Period of Distrust by Park Kyung-Ni (Part 3)

After the monk selling rice had left, Jinyong’s mother waited for mid-July. This was when the All Soul’s Day for the dead took place.

The day before mid-July, her mother had already gone to the temple and arranged for the event, taking Munsu’s picture and two thousand hwan. So, the next morning, as soon as the first light appeared in the sky, Jinyong followed her mother out of the house, carrying a basket of fruit. They went up a fairly steep road towards B National School until they saw the courtyard of the temple. With all the exorcisms, the temple was at its busiest today, so the women from the village had come to help out.

The large-framed chief monk rejoiced at seeing the mother.

“My, how devoted of you to come so early…”

The mother dabbed her eyes with her handkerchief.

“Please look after our child. Please. He’s so pitiful…”

She blew her nose. There was no way that this monk, who had had his fill of the mother’s sorrow last evening, would be content to listen to this again. In an extremely business-like fashion, he said,

“But the lady who’s meant to go first still hasn’t arrived, so what can I do?” He was lost in thought for a moment.

There was no way of knowing what kind of lady she was, but the temple seemed to think her an extremely valuable guest. The mother gave a bitter smile and stared at the monk.

“Then do our child first.” The monk looked at her for a while.

“Then… shall I start with you, madam?” The monk decided as such and then called out to the monk passing by.

“Brother!”

This “brother” turned around. Compared to the smooth-faced chief monk, he looked much older, and even his face was gaunt.

“This lady paid two thousand hwan last evening, but the lady who was meant to go first hasn’t arrived yet, so if we let her go first, she’ll be done before the other lady gets here.”

From his manner of speaking, it seemed as though he respected the other monk’s opinion.

Instead of replying, the old monk looked the mother and daughter up and down, but since their money barely amounted to anything, he just left curtly.

Jinyong and her mother stood blankly with their backs to the sanctuary.

The sun was rising over the ridge ahead. Jinyong was unaffected by the bright morning, as if she was simply looking at a mural.

She wondered how shameless it must have been of them to pay the lowest amount but come at the crack of dawn expecting to go first.

A young monk carrying the offerings came by.

“Excuse me, is that tall monk not here?” The mother was asking about the one who came selling rice.

“He doesn’t stay in the temple much,” he answered simply and went into the sanctuary.

The prayers for the dead started soon after. Jinyong was greatly disappointed when the old monk sounded the moktak (*wooden percussion instrument) and started the prayers as if dozing off. She was sorry that it was not the large chief monk with the rich, sonorous voice. She felt that if they were going to do this, they should at least have a good shaman.

While he prayed, the monk leered at Jinyong, who was standing blankly next to her bowing mother. She wore a purple dress and her waist seemed unspeakably thin. Her dark eyes stood out in her otherwise pale face.

The monk was still leering inappropriately at her. Whenever she felt his eyes on her, she awkwardly bowed her head down as if she was being pressed. Just like the proverb ‘a monk’s heart isn’t in the prayers, but in the rice offerings’ she thought that his monk’s heart was not in his prayers, but in her attitude of coming to the temple but not worshipping. She felt more and more fatigued as if she had had some kind of confrontation with the monk.

A while seemed to have passed. The chief monk panted into the sanctuary.

“Brother, hurry up. The lady has come now. Just summarise it.”

The chief monk hurried to a corner of the sanctuary. The old monk moved on to the departed in front of the altar. It was doubtful whether had had finished the scriptures properly. The young monk who had carried the offerings before came in with a wide bowl. He looked back at the mother and daughter and gestured to them to go up to the altar.

Jinyong lay down before the picture of Munsu. At first, warm tears gushed out uncontrollably onto the cold floor. She could feel Munsu deeply in her heart.

“Munsu, eat up, you poor child…”

Jinyong had never heard her mother’s voice sound so sad. Her mother put a stick of incense in the burner and offered twenty ten hwan notes, crisp as though they had just come from the bank, to the dead. Then Jinyong got up and offered incense. When she turned back, she saw the monk crane his neck and peek at the money. That crisp, new money looked like only a hundred hwan. Jinyong hung her head in shame.

The young monk who carried the bowl pushed the money forward and said sullenly,

“The donation is too small. In this world or that world, you still need money. Why don’t you go see your friends and go back?”

Jinyong felt the blood rush to her head. She cursed her mother’s cheapness for not bringing any more money.

The young monk took the food laid out next to the altar piece by piece and put it in the bowl. Shoots, ddok, fish, fruit, his hand went for them one by one. When his hand approached the mouth-watering honey biscuits, the monk who had sounded the moktak suddenly shouted out fiercely,

“That’s enough!”

