Масахико Симада - Death by Choice

“You and your teacher make a fine perverted pair, I must say.” Just listening to him was giving Kita heartburn and a dreadful thirst. He ordered water.

“I’m just saying this is one more way of committing suicide. It takes a while, mind. Obviously, I’m not suggesting you try it yourself. I mean, you’re a man who’ll eat curry for almost his last meal, after all.”

“Just drop it, OK? You’re saying I should’ve eaten noodles? I don’t want to eat another thing.”

“Curry! Noodles! You’re a man with a sorry stomach, you are.”

“Don’t judge a man by his stomach.”

“Oh but I do. I hate Americans, for instance. This world isn’t such a simple place that you can conquer it with goddamn hamburgers.”

“Just what’re you trying to tell me?”

“I’m speaking of the sorrows of the flesh. That explosive appetite of this teacher of mine did its work and sure enough his organs fell apart. Food eccentricity is a kind of terrorism, when it comes down to it. But it was also the only way my teacher could slake his desires.

“We’re all starved of love, and tormented by the fear of losing love. From time to time we have to ease our fears and cravings by a bout of overeating. We search out food to replace the love we can’t chew and swallow – or in some cases we do the opposite, despair of finding love and thus cease to desire food. At any rate, love and food are fatally interconnected.

“I cannot live without love. Yet love evades me. This is our dilemma, and we’ve constructed two ways to ease the pain. One is fervent eating. The other is refusing to eat anything at all. Being starved of love both stimulates the appetite and removes it. Both these responses are destructive impulses that derive from a sense of love’s absence. The one leads to overeating, the other to anorexia. Either way, too much or too little, we die. We humans survive by maintaining a balance between the two, but overeating and anorexia don’t hurt others, so no one interferes. Of course your lover or your family might try to save you, but this involves love of some sort, and the result may well be that your destructive impulses subside. Anyone threatened with death through over- or undereating is actually in a crisis of love. Yet this is where someone who has no dealings with love steps in – the doctor. Where destructive impulses are directed at others the police and the legal profession step in, but they’re not in a position to interfere with self-harm. All that can be done is for a doctor to treat the problem as best he can. You may find a good one, and with luck you’ll survive.

“My teacher was lucky in that he himself was a doctor, but in some ways it was his downfall as well. At any rate, just before his sixtieth birthday he collapsed and died from overeating. It was a hideous death, but not a tragic one. His close family no doubt felt sorry for him, but those around him had no sympathy. In their astonishment they laughed rather than grieved, and at length the ironic smiles gave way to real reverence.

“What a lucky guy to die from overeating, one of his colleagues said. Meanwhile his students gossiped that he must have been aiming to get his name in the Guinness Book of Records with the readings on his cholesterol, gamma GTP, blood sugars and so on, all measures of his various ailments.

“The poor man could barely eat anything in his last years. He’d sit there lost in thought before a dish of plain broiled fatty eel and foie gras sauté, finally manage to carry a morsel to his mouth, then reach a trembling hand to a glass of water to wash it down. His flesh sagged and spilled out between his shirt and the top of his trousers. He’d developed a thick layer of fat everywhere beneath the skin, and a marbling of adipose tissue covered his muscles and organs. His breath stank and sweat constantly poured from him in all temperatures.

“At this point, he made up his mind and prepared for his last supper. The table was laid with an array of dishes devised over long years of eccentric eating. A beef brain and pork saddle fat salad, a jellied broth of pigs’ ears and fig, foie gras and Chinese chilli sauce ice cream, ravioli of fermented bonito intestine and washed cheese, green chilli stuffed with caviar, tuna eyeballs in champagne. He assembled a row of his favourite wines – Romanée-Conti, Château Latour, Tokay and so forth. It took him five hours to polish it all off, sieving off the fatty juices and injecting them into his system. He collapsed on the spot, was rushed to hospital in an ambulance, and died of a heart attack en route.”

“Why on earth would he go to that extreme? He must’ve been pretty desperate,” muttered Kita.

The doctor drew a deep breath through his nose, and gazed steadily at him. “That’s exactly how my teacher would breathe sometimes, flaring his nostrils. Like he found the world despicable.”

“This teacher of yours wouldn’t be your old man, by any chance?”

Still holding his gaze, the doctor raised his lip in a lopsided wry smile. “You’re pretty smart. I am the son of this eccentric eater, you’re right.”

“And are you one too?”

“I’m no match for my father when it comes to appetite. I hated even eating while he was alive. I despised people who were addicted to food. I virtually lived on thin air. I didn’t eat red meat or fish. I’d occasionally snack on a leaf of lettuce or cabbage, or eat a piece of unbuttered toast. When it came to meals, it was a bowl of white rice and some miso soup. I ate what you might call the absolute minimum to survive.”

“Your own form of rebellion against your father, eh?”

“I imagine so, yes. I was twenty-seven when he died. After that, my physical constitution changed radically. My repressed appetite was liberated, and I started eating meat and fish. On the anniversary of his death I went off to one of those offal specialty restaurants and had beef brain, and when I went to France I made a point of visiting Provence to have cassoulet. But I must admit my stomach isn’t as strong as his was.”

“You inherited his appetite, but not his stomach?”

“That’s right. But I did inherit his despair. He expressed his destructive impulses through perverse eating, but I—”

“Murder people?”

“No, I haven’t murdered anyone yet. I try to, but I end up saving them. I’m still caught between killing and rescuing. I chose to become a doctor in order to render my murderous impulses harmless. I hoped the urge to destroy could be satisfied by cutting people open and messing about with their organs. But I was wrong. Pa’s eating problems worsened with age, and it seems my destructive impulses are doing the same thing.”

Why had the doctor chosen him to confess to? Kita wondered. Was it because he thought Kita would understand the despair of this gluttonous father and his murderous son? The doctor had analysed himself, but now what?

“You’re sick. Go and see a doctor.” Kita was trying to throw him off with a casually dismissive remark.

“I’m asking you to stand in for a doctor here,” the doctor replied.

Kita smiled wryly. “This is turning out to be some last supper,” he muttered.

“Kita, why do you want to die?”

Everyone he met asked him the same question, and he didn’t have an answer. He simply made up some witty response on the spur of the moment to get the other person off his back.

Now he said the first thing that came to him. “A kind of self-sacrifice, I guess.”

“So you think your death is going to help the world?”

“Not really, no.”

“OK, why die then?”

“My instincts are telling me to. Just like your instincts tell you to kill people and then to save them.”

“I get the feeling we’ve got something in common, you and me. We can’t explain our impulses.”