Kita emptied out the backpack. Somehow, she’d managed to assemble a knife, a rope, an enamel cup, an aluminum pan, and some chocolate. Seemed like she was trying to tell him to go hiking.
Now that the two girls were gone, it was so quiet his own breathing began to get on his nerves. It was quite hot, but the room felt chilly. Was this that empty feeling that comes after a good feast? At such times maybe the only thing to do is skulk about in bed. If only someone was there to stand by his pillow and watch over him, hold his hand. He should have employed a partner he could lean on when he needed to.
He was just dozing off when the phone rang. It was Heita Yashiro. The first thing he said was, “Still alive, eh?”
“That Mitsuyo tells me she’s gone and left you alone and gone back to Tokyo,” he went on. “I really told her off. You all by yourself there?”
“All alone.”
“That’s bad, that’s bad. If someone’s not there beside you all the time, you’re likely to follow through on your plan and pop right off to the other world.”
“You’re worried?”
“Sure I’m worried. You’re not insured yet, and we never finished discussing that business deal. I’m askin’ you.”
“Asking what? I’m not interested in the deal, and I’m sure I refused to take out life insurance.”
“You oughta get it. Who’d turn down the chance to get money if it’s owing you?”
“I wouldn’t be getting any money. Nor would you.”
“I’m not interested in getting it. But if your mother or your brothers and sisters are still around, surely you should send twenty or thirty million their way? After all, you’ve done your old Mum quite a bit of wrong to date, haven’t you?”
“Too late now, surely. I’m a homeless man these days, after all. Those insurance guys are no fools.”
“Something could be managed. You could say you were a live-in employee in my company.”
If he left some money to his mother, would that really erase his debts to her? Kita was letting himself be convinced by Yashiro again, and accepting help he’d rather do without. Still, it was hard to take Yashiro’s goodwill at face value. Kita was inclined to suspect him of ulterior motives.
“This wouldn’t cause my mother any problems, would it?”
“Don’t be crazy. You’re trying to say it’s unfilial to name your mother as the recipient for your life insurance? Now let me tell you just one thing, don’t you go letting on to anyone that you’ll be committing suicide next week. And if by any chance you’ve told someone already, make it clear to them it was a joke, right? Hell, it’s not the sort of thing most people really mean when they say it, after all.”
“I haven’t said a word to anyone personally.”
“Ah yes, those girls. There’s no saying they won’t find themselves hard up for something to talk about and use your story as fodder.”
“You did the same yourself, if I may say so.”
“No, I’m different. Me, I think you should leave some proof of the few decades you’ve spent on this earth. I just want to help you leave a really vivid memory for all those people who’re planning to hang around and grow a bit older in this life. Surely you’d like to be someone that people recall with fondness – ‘Oh yeah, that guy called Yoshio Kita. He was a bit odd, wasn’t he?’ That sort of thing.”
“Not particularly.”
“You wouldn’t like to do one really important thing in this life, to make people remember you fondly as the guy who passed away kind of intentionally?”
“It’s not that kind of romantic thing at all.”
“Don’t knock romance. We men have lofty convictions women know nothing of.”
“That so? Well I don’t. You’re too late.”
“Come on, you could put your death off a bit longer.”
“No I couldn’t. I’ve made my decision.”
“I don’t imagine you’ve promised anyone though, have you?”
“I’ve promised myself.”
“You sure are stubborn for a youngster. OK. You’re coming back tomorrow afternoon, right? You get to meet Shinobu Yoimachi at nine tomorrow evening, so drop in at my office before that. I’ll take you to the meeting place. I’ll have all the insurance papers here ready. Let’s have a meal together, eh?”
He wasn’t quite sure what was going on, but it seemed like he was going to have to meet Yashiro again. But why was the guy so eager? Was he just having fun, or was this some complex plot to make money? Never mind, why worry? He could break the appointment tomorrow if he chose, after all, Kita told himself. He was about to put the receiver down when he heard Yashiro’s voice continuing, “By the way, what are you doing this evening?” He hung up without replying. Immediately, the phone rang again. Kita left the room.
At the hotel’s sushi bar he mutely picked away at what was probably his fifth last evening meal. Raw lobster, raw octopus, conger eel, bluefin tuna, bonito, abalone, salmon roe, wrapped up with a miso soup with sea bream. He chuckled when he realized that somehow everything he’d chosen had felicitous associations.
The bar lady looked at his face and remarked on how shiny his skin looked. When he explained he’d just had it scrubbed in the spa she took him for an actor, and asked him to sign a square of poem paper for her. He couldn’t be bothered turning her down, so he wrote his name down in careful script. He stared at the remaining blank space for a while, then imitated the old gentleman he’d met at the noodle house by writing a little poem:
All I know is
I must fish myself out of
The bad son soup
Signed: Yoshio Kita
Monday
Don’t Tell Mum
By the time he left Atami, Kita had spent three hundred thousand yen. It had taken him two days to spend what he’d normally spend in six weeks. Living sumptuously takes it out of you, though. Even if this decadence suddenly tipped him into insolvency, come what may, it was no big deal. He’d always had the habit of doing things on the cheap, so he couldn’t be bothered letting expense worries overshadow things now. Besides, luxury was no doubt an irrational pleasure. What meaning beside irrational pleasure could there be for a guy to choose to drink an eighty thousand yen bottle of French Romanée-Conti wine rather than an eight hundred yen bottle of Chilean? If you were curious about the difference, why not at least try them both? Mind you, if you downed three bottles of each on your own and ended up defiling the Bible with your vomit, it would be all the same anyway. Yes, it was all irrational. A real connoisseur probably would regret nothing even if he drained three bottles of Romanée-Conti then threw the lot up again. Irrationality is the very thing he’s after.