The young monk glanced at Jinyong and hurried outside to place the food on the stone for offerings.

Jinyong was taken aback. She had not objected to their dealings at first. But like this, how could she not explode into rage? She poured her anger that could not be directed at anyone in particular into her tears. As she cried, she felt Munsu’s hands wrap around her neck. An insane loneliness and pain rose up inside her.

The young monk came back from giving away the food, and now started to collect the fruit.

“You should take this. The cloth…” he said, turning to the mother.

Jinyong looked at the young monk with her red, bloodshot eyes.

“I don’t have a job. Stop!” Her voice was almost a scream. The old monk came out into the sanctuary, having finished off his work.

“Why aren’t you taking back what you brought?”

The mother answered instead of Jinyong, who could not even look at him.

“Well, that…” She glanced at Jinyong’s face. The old monk gulped and said,

“Monks need to eat to live just like you.”

Jinyong’s eyes glistened.

“You’ll need to eat breakfast, but it’s so early it won’t be ready yet. Would you like to wait?” The young man left with these words.

Jinyong perched on a stone in the sanctuary. The words “in this word or that world, you still need money,” ran through her mind again. Of course it had always been business for them. But if this was true, did that mean the monks’ respect for Munsu’s memory was calculated according to the amount of money they gave them?

Jinyong was seething with anger over this when a smartly dressed young woman, seemingly this valuable woman who was meant to go first, came into the sanctuary, guided by the chief monk. A short while later, the sound of him reading the prayers seeped outside. His voice came from his stomach and was worthy of the sleeping Buddha waking up for the first time and listening with his full attention.

Jinyong jumped up.

“Mum, let’s just go.”

Clearly they did not come to the temple just to eat. Knowing that she could not stop Jinyong from walking off, the mother said to the old monk hovering in the courtyard,

“We’re just going to go.”

“You should at least eat some breakfast…you’re going?”

He did not try to stop them at all. He walked them to the temple gate.

“Just like you, monks need to eat to live.”

Jinyong was more dumbfounded than enraged.

She walked down the road wordlessly, grabbing at weeds as she went. The same thought floated around her head: that she had left Munsu alone in an unfamiliar inn without any money to pay for it.

She felt her forehead: it was hot like a fireball.

Jinyong was ill throughout midsummer. Since her tuberculosis had only minor symptoms at first, it had been completely ignored and had gradually grown worse. What’s more, it continually developed into other illnesses. Even if she just drank cold water, her stomach ached. Her eyes were always sore and her mouth was constantly blistered. It even reached her ears. The cavity in her tooth she had ignored for years started to ache and it throbbed all through the night.

Jinyong trembled in fear as her body started to dissolve. Hers was a life like an earthworm stretched out under the blazing sun.

Jinyong’s body and moreover, her mind, were dissolving like this.

Each night, the sound of her son crying, the sound of mountains, hills and houses collapsing resounded in her ears; visions of glass smashing and countless shards piercing her face; when she closed her eyes, the face of the boy soldier with the burst guts, her husband’s face, her child’s face, pink, yellow, blue and lastly black, she was covered by those colours in turn and then finally an infinite space engulfed her surroundings like fog.

Noises, feelings, colours – Jinyong’s nerves went off track in this order. Unable to take this any longer, she hauled her neglected body over to H hospital. But in the end, she gave up on going there too as it was too far.

Having to use what little remained of their money on living expenses also played a part in this. However, the real reason was that she had seen them sell empty bottles that had once contained foreign-made medicine for injections.

Y Hospital concealed the amount they used, S Hospital was a shambles and H Hospital sold empty medicine bottles.

When the nurse was counting empty bottles, Jinyong intuitively thought it was fake medicine. But it was not only H Hospital that sold empty bottles. And even with these empty bottles, she could not say for certain that they were fake. Ink bottles, paint bottles or even ground pepper bottles were commonly used. But the truth was that the streets were flooded with fake medicine. The merchants would all insist that their fake was the real thing. Thinking this, Jinyong thought that doctors with medical authority behind them were just like merchants and thus they were becoming less and less trustworthy. Of course, no matter how insignificant an empty bottle it is, it belongs to that doctor and it is his basic right to sell it. Even so, instead than their basic rights, Jinyong thought only of the fake medicine, spreading invisibly like pests.

The sunflowers scattered their seeds.

