Масахико Симада - Death by Choice

They’d have one go. If Kita stayed under longest, he’d get twenty-four hours with Zombie as his secretary and Mitsuyo as his slave. If he lost to Zombie but won against Mitsuyo, he’d have to buy a hundred lottery tickets but he’d get a slave. If he won against Zombie and lost to Mitsuyo, he’d be a slave with sidekick secretary.

They took a series of deep breaths, calmed themselves, and emptied their mind of thought. When the second hand on the clock moved to upright, they were to all dive together. Five, four, three, two, one. Kita held his breath and sank, checked that his two opponents were down there with him, then closed his eyes.

Occasional bubbles broke the stillness. At last they all signalled to each other that they were at the end of their tether, and all broke surface with a burst of bubbles, barely a moment apart.

The mermaids gasped for air. “God, that was scary!” “I thought I was going to die!” they declared in shaky voices. The first up had been Zombie, next Kita, and last Mitsuyo. Kita found himself slave-with-sidekick.

As they warmed their chilled bodies in the 40°C Jacuzzi tub, the three of them discussed how things should begin. It was already past midnight, so there was no avoiding their various roles. Mitsuyo, whose breathtaking skills had won her the crown, immediately began by ordering a beer and an oil massage after the bath. Kita told his secretary Zombie she needn’t do anything until morning. Both the queen and the secretary were exhausted. The secretary curled up on the sofa with a blanket and fell asleep, and the queen began to snore as Kita massaged her. Left to his own devices, Kita became turned on, and found his little feller suddenly standing up. He hesitated to take the prone queen from behind in case she got mad, but there was insubordination in the ranks below, so he slipped on a condom and thrust in his cock. The queen curled away from him for a moment and said, “Don’t,” but once she’d established that he was wearing a condom she turned lazily over, opened her legs, and let her slave do as he would. Zombie was peeking from under her blanket while Kita used Mitsuyo’s body to masturbate. He stretched his hand out beyond the pillow, and turned off the light.

Kita woke to the sound of splashing water. Secretary Zombie was lying in the bottom of the pool. Fearing that she was up to her old suicide tricks again, Kita rushed to the poolside, beat on the transparent screen, and shouted, “Are you alive?”

She was. The now wet Secretary Zombie announced that it was Saturday and enquired what she could begin by doing for him.

“Let’s go out somewhere,” he replied. First, however, he must learn the opinions of the queen. There was still no sign of Mitsuyo waking. Still wet, Secretary Zombie went over to her and hugged her. “Ergh!” moaned the queen in a pathetic voice, evidently dreaming that a snake was twining itself round her. Her eyes opened. Secretary Zombie leaned close to her ear and whispered, “I was a bit lonely last night. Don’t leave me alone too much.”

Mitsuyo placed a light kiss on Zombie’s lips. “Right,” she said, and rose to her feet. “Let’s go to the seaside.”

At the word from Mitsuyo, both the others hurriedly set about getting things ready. Kita remembered that he had a camera, and took a picture of the two naked girls snuggling up together.

They paid at the desk and stepped outside to find a light rain was falling. Kita had used about one hundred thousand yen the previous evening. The three ten thousand yen notes that Yashiro had given him as funeral money were still in his pocket. Just outside the hotel there happened to be a lottery ticket booth, so he bought thirty thousand yen worth of tickets and presented half each to the secretary and the queen. He tried to give Queen Mitsuyo an extra thirty thousand on the grounds that he’d slept with her the night before, but she shook her head. “No charge,” she told him with a smile.

The three of them joined the pleasure-seeking crowds on the train bound for the resort town of Atami. Each sank greedily into a doze inside the carriage, and when they got off at the station an hour later, they were all hungry.

“Atami’s famous for its dried fish, isn’t it?” said Mitsuyo, so they hopped in a taxi and asked the driver to take them somewhere where they could have some sake and dried fish.

They settled themselves down in the tidy little restaurant and put in an order for a grill of the dried fish they’d selected from the display outside the door, along with various top grade sakes. Dried fish by itself would be pretty boring, they decided, so they added sashimi and seasoned boiled vegetables to the order. They had such a fine time eating and drinking that pretty soon they attracted wry smiles from the other customers and the lady behind the counter.

“Dining in fine style, eh?” A skinny old man remarked in the direction of the three, who had by now settled down to idle the time away around the table. He was sitting alone at the corner of the counter, sipping sake as he picked at a dish of dried mackerel. He had the air of one who was indulging in one of the modest pleasures of old age. “The great thing about dried fish is you can nibble away at ’em like a pauper,” he went on. “One of these little things only costs me eighty yen. My great grandfather used to love ’em.”

“Wow, so this is a really old restaurant,” said Mitsuyo, in response to the old man’s monologue. He immediately turned to her, as if he’d been just waiting for someone to talk to.

“When I say ‘my great grandfather,’ you realize the man I’m referring to is the great gang boss Hatayama the Third, don’t you.”

What? So the supreme boss of the Hatayama Gang, the biggest gangster organization in Japan, was mad about dried mackerel? It wasn’t only Kita who was tickled by this story. Mitsuyo and Zombie also suppressed a smile as they exchanged glances.

“So you used to be a gangster?” asked Mitsuyo in her usual carefree way.

The old man turned his faded eyes to her and stared hard. “I did a lot of wicked things in my youth,” he muttered.

Mitsuyo invited him to join them, and poured him some sake. The old man raised his hand to his forehead in a brief gesture of thanks, as sumo wrestlers do before accepting their winnings in the ring, and settled himself down beside Kita.

“You’re all down from Tokyo, aren’t you? I can tell from the accent.”

“And where are you from?”

“Sunpu originally. Village in Tokugawa. These days I’m in an old folks’ home in Atami. Death’s got a set against me and won’t kill me off, so here I am, condemned to a long life.”

“What a weirdo,” Mitsuyo murmured in a tiny voice, then carefully turned a smile on him and said, “There’s someone here who’s just the opposite, you know. He’s been lured by Death. Right here,” and she pointed impudently at Kita. There she went, using him again. Kita waved his hand to tell her not to pursue the subject, but Zombie chipped in, “He says he’s going to die by next Friday.”

The old man furrowed his brow and turned his gaze on Kita. “Some illness?” he said.

“Well yeah, a kind of illness I guess,” Kita replied casually. The old man didn’t seem interested. He blew his nose once, then set forth in a long-winded monologue.

“All through my youth I survived all the daredevil antics I got up to. When I gets back in one piece after the war I thinks to meself, here’s a bit of luck! Ill weeds grow apace, you know the saying, so I sets out to be an ill weed, and I raised hell I can tell ya. Young folks these days can’t raise hell like that, poor things.”