Death by Choice

WHAT IS “DEATH BY CHOICE”?

How are you?

I’m so-so, myself. Bored, as usual. One life cycle completed and into extra time, pottering about in my tiny patch of garden like an Englishman intent on finding his pleasures among the mediocrities of existence, tending cucumbers and scallions, and cutting lengths of bamboo from the local grove to make little bamboo trinkets. Younger friends remark that age seems to be catching up with me these days, and I guess it’s true, I’ve reached that time of life. And now, in my dotage, I’ve come up with this kind of desperate novel, in which I’ve given myself free rein to portray a decadence in keeping with this fin de siècle moment, and preparations for what’s to come. Those who read this book will be a step ahead of everyone else by getting a sneak preview of life and opinions at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Actually, I have to say I’ve already published quite a few novels that accurately predicted the future. I flatter myself that I haven’t just done what a journalist does, tagging along in the wake of alarming events with an analysis of their social pathologies – I’ve been consistently aware of historical trends, and tried to grasp what lies beneath the superficial currents of the age. You could call me the last canary that’s taken into the coal mine. But the canary is rather like the boy who cried wolf. I love that boy, and I never could believe he was lying. I choose to think that he was simply more highly-strung and sensitive than anyone else in the village.

You don’t have to be a depressive – everyone who’s lived twenty or thirty years has once or twice felt the seductive urge towards suicide. My own thoughts have turned that way repeatedly ever since adolescence. I’ve managed to survive thanks to the fact that I was never really all that serious about it, but I know you don’t necessarily need some strong motivation or hell of despair for suicide. Other people, the ones left behind, assume that you must have been driven to it by some dreadful anguish, but the person who dies doesn’t consider it in such complicated terms. This is the case with Zombie (alias Izumi Mizusawa) in the novel. On the contrary, I’d guess that if you were in a state of mind that allowed you to pause and really think about why you needed to kill yourself, there’d be a pretty good chance you’d give up on the idea.

We can’t pop over to the other world and ask the people who’ve committed suicide about this, so their real motives for suicide must remain a mystery. Actually, there may well be such complex reasons and motivations behind the act that even they themselves aren’t aware of them. You can’t find all the factors behind a suicide in the personal consciousness and situation of the person involved. It’s perfectly possible to have suicides produced by social situations, or being swept along by mass psychology, or even resulting from fashion. Think of the people who kill themselves as a sacrifice to some popular idol, or as a result of the Internet circulating suicide manuals or offering cyanide for sale.

I don’t feel any urge to recreate some outmoded suicide manual from a passing fad. I don’t see anything wrong with the existence of manuals like this – they’re pretty much like those for conducting love affairs, or cooking, or wandering the world. The important thing is to find out whether things really happen the way they say they do in these manuals. After all, that kind of advice is just simplified generalization. Even if people follow precedent exactly, the process and the result will differ completely from one person to the next. I’m a novelist, so all I can do is doggedly pursue the tale of one suicide.

After adolescence, the period that is most closely connected with suicide is one’s forties, when it’s the leading cause of death. This has some relevance to me, since I’ve only got a couple of years to go before I turn forty. So I feel the need to work through the question of suicide till I’ve grown sick of the subject, in order to get my head around how to deal with my coming middle-aged male crisis. This impulse is what lies behind Death by Choice, a detailed look at the last week in the life of a man who’s decided to kill himself the following Friday.

Just suppose you had a million or so yen in the bank and knew you only had one week before departing this world – how would you spend your remaining time?

This may be a tired old theme, but I don’t imagine many have actually thought the question through to the bitter end. I’d guess everyone’s first thoughts would turn to the pleasures of the flesh. How about, for instance, a dish of boiled shark’s fin plus abalone steak plus underbelly of bluefin tuna, all you can eat, followed by sleeping with three rabidly sexy ladies and a champagne bath to top it off? But the pleasures of the flesh can get pretty wearying. Next morning you’re in the grip of heartburn and a hangover, not to mention a sore groin. OK, why not go take a break at a hot spring resort? And meet up again with an old lover before you die, maybe kidnap the star you’re crazy about, and since you’re going to die anyway you could donate your organs to someone who wants them, and do something remarkable that will make good and sure your life in this world will be remembered? You just have to set your mind to it for a moment and you’ll uncover a tangle of all manner of desires, impulses good and bad, and vanities. People don’t usually give a thought to what happens after they die, but when death is finally approaching, your mind can suddenly rush frantically to the question of that future time when you’re no longer around. People in their forties contemplating suicide will think of the family they’d be leaving behind, and take out some insurance. If more than a year has elapsed since you signed the form, the insurance company will pay out in the event of suicide – and apparently there are quite a few cases where someone does kill themselves after the year is up. How to imagine the world you’ll leave behind you – this is the real ethical question. It’s wrong to decide that you can get away with anything since you’ll soon be dead anyhow. We have the freedom to choose to die, but this freedom of choice is a cruel thing. Understand this, and you’ll feel increasingly inclined to put off the actual deed once you’ve had your fill of the pleasures of the flesh.

To be honest, when I began this novel my plan was to write up the theme of suicide in a kind of muscular comedy form à la Chaplin, Lloyd, or Keaton. The idea was to address those youths who mystify suicide in their pallid novels, and say to them Come on guys, enough. It’s really just a comedy, you know. At any rate, that was the plan until I got as far as THURSDAY.

When I launched into FRIDAY, things took a new direction. Then I put off the publication deadline, and added another chapter called SOMEDAY.

Once the Friday deadline is passed, what Yoshio Kita confronts is death itself.

If I can claim to have understood anything in the process of writing this novel, it’s that there’s another kind of urge besides the urge to eat, the sex urge, and the urge to know – and that’s the urge to die. Freud was right.