Death By Choice

by Masahiko Shimada

Once in the train on the Odakyu Line, he settled down to think. What was the best way to announce himself in order to avenge his broken heart? What was the first thing he should say to her once he’d told her over the intercom that she had a special delivery, and brought her to the door? Would she realize who he was if he said nothing? If she asked what he’d come for, he’d tell her his name, and apologize for the unexpected visit. Naturally, she’d be bound to look put out. Surely she wouldn’t come straight out and demand to know what he was doing there, when she’d vowed never to see him again? If she did, he should answer unflinchingly, “Don’t worry. You’ll never see me again.”

  Or, since he already knew he wouldn’t be welcome, perhaps he should say, “I’ll pay you a hundred thousand yen if you let me have tea with you at home here.” And if she didn’t get the joke, too bad. He should either just walk right in, or drag her out. Still, if he did that she’d take a strong stand and start treating her old lover like an abductor. It was a peaceful neighbourhood, so the police were bound to come running.

  For some reason, his imagination kept tending toward negative scenarios. Surely it was possible that she’d exclaim, “Well, well, great to see you again. How are you?” the moment she saw him, and invite him in as if he were one of her many friends just dropped by. She may be indebted to him, after all, but she shouldn’t bear him any grudge.

  At this point Kita left off pondering the question, and instead drew a piece of paper from his pocket and checked her address and phone number.

  Her name had changed to Mizuho Higashi now she was married, but Kita hadn’t taken this on board. It was still Mizuho Nishi who came to him in dreams, transformed herself into a soft pillow, and accepted his embraces. Naturally, she was as she had been during their short honeymoon period together. But it was all rather vague and unsatisfactory, like frolicking with the figure of a ghost. There were times when he thought he heard her voice, but as soon as he listened carefully it would fade into the dialect of passing high school girls.

  He could still faintly recall what the sensation of love had been like. Back then, his sensitive nerves had registered her every word, her look, her fingers as they danced on an invisible keyboard, even the gentle breeze that brushed her cheek. Those nerves of his had been primed for her alone.

  Had there been anything resembling a beginning, a development and a conclusion in her love, he wondered? The relationship had abruptly ended with the introduction of Higashi, and Kita could scarcely remember how things had begun with himself. He had a feeling he’d drawn her in a game of chance at a university party, but he also seemed to remember that things had begun with him asking her out to a concert of Beethoven’s thirty-second piano sonata by an elderly Russian pianist. Or maybe that time in the park with all the cosmos in bloom had been their first date. The fact was, Kita’s memory of those times had lost all sense of continuity. The passage of time and the seasons were all jumbled up in his mind.

  Not that it was all so long ago his memory would naturally become moth-eaten like this. His self of that time wouldn’t have been at all surprised by his present self. Nevertheless, recalling memories of Mizuho Nishi was rather like sorting through strands of memory from early infancy. For one thing, he didn’t really have any memories to speak of – or perhaps he did, but couldn’t really recall them. What remained clearest in his memory from childhood, he wondered?

  There was the time he’d fallen from the horizontal bar in the playground, and the world had suddenly gone red. And the time he’d shoplifted that book of Dali’s paintings, and run like crazy toward the river with it.

  And what of his relationship with Mizuho?

  There was an image of her standing on a station platform, wearing black leather boots. The time when they hadn’t been able to stop laughing as they ate dinner together. The bit of fluff on her eyelash one winter afternoon, and the mosquito bite on her knee that summer evening.

  He had to tell himself stories over and over till he half believed them, before he could resurrect happy memories of her. He couldn’t really manage it on his own; he needed to find someone to help him. And if that was impossible, then all he could do was meekly concentrate his energies on trying to forget the bad memories. This was how the memories had come to be censored and moth-eaten to the point where all that was left was a pile of junk.

  And had she ever even once been conscious of her relationship with Kita as being in love? It may well be that there’d never been a time when her nerves had tingled at his presence. In fact, those nerves of hers probably only ever really responded to Higashi, he decided.