The ajumeoni had said a few days ago that she would return the investment, and as promised, she came with the last remaining ten thousand hwan. They had intended to take back the hundred thousand hwan all at once, but she sent it back bit by bit, and they were now down to their last pennies. After she handed over the money, the ajumeoni stood up to leave and expressed her dissatisfaction at Munsu’s tablet being placed in a temple. Then she scolded her, asking why she worshipping that idol. Jinyong wanted to ask her what didn’t count as an idol, but she suppressed the urge and just looked at her silently. It was not her duty to explain the contradiction.

It was Chuseok.

Jinyong did not stop her mother going to the temple. Instead, she bought fruit and piled it up lovingly in the basket for her. Pears, apples, grapes, chestnuts, dates, there were even three or four types of biscuit.

As Jinyong stood at the gate, watching her mother walk off with the basket, she suddenly recalled the monk saying, “Just like you, the monks have to eat to live.” The monks were eating Munsu’s food – what a waste. How odious. But her face reddened with shame in the next moment. Why did I think such a despicable thing?

Jinyong locked the door and climbed up the hill behind her house.

She wanted to cry, she wanted to shout.

Tents small as crab shells stood here and there on the hill. Not a single wild flower or tree root could be seen: a slum had already developed here and this hill was no longer a hill. A girl’s arm, thin like a spider’s leg, drawing water from the stagnant stream, the sallow faces sticking out of the tents – though she wanted to cry when she left the house and climbed up this hill, she now felt a sense of shame as if hers was an extravagant existence.

Jinyong climbed up for a while, went over a large rock and sat down. The streets visible from the ridge were messy. Wherever there were hills, the houses were clustered together like insects. Inside, there was a temple, a chapel, Eastern and Western things as though it was a transition period and all kinds of different lives which lacked symmetry.

If there was hope inside this kind of city, would it be the trees along the roadside? Would it be the purple clouds brushing past the distant mountains? Jinyong propped up her frail chin in her hands.

The sound of the city buzzed in her ears like a bee and a luxury car slid towards a hill with a villa. Seeing this from the ridge, Jinyong thought it was like an insignificant beetle. A beetle scuttling along.

Jinyong glanced around her surroundings as if for the first time. It’s an impulse of absolutely no meaning. So, what of it? She unconsciously tried to control herself. In fact that was the case. So what of it? So what if it’s like a beetle, like insects, trees, clouds, so?

Jinyong swept up her hair.

All the pain was inside me. All the contradictions were inside me. The gods and Munsu’s touch were all inside me.

But in reality, none of these existed anywhere. Like a prostitute, I visited at two places of worship without honour. I presented offerings and money. But maybe that was a commission I gave to the gods for communication with Munsu. But in reality this commission provided a few more meals for the monks. In the end, I was trying to deceive myself. Munsu won’t be anywhere.

Again, Jinyong swept up her thick hair, which flowed down above her brow. Her pale hands were verging on transparent. Mystery, forewarning, dreams, no this was coincidence. Munsu’s death: it was human error without a doubt. All people get old and then die. Of course, they get old and then they die… Even if my child was already meant to die, I didn’t want to let him die in that way. Like a calf in a slaughterhouse… I should try and hate people. Why am I thinking of a god I don’t know exists? No, a minute ago I said it didn’t exist… No I don’t know. I should hate people. I should rebel. I should put a curse on all the plundering murderers.

Jinyong muttered, rambling to herself for a while like a drunken man. A shadow cast over her face. Clouds passed by in a limitless autumn sky. On the streets, the scene of the Chuseok activities looked like strewn confetti. Jinyong’s eyes, swollen from fever, rose up looking at this. She no longer had the spirit to rebel, she no longer had anything. Only the labyrinth of her empty heart spread out before her eyes.

Jinyong swept up her hair out of habit and climbed down the hill.

The sallow faces in the tent, having come back to this place, Jinyong once again felt a sense of shame as if hers was an extravagant existence. 

The Mayfly (Kagerou) by Saito Tomohiro (Mizushima Hiro) Chapter 1

In this town, crowded with the hundreds of thousands of people who live here, it’s next to impossible to find a quiet, dark “solitary spot” with no-one around. However somewhat miraculously, the place that Yasuo found matched these criteria almost perfectly.

It was a rooftop playground on top of an old department store which had gone bankrupt three years ago and had been derelict ever since.

On top of the artificial grass, where bare concrete peeked through wherever the grass had become unstuck from the surface, playground equipment which had been left to the elements with no-one to take care of them and electric rides in the shape of animals glistened faintly, wet with the evening dew.

With such an atmosphere, it was almost like a graveyard for the children who had once played here.

