?” came Zombie’s voice from next door.
“Don’t come in here!” he said, and heaved again. When the last spasms were done, he turned on the light and checked the contents of the drawer. Good God, he’d gone and defiled the Bible and the Buddhist sutras with his undigested seafood and wine!
Holding the drawer in his arms, he made for the bathroom. He rescued the Bible and the Sutras from the sea of vomit, rinsed them off under the shower, and wrapped them in a towel. Meanwhile, Zombie had crept over for a peek. She rushed off as if horrified to have witnessed some forbidden sight, to report to Mitsuyo.
“Help! Kita’s washing the Bible!”
“Eh? I didn’t know that was something you could wash…”
SUNDAY
Once in a Lifetime
Kita lay there with a hangover until close to midday. Meanwhile, the two hot springs geishas set off early for a game of tennis. When he finally surfaced, Kita took a bath, then grabbed a taxi with the idea of filling his empty stomach with noodles or something. The driver took him to a noodle restaurant in a made-over old farmhouse. As he sat there, blankly making his way through omelette and grated yam, an old couple arrived and sat down at the same table. They said hello with friendly smiles, which made Kita nervous that he was about to get himself mixed up again with more well-intentioned meddling.
The wife then pointed to the garden of the farmhouse beyond the little lane,
and murmured to her husband in a languid undertone, “Look at that lovely house, buried in flowers. So many! Hydrangea, orange blossom, pinks, rose of Sharon, petunias…It reminds me of that poem:
I never thought to see
One speck of dust disturb them,
This bed of endless summer flowers
Where once my love and I
First lay in one another’s arms.”
“Ah yes, that’s in the Kokinshu, isn’t it. Not ‘endless summer flowers,’ ‘endless summer blooms,’ it is.”
“What about some sake, darling?”
“Well, why not. It’s splendid weather, after all. Let’s be daring and have a cup, eh?”
“Soon it will be time for the gardenias and cotton roses to bloom, won’t it?”
“Those summer scents are so enchanting.”
“I remember Kenji used to love cotton roses.”
“Ah yes, how many years is it now since he died? I still feel as if he’s alive and could pop in for a visit any time, you know.”
“He made enough noise while he was alive, didn’t he, but how quiet he is in death.”
“Yes, it’s a sad truth, that old saying ‘silent as the grave.’”
Could they always have such elegant conversations with each other, wondered Kita, casting a furtive glance at this couple who seemed to inhabit a different universe from himself. True, they were speaking Japanese, and sitting at the same table as him, but their words struck him as some imagined poetic ephemera.
They sat there sipping their sake and picking at the side dish of wild vegetables they’d ordered, gazing at the flower-filled garden across the way. Taking them in, Kita’s eyes caught the husband’s.
“Would you like a cup?” The old man delicately wiped a finger over the rim of his sake cup, and held it out for Kita.
“Thank you so much, but I have a hangover and all I can face is water,” Kita replied politely, whereupon the wife remarked in the kind of elegant tone with which she might recite some poem, “Kenji tried to cure both hangovers and cancer with sake, I recall.”
“Kenji was doing his best to disinfect his body with alcohol.”
The wife smiled soundlessly with her teeth.
“Are you on holiday?” asked Kita.
“Yes. Death’s messengers will be coming for us soon enough, so we’re spending our remaining time on earth in perpetual travel. We’re still in the middle of the journey.”
“Really? So you do the pilgrimage to Ise Shrine, and so on?”
“What do you think, darling? Shall we?”
Her husband inclined his head thoughtfully. “Well it’s a bit late to hope for salvation at this stage,” he said, and he too gave a soundless laugh.
I get it, thought Kita. The post-retirement couple indulging themselves in refined travel. Just then their order of cold noodles arrived, so Kita returned to his own private world of hangover woes. Still, the couple continued to prey on his mind, and his eyes moved between the two as they ate their noodles, and the flowery garden opposite.
The old couple ate as though they’d forgotten what appetite was. This restaurant did a pretty filling tempura noodle dish that seemed to be a particular favourite with the clientele, and the customers who ordered it were gritty, no-nonsense types. But these two had not a trace of grit on them. The way they sat there politely sucking in their noodles, they could have been performing Zen meditation. It took quite some time for a single noodle to pass through their pursed lips. Watching from the sidelines, Kita was beginning to get annoyed. They sucked gently away at their food, sipped the side cup of noodle water as if sunk in meditation, then carefully replaced the throw-away chopsticks in their paper covers, remarked to each other how delicious it had been, and turned once more to look at the flowering garden.
“You must be lonely, all alone like this.” The husband was casting a lure in his direction again.
“No, the only problem’s the hangover,” Kita replied with straightforward frankness.
But the old man wouldn’t accept this. “I imagine there’s more to it,” he said, and soundlessly produced a complicit smile.
“Where will you go after Atami?” Kita asked, resorting to the usual question.
“I’d have loved to climb Mt. Fuji if only the old body would do as it’s told a bit more. Maybe we’ll head off to Kyoto.”
“I’d like to see Okinawa before Death’s messengers come for me,” his wife cut in.
These messengers kept cropping up in the conversation, so Kita made an attempt to say something in keeping with the tone.