  He asked the way at the police box by the south exit, and set off. On the way, he came across a flower shop, so he got them to make up a ten thousand yen bouquet of yellow roses. He wouldn’t announce an express delivery, he decided, he’d announce that he was delivering some flowers.

  He sniffed at the roses as he walked. They smelt to him like the scent of Mizuho’s body.

  “Come along Kazuki, hurry up. What’re you doing?”

  A woman in a dark blue suit was calling to her son in a low, authoritative voice. The little Kazuki, dressed likewise in dark blue shorts and a white open-necked shirt, was in his own fantasy world, running a toy car along the guard rail and telling himself how the Ferrari hit a camel and exploded. When Kita went by, the boy suddenly yelled, “Hey Mum, those flowers are walking!”

  Sure, why shouldn’t flowers walk, after all? Kita thought, and he began to run. As he ran, his spirits lifted. He would get the better of his rival from the Finance Ministry, have lunch with his wife, and at least steal a kiss, he decided.

  The site Mizuho’s house stood on was of average size for the neighbourhood, but the white tent-shaped building of reinforced concrete stood out glaringly, expressing its owner’s taste in excruciating detail. Tiles designed like Arabian picture plates graced the entrance pillars and balcony. The tiled fence itself formed a flowerbed in which tulips bloomed. The tiles of the gate pillars were faded from the rays of the sun. The garage doors were closed, but he could faintly discern a Mercedes Benz through the semitransparent glass shutters.

  Kita passed the house and walked on another fifty yards. Then he pulled himself together, and turned back. This time, he stopped in front of the gate, but then immediately set off again in the direction of the station. After ten yards, he turned again, went back to the gate, and pressed the intercom button below the sign carved with the name “Higashi.” A toy car and a bicycle with practice wheels stood side by side in the entrance. Until this moment, Kita had scarcely registered that this couple had children.

  Clutching his bouquet, Kita retreated. Unfortunately, just at that moment the little boy called Kazuki was coming towards him, holding his mother’s hand. If they were here to visit Mizuho, Kita would lose his chance. He and Kazuki caught each other’s eye. Clutching his toy car, Kazuki pointed at the flowers. “Hey Mum, those flowers are standing there.”

  Pretending he’d mistaken the house, Kita moved on, then he began to trot, trying to create more distance between himself and the mother and child. It was the kind of press-the-doorbell-and-run game he hadn’t done for twenty years or more.

  “Look! The flowers are running!” Kazuki cried.

  This was why he hated kids, Kita thought as he executed another detour. He’d been wandering the neighbourhood for around half an hour by now, and it was past ten thirty. He decided he should find out whether she was at home and whether her children were with her before deciding on his next course of action. He’d telephone. Would she agree to meet him then and there when he asked her to? It couldn’t happen in front of her children. Judging from the toy car and bicycle by the entrance, she may have two kids. Or perhaps there was only one. At any rate, one was clearly a boy, maybe around Kazuki’s age. If she’d had a child soon after marrying, he’d be five or six by now.

  He was going to be saying farewell to everything on Friday, yet here he was still unable to make up his mind. He mustn’t be sca
red of a child. These flowers had business to attend to with Mizuho. He mustn’t be put off. He’d go back to the shining gateway, and press that button.

  But there was no need. Mizuho Nishi was standing there in front of the Higashi home. There was no sign of a child. If he kept walking, he’d run straight into her, so Kita paused and appeared to be tying his shoelace in the shade of a tree, while he looked at her.

  She hadn’t come out to meet anyone, she was going out in the white Mercedes. From this distance, all he could make out was that she was wearing a black dress, and had short hair. He must hail a taxi right away. The prospect of a taxi in this residential area seemed hopeless, but luckily several soon cruised by on the lookout for department store shoppers. Sinking into one, Kita told the driver, “Follow that Mercedes.”

  He took a deep breath, and said to himself with a little smile, “OK, the chase is on.”