In the dark sky, beyond the safety fence stretching around the area, sat a new moon, so slight it could have been shaved down by a file. There was barely even a slight breeze.

It was the perfect environment for dying.

“This is awesome…” Yasuo whispered, without a hint of sarcasm in his voice. He grabbed the iron fence in front of him, over twice his height, and shook it back and forth.

The wire netting, which was tied to iron construction pipes, vibrated and rattled loudly, but it seemed to be sturdy enough for an adult to climb over.

If I can just climb over this four metre fence, I can say farewell to this burdensome, troublesome life forever.

It’s not like he’s been faced with many walls or obstacles in his forty years of living. To be more accurate, he would avoid such things before he had to face them.

“How apt that in the end I should have to climb over such a wall.” Although he tried to reason as such inside his head, the fence seemed too high for Yasuo.

Since last evening, he’d not eaten anything for over twenty-four hours. Moreover, since he’d kept on walking around, without a wink of sleep, he’d used up almost every last ounce of energy.

Just thinking about going down that damn long staircase again and finding another location made him feel depressed. Wondering whether there might be a hole in the fence, he followed it round the perimeter of the roof, but this proved futile in the end.

Yasuo mustered up the last of his strength, stretched out his hands as far as he could, stuck his fingers through, and then twisted the tip of his dirty, worn-out trainer through the wire.

Once he lifted his weight onto his ten fingers and right foot, the whole wire netting gave out a loud wail and a powder of dried paint and rust rained down over him.

Frowning instinctively under this endless baptism of rough, sharp powder, Yasuo let out a soft cry, possibly his last on this earth, with the taste of blood in his saliva from the iron rust.

“God, that was unlucky…”

Even so, Yasuo did not let go from the fence. With his face speckled with pieces of dried paint and rust, he moved his arms and legs in turn and wriggled up the fence. Yasuo climbed up clumsily, frail and slow like a cicada approaching the end of its short life.

When he was halfway up, a light suddenly turned on in the office building opposite, separated from the department store by a road. All of the rooms had been dark up until then, so this one room was rather conspicuous.

Yasuo hid away like a cockroach about to be discovered by a human, and stared at that room with the light on.

He saw a young woman, dressed in work clothes and carrying a bag from a convenience store, come in and listlessly approach the desk, moving slowly like an old lady.

He thought he heard her sigh with exhaustion.

This woman, completely oblivious to the fact that a man was clinging to the fence on the roof opposite, hoping to kill himself, drew herself towards the computer monitor, let out a large yawn, and started to unenthusiastically tap away at the keyboard.

There were less than thirty metres between Yasuo and this room with the woman. If it had been daytime, they would most certainly have seen each other, but the roof of the department store was pitch black and there was little likelihood that she would see him.

Yasuo once more scraped off the bits of rough iron rust from his front teeth with the tip of his tongue, and then spat forcefully into the empty space beyond the fence.

The clump of white, foaming saliva was sucked into the valley between the pitch black buildings, and soon fell out of sight.

The clock on the station building to his right was about to strike eight.

He still had plenty of time before his time limit of midnight, but the sooner the better.

Beyond the bright glass window, the office woman was muttering something with her attention fixed on the monitor. She was like a plain, lonely tropical fish, keeping still and hiding in the darkness of an aquarium.

Yasuo started to climb up the fence once more. Once the tips of his fingers had reached the top of the iron frame, he heard a voice behind him.

“Excuse me…”

He gave a strange shout, unable to even say “oh” or “wha-” and sheepishly turned his head.

Since it was dark, he could not see his face, but he saw a man look up at him, dressed head to toe in black, with a black hat like that which Michael Jackson wore in his Billie Jean days, and a glossy suit.

The man stared at Yasuo with his hands in his trouser pockets and his white teeth peeking through his mouth. It was as if he was smiling.

Yasuo reflexively shook his head.

“No, you’re wrong. You’re wrong!” Yasuo was getting flustered and panicky, but the man replied in an awfully nonchalant tone unbefitting to the scene.

“What am I wrong about?”

“So…well… I’m not gonna kill myself…oh… I’m just looking at the view.”

Misty clouds were floating by slowly, covering up the sky above, but the woman in the building opposite was still in the same posture, muttering something at the monitor.

The man tried to persuade Yasuo, who was making up confused excuses whilst clinging to the fence.

“If you want the night view, you can see it just fine from here, so why don’t you come down?”

After the silence played out for a short while, Yasuo nodded his resignation.

“You’re, you’re right.”