So what about himself, wondered Kita? He was still scared of the irrational.
He bought a gift box of assorted dried fish at the station shop, and hopped on the bullet train. He had to be systematic about how he spent his time from now on. Sure, other people’s expectations were part of it, but he’d begun to think it would be a waste to idle away his remaining time like that old couple in the noodle house. If he met up with Heita Yashiro again, it would set the clock ticking smartly towards the appointed hour of his death, he decided. The guy was eager to make some money out of Kita’s voluntary death. Before long, Kita would become a valuable item for a death merchant. He didn’t mind that much. After all, he was the one who got to die, and Yashiro was the businessman who used him. It was only right that their perspective on death should differ. If Kita didn’t die, Yashiro wouldn’t turn a profit. Kita, on the other hand, couldn’t care less about Yashiro’s interests. Nevertheless, while Kita was alive, Yashiro could apparently be helpful in all sorts of ways, so why not put himself in his hands for a while? After all, come Friday Kita would be released from all such worldly calculations, and he wouldn’t give a damn what happened after that. This was the freedom of the dead.
Still, it was only Monday today, and Kita was still alive. He couldn’t go about like he was dead yet. He decided to get hims
elf some new clothes for his remaining days, something cool that he could use as his death clothing as well. He headed for Ginza, Mitsuyo’s survival backpack still on his back.
First off, he looked for some shoes that would put a spring in his step for the remaining days. Smooth leather ones would be too slippery. On the other hand, his tread would be too heavy with thick caterpillar-type soles. The best kind would allow him speed lightly towards his destiny. His eye happened to fall on a pair of zebra-striped basket shoes. They had a layer of air in the sole, and he liked the sinewy feel of the tread. He threw away the old shoes that had kindly seen him through until now, and set off right away walking down Ginza mounted on his new “zebras.” Just the difference in feeling underfoot gave a lift to his mood. Wherever he might find himself flying away to, these shoes seemed to promise to give him a good strong run-up before takeoff.
He headed for the menswear section of a department store. It was still morning, and there was only a smattering of customers there. He bought a shirt with the same zebra stripes as his shoes, then at the urging of the salesgirl he added a cream jacket to the combination. This went perfectly with the tropical fish necktie that Zombie had given him, and gave him the air of one of those exotic gamblers who showed up in the casinos of Lido or Monte Carlo. The salesgirl added in a pair of mustard-coloured cotton trousers. When he turned up the cuffs over his basket shoes he looked, if not like someone about to commit Death by Choice, at any rate like some neurotic playboy. Then, adding the backpack to this attire, he was transformed into a vagrant with a touch of good taste. The sensibility revealed itself in the little clank of the aluminium pan at every step he took. Next, box of dried fish in hand, he added in for good measure a huge pair of Infinity sunglasses. Deciding against a hat, he instead bought a bright red umbrella. The whole thing came to eighty-two thousand three hundred yen.
He also popped his head into the basement food hall. His father often used to slip in the department store food halls on his way home from work to catch the closing-time sales, and would buy a cylinder of fish paste or some baby dried sardines, dried fish, or sukiyaki beef. He would just buy whatever was on special offer. Spurred on by his new outfit, Kita decided to follow his dead father’s example, and scooped up whatever food his hand fell on. To begin with, he limited himself to dry goods – dried cuttlefish, edible algae, kelp, dried white radish slivers and dried scallops – but before long he found himself on the kind of roll that shopping excitement induces, and he bought a kilo of high-grade Matsuzaka marbled beef, a box of early white peaches, and three skewers of roasted eel. The total set him back twenty thousand yen.
He glanced at his watch and saw it was right on noon. Manoeuvring his great pile of shopping into a taxi, he ordered the driver to take him to Takashima Daira.
There was somewhere he wanted to drop in on before his execution. Anybody in his position would do the same, as the hour of their execution approached. Not because the place was famous for its suicides, but because the woman who had brought him into this world was there. He hadn’t done much for her while he was alive, and now he was going to give her further grief by preceding her into the next world. Thus, he wanted to go and humbly express his regret, without putting on any airs about what he was going to do. Most people under sentence of Death by Choice make their way to their mother’s sitting room, driven by the same compulsion.
He decided not to talk to the driver. He couldn’t take another dose of any contradictory philosophising on life. But there, coming from the car radio in a sleep-inducing murmur, was a voice harping on about that very theme. The road was jammed with traffic. Kita closed his eyes, and did his best to shut out the distracting sound. He began to think of the various things he had to do.