  Picnic at the Neurology Clinic

  The white Mercedes went along Setagaya Street, on through Sangenjaya, and pulled up in the parking lot of a general hospital. Kita had leapt to the conclusion that she was setting off for the heart of the city to have a pleasant lunch chatting with some elegant friend, and the discovery that her destination was a hospital threw him into confusion. He’d have a hard time finding a vantage point from which to watch her and work out whether she was there to visit someone, or to see a doctor.

  Luckily, he was still carrying the bouquet. If he walked down the hospital corridor with it pretending he was there on a visit, he wouldn’t look suspicious. He set off at a run clutching the flowers, planning to arrive before her and hide in wait behind a pillar in the lobby.

  Eyes hidden behind sunglasses, Mizuho Nishi headed straight for the reception desk. Kita watched her from three yards away as she went past. Her face was so drained of life that she might have been wearing a porcelain mask. She had grown considerably thinner in the last six years, but her arms and back emanated a languid sexiness that she hadn’t had in her mid-twenties. Her listless movements were reminiscent of slowly shaken silk.

  “Mizuho Nishi! Mizuho Nishi!” Kita silently chanted to himself as he watched, trying to identify the lover from whom he’d parted six years earlier with the wife before his eyes. At any rate, Mizuho Nishi was obviously alive. Kita felt gratitude to some higher force for this.

  She collected a form from the reception desk, turned away from him and walked off, but then paused as if at a sudden thought. She turned, her hand went to the back of her head in a gesture that seemed to brush away the sensation of something clinging there. Kita averted his eyes, his heart racing uncomfortably. Then she turned back, and walked off toward the elevator, her heels clicking loudly as she went.

  Kita checked the name above the reception desk where she had received her form, and saw that it belonged to the Neurology Outpatient section. He couldn’t imagine what illness this could be. Having no urge to go up to the relevant waiting room, he decided to hang about on a sofa in the lobby sipping oolong tea until her consultation was over.

  Hospitals are perennially crowded places. There are patients who commute from home, as well as those who are hospitalized for months, and some who are brought in against their will. The population rises and falls from one day to the next. No one would come in the hope of dying, of course, but it takes a certain amount of courage to place your life in the hands of others by coming here. Having sold his organs, Kita would inevitably end up in a hospital, he realized, whether he wanted to die there or not. This thought prompted him to look around, checking out the sort of place where he’d be brought as soon as he’d died.

  The corpse would come in an ambulance and be offloaded at the ambulance depot, then they’d probably take it straight to some empty operating theatre.

  Following the diagram of the hospital layout, Kita headed for the surgical department. Bandaged patients were moving about in the corridor on crutches or in a wheelchair. Others, either awaiting or just out of surgery, were going around with a drip stand attached to a tube in their belly.

  Once removed, Kita’s organs would be frozen and delivered to their various recipients, his belly would be closed up, and what remained of him wiped clean, put in a case with dry ice, and conveyed to the underground morgue.

  He went back to check the diagram and see where the morgue was located, but it wasn’t listed. “Are you visiting someone, or looking for a ward?” asked a passing nurse.

  “I’m going to the Neurology Section,” he replied.

  “Third floor up on the elevator and turn right.”

  Kita bowed briefly in thanks for this simple explanation. Giving up his search for the morgue, he returned to the sofa in the lobby, and sank into a daze. This area also served as the waiting room for the Internal Medicine outpatients, and it was thronged with waiting people. It suddenly occurred to Kita that he may be in the way here, so he walked some distance away and found an empty seat near the lift, where he settled down to wait for Mizuho to emerge.

  He observed a middle-aged man in pyjamas, sitting in front of an old man, knees touching. They were deep in conversation.

  “Nah, these patients’re all too weak to be able to do away with themselves. Folks what commit suicide are generally hale and hearty. Take jumping out of a window, now. How’re y’gonna get yer body to make the leap if it won’t do as it’s told, eh? Your body’s still good ’n heavy, the splat’d be spectacular I’d say, but as for me, I’m all dried up and light as a leaf. Any passing breeze blows me half off me feet. If I was to come tumblin’ to earth, I’d make no more sound than the tap as a bamboo broom falls over. You’ve got no problem. You’d make a fine thud. Hangin’ yerself’s tough, too. There’s that hook in the ceiling for hangin’ the drips from, but whaddya do about a rope? The nurse ain’t gonna bring one for you, is she now?”