The strength had left his shivering torso bit by bit, and his elbow, bent at a right angle, stretched out slowly as if it had lost to gravity. When he had slid down about thirty centimetres, a thought suddenly filled his head.

Rather than climbing down and being caught by this man, wouldn’t it be far easier to risk climbing up, considering what would happen afterwards.

He decided quickly. Like an escaped convict trying to break through the final obstacle, he thrashed out his right leg from where it rested on the wire, performed a pull-up type trick with all the strength left in his arms, and wrenched his whole body upwards with one swift movement.

In the next moment, his torso was leaning over the top of the fence.

If he let go now and dived headfirst into the darkness, it would all be over. It was only this that differentiated him from an escaped convict.

Yasuo threw his hands in front and closed his eyes tight.

But, that moment never arrived.

When he was on the brink of falling, the man’s white gloved hand grabbed hold of his ankle like a spider trapping its prey.

He supported himself on the edge of the fence and his whole body lolled back and forth like a broken balancing toy. He opened his eyes inadvertently and the forty metres of scenery below flew into his field of vision. He could see clearly that which should have been near impossible in this dark, like the outline of the blocks laid out on the pavement.

A dreadful fear pierced through Yasuo for an instant, but in the next moment this had changed to anger at the man.

“That’s dangerous! What do you think you’re doing?” His shout echoed for a moment through the valley between the buildings.

“It’s you who’s acting dangerously.”

Whilst the man’s quiet, low voice reverberated down the valley, he grabbed onto the wire netting like Spiderman, with one hand and one foot and pulled him down with a strength that made his ankle shake.

The frame of the fence was eating into Yasuo’s hips, and there came a sound of it crunching through the cartilage.

“Ow! Hey, you! Ow, ow, ow, ow. I get it so let go!”

“I’m sorry but,” he was pulling him down more and more forcefully, “I can’t.”

“Ow!” The upside-down Yasuo shouted at the man through the fence.

“Please be patient. And if you shout so loudly, someone will come.”

“Then why are you doing this?”

“No, today I’m just bursting with strength.”

Not understanding what this meant, Yasuo was confused. His tone was stupidly polite, but by contrast, the hand that grasped onto his right ankle was rough. Moreover, there was a thin smile on his lips.

“Anyway, let’s go down first.”

Even if he could have mustered up what little remained of his strength, it didn't seem like he would be able to shake off this meddlesome man whilst half hanging upside-down.

“I, I get it. I’ll do as you say,” he said and clasped the fence frame with both hands. He got himself vertical again by bending his back, but the moment he did so, countless stars started to fall down around his eyes, and he felt his consciousness fading.

+

Yasuo awoke to a chill crawling up his spine and saw an unknown man looking down at him.

His face looked artificial, like a mannequin in the gentleman’s clothing section of a department store, and it took him a short while to realise that this was the “spider man” from before.

Ignoring the man’s question of, “are you alright?” Yasuo raised his head, still hazy, and looked at his surroundings.

There was a life-sized figure of a gorilla whose painted eyes had chipped away and a giraffe slide, blackened by acid rain: it was the same place as before.

“Perhaps…right?”

He didn’t catch what the man said, but replied “yeah” automatically.

“Since you’ve raised your head up so suddenly, you may get faint. Do you hurt anywhere?”

“Yeah, especially…” Yasuo answered, then stuck his elbows into the artificial grass and raised up his upper body, but he didn’t yet feel like standing up.

He remembered a slight fear of this man who, in spite of the abnormal circumstances, made no attempt to alter his calm, composed attitude.   

Yasuo looked up at the fence and asked timidly,

“Did I…fall from there?”

“No,” the man said, shaking his head. “I caught you. If you’d fallen like that, perhaps…”

You’d be done for. At least, Yasuo interpreted as such.

Nevertheless, he is a suspicious-looking man. Not knowing what would happen if he mistakenly angered the man, Yasuo endeavoured to speak in as polite a tone as possible.

“Erm…sorry, but do you work for this department store?”

No, the man replied immediately.

“So, are you from a proprietary company?”

“No, but I have permission to enter this building.”

He must work in security then. He figured that for the present it would be best if he apologised, so he faced the man who stood looking down on him and hung his head slightly.

“It seems like I’ve caused you trouble…I’m sorry.”

“No, really, it’s nothing it all.” He waved his hand in front of his face as if to say it was nothing to worry about and smiled. “It was me who went too far when pulling you down… It was just about bearable, right?”

Was that just about? Yasuo cursed him inside his head, but thinking that he should stop encouraging this man, he just gave a feeble smile and said, “yeah.” It was the smile that he always gave unconsciously whenever he was in a fix.