“So the final destination of the trip is Hades, eh?”
It was intended as a joke, but the husband gazed at him levelly and said, “Actually, it’s a Fall By The Wayside tour.”
The original idea of falling dead by the wayside involved a great deal of poverty and misery, thought Kita, while these two retained an astonishing luxury of time, money, and sense of enjoyment.
“You no longer have a home to go back to, then?”
“We don’t.”
“Well then, you’re the same as me.”
“You have nowhere to go back to either?”
“I’m just into the third day of the journey. What about you? How long since you both set out?”
“It’s only been a week.”
“Really? And how long do you plan on continuing?”
“What do you think, darling?”
“Well,” replied the husband, “it’s hard to calculate that.” He fell into silent thought for a moment, then announced that he’d composed a little verse.
“Selling our swallow’s nest
We take flight with the money
To die by the roadside.”
The wife added the explanation that they’d sold their house and were using the money to travel, so they could keep on going for a year or even two if they felt so inclined.
“But my husband’s determined to fall by the wayside, you see.”
“‘Fall by the wayside’ doesn’t have quite the right nuance, perhaps. The fact is, we’ve decided to simply quietly disappear, without causing anyone any inconvenience.”
“I see…” Kita couldn’t think what more to say.
“But it must be hard for you, having nowhere to live. We could be of assistance, if you’d like.”
“Thank you very much. But I’ve left a few things undone in Tokyo that I have to go back and attend to.”
“What a shame. So you go East and we go West, it seems. We meet only to part once more. But it was very nice to meet you.”
“Take care,” said Kita, putting out his hand. The old man held it in a feeble grasp. “You too,” he said, and watched him leave. Take care and die, was what it amounted to for both sides.
On his way back to the hotel, Kita reflected that he’d made the right decision when he decided on next Friday for his execution date. If he went on not managing to die, day after day, he’d get to be like this old couple and no longer capable of really getting the best out of his last days before the execution date. Their appetite for food and sex had faded, there was no youthfulness, no yearning, not even the strength to really throw around the money they’d made on the sale of their house – all that was left was to pursue their pointless journeying. Maybe by the time you reached that age you were inclined to be attracted by those old wandering poets of yore like Basho or Saigyo, but somehow Kita couldn’t imagine himself there.
Still, that pair were intent on achieving their last great undertaking, to disappear and die quietly by the wayside. Once you got beyond a certain level of debility, it was just too much trouble to die. You could no longer die by your own hand, you had to rely on a doctor or a virus to get you there.
While you were young, on the other hand, you could do it under your own power. If something nasty happened, well you could probably finish yourself off that very day. Cancer loves vital young cells. Be it by accident, or illness, or suicide, young people could die all too easily. If an old
death was decay, then a young death was more like an explosion.
When he got back to the hotel, geishas one and two, fresh from the bath, took him by both arms and marched him off to the beauty spa, where he was given something called “a roamer therapy,” and had his hair cut and his nails done. Looking at his freshly peeled and glowing face in the mirror, Kita thought he didn’t look too bad really.
Once out of the three-hour confinement and over his hangover, he went back to their room, looking forward to his next feast. “Here I am,” he called, but there was no answer. On the bed, he found a note:
Dear Kita, I’m really sorry to disappear on you without saying goodbye. There’s some stuff I just can’t get out of back in Tokyo. These last two days have been amazing, a kind of trip to the Dragon King’s Palace. You’re a great guy, Kita. I really mean it when I say I hate the thought of you dying. Still, it’s really cool that you’ll meet your death the way you’d visit the Dragon King’s Palace. It’s a bit on the B class side, with occasional fantastic moments. I’ll keep my promise, don’t worry. I’ll follow through by checking out that Finance Ministry fellow’s address and getting that high-class lady to come meet you. But how will we communicate with each other? I’ll leave you my cell phone number. I’d love to meet you one more time. This necktie’s a present for you – it’s so cute, with all those tropical fish swimming around on it. It’d make me happy if you use it when you hang yourself. Finally, from my heart, merci beaucoup. From Izumi Mizusawa (aka Zombie).
I hadn’t really thought about dying before, but after meeting you I’ve started wondering if I should do it too. Thanks for all the delicious food. If you feel like making a meal of me again, just give me a call. I’m happy to have sex with you one more time. I mean it this time. The world’s full of rotten guys, but I just got the feeling you’re really struggling with something. I don’t really get it, but anyway, hang in there! Sorry to leave you behind in the beauty spa like this. But I just thought maybe you somehow want to be alone, so I decided to go back to Tokyo a bit early with Zombie. I’m not running away, believe me. I know there’s not much you want in life, but if you do want me to do something, feel free to tell me. There’s only five days left before Friday, so make sure you really get the best out of them. No regrets, OK? If you want to do something bad, try not to make people hate you for it. I remember there was this thief once called Umegawa Something, who murdered someone he was holding hostage, by shaving off her ears, stripping her naked, and torturing her. They finally shot him dead. Don’t you do anything like that, will you? But hey, you’re a nice guy, I’m sure you wouldn’t. My present to you is a backpack. There’s various things inside. Please use all you can before you die. Bye bye. Love, Mitsuyo.”
Death By Choice Page 7