  “All we can do is wait for the doctors to kill us.”

  “You’d imagine there’s all kindsa ways of dyin’, wouldn’t yer, but there’s not that many y’know. Still, I’d say someone who’s spent a lotta time thinkin’ through various options would die well.”

  “I’d like to live a bit longer, personally. I haven’t eaten all I want yet. I’d like to wave good riddance to this hospital food as soon as I can, and make a real glutton of myself with delicious food.”

  “True enough, hospital food’s horrible stuff. How do they manage to make it so awful, eh? It’s a crime to feed that rubbish to old folks who don’t have much longer to live. They oughta be ashamed of themselves. The hospital food down in Kansai’s a bit better, ya know.”

  “I’d love to eat a good filling bowl of ramen noodles.”

  “Sure thing. Wouldn’t it be good to kill yerself with ten bowls of the very best noodles tucked away in yer belly, eh?”

  “I’d also have grilled eel, whole boiled shark’s fin, stewed abalone, smoked and pickled radish, Korean herb-stuffed chicken, and oysters on the shell.”

  “Y’ve really got a thing about food, haven’t ya. I’m full of awe.”

  “If you don’t die of cancer, how would you like to die, Dr Matsui?”

  “I’d die over a woman.”

  “If you take that medicine you’d probably manage it.”

  “Sure thing. Pop some Viagra and die makin’ a nurse gasp, eh?”

  “But it doesn’t last past the grave, does it? Just like joking about how to kill yourself.”

  “True enough. Once yer dead you don’t think. You can’t complain then. So be as selfish as yer want, I say. That’s livin’, that is.”

  “I saw a war documentary once long ago, with a scene of an Australian prisoner of war having his head cut off. Just as the sword was about to come down on him, he flinched and pulled his neck in. He knew he was about to die, and flinched because he imagined the pain to come. It made me feel really strange somehow, to see that.”

  “Hmm. Yeah. I’d say the guy who jumps from a building probably grimaces as he’s about to hit the pavement too. It’s gonna hurt like hell, but
the next instant yer dead, aren’t ya.”

  “That’s right. I saw the same thing in a media photo from the Vietnam War. A spy who’s about to be shot, kneeling there with the pistol at his temple, his face all twisted. The bullet’s going to strike him straight in the head, so he wouldn’t actually feel any pain.”

  “He might feel pain for zero point something seconds.”

  “Isn’t there any way of dying that doesn’t involve any pain, Dr Matsui?”

  “My field’s archeology. I don’t have a clue about such things. But I hear they put monkeys on the lab table in biology and do studies, kill ’em in various ways and gather the data from their nerve responses. Lookin’ for the least painful method. Those studies apparently help in developing new means of execution, and surgical operations.”

  “They torture monkeys for that?”

  “Someone at the research centre told me you can hear the screams of their death throes every day.”

  “Monkeys are killed so that people can die more easily? I hate pain, but I could put up with a little needle prick to start the process. They just use an injection for executions in the States these days, isn’t that so?”

  “Yeah, when it comes down to it, that’s proof you’re alive. You can only say ‘ouch’ while yer living, can’t ya? Nothing hurts once yer dead.” At this point, the old man with the Kansai accent noticed Kita sitting there listening to their conversation in fascination, and addressed him. “You’ve been eavesdroppin’ on our odd conversation about death and pain and so on, haven’t you? Are you here to visit someone?”

  Kita gave a nod, and replied that an acquaintance of his was in the Neurology ward.

  “Neurology ward, eh? What’s his problem?” asked the fat middle-aged man.

  “I don’t really know.”

  “I think Neurology’s for patients with things like autonomic dystonia, or headaches, or neuroses,” said the old man.

  “Not necessarily. You also get patients with serious problems like Parkinson’s, or progressive muscular dystrophy, and things like that.”