As if to mirror Yasuo, the corners of the man’s mouth curled upwards.

“Since I did literally hold you back from what you wanted to do (*in Japanese, ‘to hold someone’s foot’ means ‘to hold someone back from achievement’ and he did literally hold Yasuo’s foot), you must think I’m an interfering jerk.”

“Oh, no, it’d be a pain for you if someone died here, so what could you do? That’s your job, right?”

The man’s smile disappeared for a split second when Yasuo uttered the word “job” but he immediately returned the corners of his mouth to their original positions.

“Well, it is but…”

 Yasuo was now convinced that he was a security guard for this building. He was rough, but he was also used to restraining people. There must have been others who had tried to jump from here.

“You’ll get cold on the ground. Do you want to sit somewhere?”

“Oh, yeah.”

In truth, he wanted to get out of this place as soon as possible, but he felt guilty, so he did as the man said.

He pushed his hands against the rough artificial grass, but as soon as he tried to stand up, his whole body swayed to the right.

He had hardly any strength left in his legs. With a surprised expression, the man held out his hand.

“Are you in pain?”

“Well not quite, but it feels like I’m numb around my ankle.”

“Ah.” The man looked at Yasuo, seeming as if something had come to mind.

“Back then, when you were about to fall, your right foot got caught in the fence for a bit. Maybe you twisted it then.”

It must be that. Yasuo admired the man’s observational skills: even in that situation, he was still composedly watching everything.

“Do you mind if I…” The man leaned down to Yasuo’s feet and lightly pressed his ankle with his fingers.

“Does it hurt here?”

“No, not much.”

“Hmm.” The man nodded in satisfaction.

“It’s not too swollen and there’s nothing wrong with the bone. It’s probably a light sprain.” He stood up, clapped his hands together like a worker done for the day and smiled broadly.

“I’m glad, I’m glad.”

Does he just really love his job? Or is he soft-hearted by nature? Or simply a fool? Yasuo couldn’t understand why he seemed so happy.

The man pointed out to Yasuo, who was standing there with a dubious expression contrasting to the man’s, a mobile stall not ten metres away.

One of the wheels had fallen off, the trailer was tilted at an angle and there was a little bench next to it.

“Can you walk there, do you think?”

He imagined that if he said he couldn’t, he would just have more and more trouble, so he nodded, “yes,” and tried moving his ankle.

“I think I can.”

He supported himself on the shoulder of this man who was at least one head taller than him and walked slowly towards the bench, gently trailing his foot behind him.

The two of them sat down next to each other on the old bench that had Founder: American Dog written in extremely bad writing on its back.

“I’ve not eaten one recently,” the man muttered to himself.

“Huh?” Yasuo asked, to which the man answered with a serious look on his face.

“American dog.”

“Oh…”

The moment you bite into it, brown and plump with its texture of a freshly baked doughnut, covered in ketchup and mustard, that nourishing taste and smell of piping hot sausage captivating your senses – Yasuo’s mouth was salivating and his stomach was rumbling at the thought.

In order to try to trick his stomach complaining of an unbearable hunger, he started to look for some cigarettes, even though he had long since given them up and there was no way there could be any left.

“You don’t have a cigarette do you?” he asked.

“Sorry, I don’t smoke.”

“Ok…I’m sorry. I don’t smoke. Just kidding.” (*It’s impossible to convey the joke in English, but it’s a play on words between a colloquial ‘I’m sorry’ suimasen and ‘I don’t smoke’ also suimasen)

“Huh?”

“No, it’s nothing.”

It was a joke in which Yasuo had much confidence, but it had simply eluded the man. He appeared to be concerned with something else.

“Your face, it’s dirty.”

“Huh? Oh.” Flustered, he took out a tissue from his trouser pocket. He had received this packet of tissues, advertising a consumer finance company, in the afternoon when he had been wandering aimlessly through town. The picture of a smiling gravia idol dressed in a uniform and the words “scheduled usage” slipped into the surrounding darkness as if in response to his wish not to have to look at them.

Yasuo wiped off the pieces of rust and paint stuck to his face with a tissue wet with spit.

“You’ve not been drinking,” the man said.

“I haven’t…what do you mean?”

“What happened before, lots of people drink before they do it.”

Yasuo stared at the man’s face, not understanding what he meant, then suddenly nodded enthusiastically.

“Ah, yes, they do.”

He had grasped the meaning – borrowing strength from alcohol. One’s fear of death must weaken that way.

