Mitsuyo: You mean like Felaccio Girls School? Well then, I guess you’d only find office girls and housewives from there.
Takako: No way. You ever heard of the manga artist Hiyoko Kannazuki?
Zombie: I know her! She did that story about the girl who had one hundred eight disastrous love affairs.
Takako: You read Kannazuki’s latest?
Zombie: Sure. The girl starves to death from anorexia.
Daikichi: You could find one or two odd guys who graduated from my school too, if you looked.
Calpis: We had that weird headmaster, didn’t we?
Daikichi: Oh yeah, old Jomon. Named after that prehistoric Japanese period. He was really weird.
Poo: What kinda guy was he?
Daikichi: He graduated from the Nakano Military College.
Poo: Eh? What kinda school is that?
Daikichi: The place Onoda went to.
Takako: Onoda? Who’s Onoda?
Daikichi: That soldier who didn’t know the war had ended and stayed holed up in the jungle in Sumatra for thirty years.
Calpis: It wasn’t Sumatra, it was Lubang.
Poo: You mean he went on fighting all by himself for thirty years?
Daikichi: He lived like they did back in the Jomon Period. The Nakano Military College is the kinda place where you’re taught to survive anywhere, even in the jungle. Our headmaster was like a Jomon guy too.
Calpis: He used to teach his students weird stuff. Like how to dig a tunnel just with a stick, or how to make a house by cutting down a single tree, or how to get water from grass, or how to tell which herbs and stuff you can eat.
Daikichi: It’s called “survival technique”. He always said it would come in handy some time.
Mitsuyo: You’ll probably find it useful when you turn into tramps on the street.
Zombie: Or when your house is destroyed in an earthquake.
Calpis: But there isn’t any jungle round here.
Daikichi: There’s grass and trees, at least.
Mitsuyo: “Survival” means knowing how to live all alone without anything, yeah?
Daikichi: You can do that just by using that lovely body of yours, can’t you Mitsuyo?
Mitsuyo: And as for you, you’re so scruffy you don’t know what to do with yourself. Anyway, there are people like Zombie here who don’t care about survival. What about you, Kita?”
Twelve eyeballs turned as one to stare at him. Kita hadn’t said a word about himself so far. Now their attention turned at last to the fellow who’d been sitting there all along, simply taking in the conversation as it bounced back and forth over the round table. A vague uneasiness hovered in the air – would he suddenly come out with some deep remark under his breath? Would he lose his temper over how boring they were all being?
“Well I don’t really understand about life…” Kita protested with a wry little self-deprecating grin.
“Come on now,” said Daikichi.
“Kita wants to die, see,” Mitsuyo said, looking at him gently, and after the tiniest pause the rest of them nodded gravely. Only Zombie sat looking down at her lap, somehow shy.
“Why do you want to die?” Takako asked, helping Kita to some Lao-chu. “You’re still young.” Beside her, Poo had tucked her chin in and was gazing earnestly at Kita from under her brows. When their eyes met, for some reason she clapped her hand to her mouth and burst out laughing. When she realized no one else was joining in, she blushed and murmured “Sorry.”
“No, no, you can laugh if you like,” said Kita. “It’s funny enough, after all,” and at this everyone obligingly laughed.
“Seems a bit dangerous to me,” Poo remarked lightly.
“Now listen, girl,” said Takako in a reproving voice.
“What’s the danger? I feel like I’m acting perfectly normally,” said Kita.
“I mean, once you’ve decided to die, you can do pretty much anything you want, right?” Poo flapped her hands about to illustrate her point.
“I don’t think deciding to die makes you all that free to act. After all, it’s tough work dying. You don’t have much leeway to think about other things,” muttered Zombie. For once, she spoke in a tone of deep conviction. Kita had to take his hat off to her – failing to kill yourself four times was no mean feat. “It’s just not that easy to do it at your own pace,” she went on. “You’ve got to have your act together or you get half way and it all fizzles out.”
The two of them were cool as cucumbers. You’d think the topic of dying was the thing of the moment.
“And how do you want to die, Kita?” Takako cut in.
“Well I haven’t quite decided. What do you think’s the best way?” said Kita, falling in with the general tone.
“I’d go for hara kiri myself,” said Daikichi.
“What, with that belly of yours?” Mitsuyo shot back mockingly. “You’d better tone up the muscles first.”
A sunny laughter filled the table again. Through the hilarity, Calpis shouted, “I’d like to just drop dead suddenly.”
“Me too,” said Takako.
Poo thought for a moment. “I think I’d go for double suicide with a guy,” she said.
“I’m not wild about the idea of dying, myself,” Mitsuyo threw in.
Everyone was waiting with interest for what Zombie would say, but she threw everyone completely by ducking the issue and casually remarking, “I wonder what I’ll try next time?”
Takako gazed into her eyes with a serious expression, and inquired about suicide methods. At this, Zombie gleefully replied, “I was still in sixth form at elementary school the first time I tried it, so I hadn’t done much research on methods. I didn’t really think about it, I just jumped into a freezing swimming pool in winter. I thought the shock would stop my heart, but I guess my heart was pretty strong, so all I got from it was a cold.”
“Why did you want to kill yourself?”
“When I thought about how I was going to have to leave all my friends when we went off to new schools, suddenly there just didn’t seem any point in living.”
“Did you write some kind of a will?”
“Uh-huh. I kept a diary back then, and the day before I committed suicide I wrote ‘I’m so sorry Mum and Dad, I can’t face going on living so I have to go to heaven ahead of you.’ But no one believed I’d committed suicide, so afterwards I tore it up and threw it away. Everyone had the idea I’d fallen in by mistake, see. There was a big fuss at the PTA meeting about how the school was negligent over safety, and it just wasn’t a situation where it would’ve felt right to explain I was trying to kill myself.”
“You always did have bad timing,” Mitsuyo remarked. “So what about the second time?”
“Well that was in third grade at Middle School. I had this good friend, and we used to exchange diaries. When that rock singer Ozaki died she got real depressed, and said a world without Ozaki was like Japan without the emperor, and there was no point being alive. And then she started talking about following him into death like the loyal retainers used to do in the old days. Well of course I already had experience from the time I tried to kill myself when I was twelve, so we started getting excited about dying together, and ended up deciding to hang ourselves in the store room of the school gym. We were just about to put our heads through the noose when the gym teacher walks in naked from the waist up and yells ‘Hey you two, what’re you doing messing about in here at this hour? Go on home this minute!’ so the whole thing went kinda flat for us.”
“You gave up, huh? Suicide was just a kind of fooling about.”
“But third time lucky in third year high school. I meant business that time. I cut my wrists and there was blood everywhere. It was quite a shock, so I panicked and dialled the 110 emergency number, but they said ‘Wrong number miss. Ambulance is 119.” Anyhow, the blood was still pouring out and my brand new dress was all red with it, and I was just feeling like I was going to faint from lack of blood when my boyfriend called up. ‘Get an ambulance and come quick!’ I yelled, and that’s the last I remember. Next thing I was in the hospital, and my boyfriend was being grilled by a policeman. He said he was dead scared about what I might come out with when I woke up. We’d had a quarrel, see.”