He’d need papers in order to apply for the insurance. He’d better go to the local Ward Office and get an abridged copy of his family register and a document certifying his registered signature seal. He owed money to friends, so he should write a will leaving them an appropriate sum from the insurance money after his death. When would he do that? Where should he leave the will once he’d written it? He’d better ask Yashiro later. Where would he stay tonight? Surely there was no way he’d be spending it with Shinobu Yoimachi.
He stopped off at the Ward Office, then hailed another taxi, and called in on his Mum. Each time he went there, the sitting room seemed to have gotten smaller. His mother didn’t seem either delighted or put out by his calling in unexpectedly like this. She just said lightly, “Hi, welcome back. You been somewhere?”
“Not really, I just went down to Atami for a bit.”
“Atami, eh? A school trip?”
“What?” said Kita with a laugh, and he sat down. His mother gazed fixedly at the clothes he was wearing and looked as if she was about to say something, but remained silent. Unloading all the food he’d bought item by item and laying it on the table, Kita said, “Put the fresh stuff in the fridge, would you?”
His mother looked dubiously at the meat and peaches, then back to Kita’s face. “Who did you get all this from?” she asked.
“I bought it. At a department store.”
“I wonder why you’ve started acting like your father.”
“I’ll get more and more like him as time passes.”
“Don’t be in too much of a hurry. You’ll be in danger of being mistaken for him.”
His mother had this tendency to say really stupid things with a straight face. He hadn’t dropped in on her like this more than about once every six months for the last few years, and even then, he’d come along like some guest with a gift for her, just stayed for a meal, and hardly really spoken to her. He guessed she’d be feeling lonely since his father died, but she’d carried on living alone and always put up a brave front, assuring him she didn’t want to be a burden on him by moving in together. Most parents would let themselves be overheard murmuring to themselves that they wished their son would hurry up and marry, and give them the blessing of a grandchild. But Kita’s mother never said a thing. She chose to act as if it was no problem. Kita was aware of all he owed her, but he too found himself playing dumb, and just keeping an eye on her from a strategic distance.
“You won’t have had lunch yet, I guess. I’m just about to have some, so you’ve come at the right time. I’ve got some cold rice, so shall we grill some of this dried fish to have with it?”
“Sure. And let’s have some eel. How about making miso soup?”
His mother went into the kitchen. Her movements were listless, and quite confused. This mother of his, who used to slip constantly back and forth between kitchen and sitting room so swiftly and efficiently, now seemed to have shrunk as though the air had been let out of her, and had grown sluggish. Her life had been reduced to a painstaking repetition of the tiny day-to-day rituals of life alone in this thirty-year-old sitting room.
He looked in on the bedroom. There was a row of potted plants out on the balcony, pansies and mini tomatoes and so on. There was quite a lot of stuff about considering her solitary life, with tea chests and cardboard boxes crammed into the tiny room. Opening the drawers and top closets, he came across boxes marked “Yoshio’s summer clothes” or “Daddy’s formal wear”. Why did she keep clothing belonging to these two men who had left? What’s more, she had carefully kept the set of illustrated reference books that Kita had treasured back when he was a grade schooler. One whole area of the closet was exactly as it had been twenty years ago.
The smell of grilling fish came wafting down the corridor together with his mother’s voice. “Food’s ready, Yoshio.”
On the table was an extra rice dish and plate of fish. “Is someone else coming?” Kita inquired.
“It’s your father’s portion,” his mother said.
She’d never in the past gone through this kind of performance. Perhaps she just wanted to pay her respects to the dead there today?
Kita stirred the miso soup about with his chopsticks. It contained some slivers of the dried white r
adish, sliced onion leaves, and seaweed flakes. His mother had made this soup without a saucepan. She had just put the stock powder and miso into a bowl, added the reconstituted white radish, then poured boiling water from the kettle over it all and stirred, finally adding the onion leaves and seaweed.
“This was the way to make miso soup that you came up with so that Dad could make it even on his own, wasn’t it Mum?”
“That’s right. He really liked it.”
“I guess you used to make it this way before they ever started selling instant miso soup in packets, eh? It’s quite an invention.”
“In the days before stock powder, I used to use Ajinomoto. This mackerel’s good. So who’d you get the food from?”
“I bought it at Atami. Like I told you.”
“What did you go to Atami for? You’re not into shoplifting again, are you?”
“Shoplifting dried fish? I’m not a cat, you know.”
“You on holiday today?”
“I’ve taken some time off. Till Friday.”
“What’ll you do with all that spare time? Planning to get up to some mischief, I’ll be bound.”
What could she be imagining? The conversation wasn’t going too well so far. “Come on, let’s stop messing about, eh?” he said, forcing a smile. “You’re throwing me off.” Then he looked at her face. He hadn’t really gotten a good look at her face when he first arrived, but now he saw that his mother’s eyes were somehow misty, and when she looked at her son’s face, she did so with the kind of straight gaze a child would use. She was close to sixty, so no doubt her eyesight was getting poorer and her field of vision narrowing, but there was something completely innocent about her look. Then there was that bewildered look on her face, as if she wasn’t quite catching on.
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