“There are plenty of cases where they drink Shochu or sake.”

“Really? What about beer?”

“I’ve not heard of many instances using low alcohol content drinks.”

“I see. Strong alcohol is better… In Russia it must be Vodka then?”

“Yeah.”

“And gin in England. English gin. I’m kidding.” (*Again, we have a pun that is lost in translation. The suffix jin is used with country names to denote nationality, so igirisujin means both an English/British person and English gin)

After a moment’s silence, the man said, “I get it,” slapped his knee and chuckled. “It’s both gin and the jin of Englishman, right?”

Maybe this guy’s alright after all. Or maybe just he’s really slow at getting jokes. Whatever the case, Yasuo thought he didn’t seem like the kind of dangerous character that would recklessly hurt others, so he felt ever so slightly less wary of him.

“Do you like alcohol?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say I was a drinker. I can’t take much…”

Though he said this, really, in his last moments he wanted to drink to his heart’s content and die. However, he didn’t have enough money in his wallet to buy even a single glass.

“That’s quite an important point,” the man said happily.

“Huh? Point?”

“It’s not good for you to drink too much. It damages the liver.”

Yasuo looked towards the rubbish bin, which had itself turned to rubbish long ago, and was about to throw away his scrunched-up tissue, when he stopped himself and turned back to the man.

“Can I ask you something?” In contrast to Yasuo’s irate voice, the man tilted his head towards him with a slight smile.

“What?”

“Are you from suicide watch?”

“Suicide watch?”

“I mean, earlier, it’s strange that you worried about my foot and now you’re telling me it’s healthier not to drink. I’m sorry but I don’t care about that kind of thing anymore. It’s the same as telling someone who gets ill on death row to get better quickly!”

Maybe it was wrong of him to trespass into a no-entry building and try to kill himself. But that doesn’t mean that someone else should interfere with what he was trying to do, or so Yasuo thought.

“People, they always say, “if you live, something good will surely happen,” but they’re just sugar coating everything. What if nothing good does happen after this? Who the hell’s gonna compensate me for that? Maybe you’ll feel good if you stop me from killing myself, that you’ve saved the life of one person, but at the very least, I’ve got to carry on living until I find the next place to die. It’s easy to say, “let’s stop suicide,” but if I asked the person who said this so seriously, will you save me, it’d be a completely different story, wouldn’t it?”

He talked on and on in one breath, but then realised that he was becoming aggressive.

He shrugged his shoulders and bowed his head to the man who was smiling like a catholic priest.

“I’m sorry, I got a bit excited. I wasn’t trying to blame you.”

“No, I truly understand what you just said.”

“What, why? Before, didn’t you say something about it being your job to stop people killing themselves here?”

“No, to be precise…”

“So you mean I should do it somewhere else? It doesn’t matter so long as I jump from somewhere other than your place?”

“No, it matters.”

“It’s strange then, that you said you got how I was feeling.”

“They’re two different things. I’m talking about the method of jumping. Firstly, there’s a possibility that you’ll get unrelated people involved. At the end of your life, in your last moment, do you want to become a killer?”

“I’ve thought about that too. That’s why I aimed for a time and place with few pedestrians.”

“But there’s still a chance, isn’t there?”

“Well, I guess, but…”

The man walked towards the fence and peered down.

“If you jump from here, it will take about two seconds until you reach the ground. A marathon runner could do about twelve metres in that time. You jump thinking no-one’s there, but the next moment someone comes running from around the corner, what would you do then? You’ll think “shit!” but you can’t stop.”

“Most people who kill themselves do it sporadically! There’s no time to think about these things in detail!”

“But you thought about it!” the man’s voice rose to a shout. Yasuo felt some kind of mysterious horror in the man’s eyes, and grew timid like an animal that has lost in a turf war.

“That is, mine wasn’t sporadic so…”

“I have another reason why I can’t recommend jumping.”

Yasuo was struggling to keep up with the man’s pace, but even though he was irritated at his own weak-mindedness, he didn’t feel like interrupting the man.

“Have you ever seen the scene after a jumping?”

“No, but I can imagine.”

“It’s tra-gic.” He stretched out the ‘a’ as if to emphasise the tragedy.

“Over sixty percent of the body is water. It’s like a water balloon, so what do you think will happen if it’s dropped from up high? A fallen corpse is sometimes called “okonomi-yaki” (*a type of pancake). Completely useless.”

“What?”

“Is something wrong?”

“No, you said something about being useless?”

It didn’t seem like the man was going to answer the question. With his eyes fixed on Yasuo’s, his expression slowly changed and he buried the silence with an ominous smile. Whilst Yasuo was at a loss for words out of irritation and fear of this man, the man spoke once more.

“Do you know who cleans up the scene?”

“Po- police, or someone from the emergency services?”

The man shook his head slowly and replied in a harsh tone.

“It’s the family.”

“No! You’re, you’re kidding. That can’t be right.”

“The police and firemen don’t do it. It’s not written in law or anything, but there have been plenty of times when it’s been the family who had to gather up those scattered little bits of flesh and clean up the traces of blood. Of course, that’s only if there is a family…”

The man looked at Yasuo to see if he had one.

“I do but… no way.”

“It’s true. Although nowadays, there are companies who can do this kind of work for you, but it costs a lot.” He made a ring to signify money with the thumb and index finger of his right hand.

Being chased by debt even after you’re dead - he really doesn’t get along well with money. He remembered that awful fatigue.

“So it’s best to give up on jumping from a building. Then there’s jumping in front of a train. This will cause a lot of pain for the jumper and for third parties, so…”

“Trains… I’ve never wanted to do that. I’ve heard that if you stop the train, then afterwards the railway company demands a huge amount of compensation from your family.”

“They do that case by case so I can’t say for sure, but often, the unlucky person who comes across that scene will be mentally scarred for life.”

“Ah.” Yasuo leant back on the bench, stretched out his arms and muttered in self-mockery.

“Maybe I should just go quietly and hang myself then.”

  “But if you get saved halfway through, you could end up living like a vegetable. Even though it’ll make no difference to you, you’ll be putting a massive burden on those around you.”

 “I guess.”

“Yeah.”

“In the end,” Yasuo pretended to chop at his neck with the side of his hand, “what’s the best way?”

“The cleaner the death, the lower the certainty of success. If you choose a more certain method, it will always end up being grotesque.”

Yasuo shut his eyes and nodded slightly.

“But in the end, however you do it, suicide will make trouble for a lot of people. Someone will have to clean up afterwards. You talked about hanging yourself in your room, but it’s the worst if it’s not discovered by someone. In the summertime, in only two days it’s like this.”

The man held his nose, furrowed his brow and shook his head from side to side.

“You’re right. It won’t take long to mummify and turn into a skeleton like that, will it?”

“Your body will rot and if you’re in an apartment, your bodily fluids will seep through the concrete floor and damage the room below. It’s still a trouble of sorts.”

“Well, that’s true, but all humans die anyway, so surely a bit of trouble is inevitable?”

When Yasuo objected as such, the man seemed to get carried away, and he started to talk using big gestures. Looking closely, the man could be seen to wear a white glove on his right hand alone.

“That’s not the only problem. Suicide will make those left behind incredibly distraught. How tough do you think it would be to clean up your child’s death scene? Your friends and family will start to blame themselves, thinking “why didn’t I save him?” “Why didn’t I notice he was troubled?” There have been people who have been so pained by this that they will follow them to the grave….”

“Wait,” Yasuo cut in. “Then, someone who’s alone, without any friends or family, does that mean it’s alright if they die?”

The man slowly put his hands, which he had held out in the heat of the conversation, back where they belonged like a shrivelling balloon losing air and silently chewed over what Yasuo had said.

“It’s sly. Everyone dodges the question like that. That’s why adults get told they’re sly by children. You say you understand, but end up saying “let’s stop suicide.” Sorry, but I’ve thought long and hard about this, even without you preaching at me.”

“You’re wrong, I…”

“I’m not wrong. You’re suggesting that if I commit suicide, sooner or later I’ll go to hell or turn into a ghost and be stuck in that same place and suffer eternally. I get it.” Yasuo spit out these words and sprung up from the bench, but then immediately flopped back down again.

“Ow, ow, ow.”

“Are you ok?”

As the man approached, his face was so beautiful that it had a kind of inhuman feel to it. Yasuo felt irritable for no reason.

“I know. You’re some religious guy aren’t you? So go to someone else and be kind or meddlesome or whatever. I’m telling you, I don’t have a single penny to buy a memorial pot or a lucky stamp.”

“No, I’m not affiliated with any kind of religion.”

“Everyone says that at first to get closer.”

“It’s not like that!” The man cut in, speaking sternly. There was a truth and solemnity about those words.

“I would like to help you disappear from this world.”

The man bowed his head deeply at Yasuo, who was staring blankly at him, and took out a business card from his jacket pocket.

“I’ve been slow to say. I’m Kyōya from the All Japan Donor-Recipient Organisation, or AJDRO for short.”