Масахико Симада - Death by Choice

You are hereby sentenced to Death by Choice. From now on, this form of execution replaces this country’s customary Death by Hanging. You have the honor of being the first criminal to be executed by this means. You should make haste to decide your chosen means of execution and execution date, and to personally carry out the aforesaid execution. For the next two weeks the weather should be fine, and all those involved are able to be at your disposal.

You have got to be joking, thought the traveller, his head bowed before the judge’s sentence. The “courtroom” was exactly like the little oden restaurant he dropped into a couple of times a month, and a haze of steam obscured the faces of both the public prosecutor and the lawyers. The judge who had delivered his sentence of Death by Choice was riding piggyback on a woman in a denim skirt. In fact, there was no getting around it: the judge was actually a baby. So what did this baby think it was up to, treating him in this high-handed fashion? The traveller felt half inclined to retaliate with a bit of sarcasm, but he felt constrained by the presence of the woman and held his tongue. He somehow felt he knew her, but he couldn’t put his finger on who she was. He’d met her quite a while ago; that much he was certain of. As for this smart-arse baby, he’d never laid eyes on him before. Babies were absolutely anonymous creatures to him. Whoever it might be, it was only someone’s baby as far as he was concerned. He guessed this particular baby must plan on being a judge some time around the mid-twenty-first century. But why did this poor traveller have to find himself being sentenced by a baby?

“Mumma! Milky!” the baby shouted suddenly. The woman carrying him on her back brought down her gavel with a thud, upon which the traveller was summarily ejected from the courtroom.

He found that the aeroplane had taken off, and had already levelled out. The traveller always grew drowsy just before takeoff. That gavel hitting the desk had actually been the sound of a baby’s bottle hitting the floor, fallen from the hand of the young mother in the seat across the aisle from him.

Fresh from his dream, the traveller had the feeling that the baby judge had somehow resembled his dead father. Come to think of it, the woman carrying him seemed to be one of his classmates from middle school days.

He examined the mother and baby across the aisle out of the corner of his eye. The baby gazed back at him. “Abama oodleoodle,” it remarked. “Eh?” said the traveller, caught off guard. The mother, becoming aware that her little darling was talking to some unknown man, murmured, “Yes dear, I’ll give you your milky now sweetheart,” throwing the man a tense, warning smile as she did so. In an attempt to dispel her fears, he responded by relaxing his frown and attempting to entertain the baby by blowing out his cheeks and crossing his eyes. Breathing noisily through its nose as it sucked away at the bottle clutched in its hands, the baby glared back. It looked as if it was about to give him a stern piece of its mind. The traveller gave a little sigh, and settled back to flip through the magazine from the seat pocket in front of him. The baby sighed too. From then on, the traveller found their eyes meeting again and again. Whenever their gaze locked, the baby would try to engage him in conversation. It seemed to be speaking in words that only the dream world could make sense of. Unfortunately, however, the traveller knew neither the grammar nor the pronunciation of dream language, and it didn’t look like the mother could interpret for him either. From time to time, the baby sighed, and gave a derisive snort of laughter. The traveller too had once been a baby. More than thirty years ago it was now. He had no way of recalling the sort of things he’d thought as a baby, but it seemed to him the world of time had been different back then. Yesterday and tomorrow had been all jumbled up together, a year would pass in the space of a day, and he could slip easily in and out of past and future lives – that was the kind of dream world he imagined he’d inhabited as an infant.

Sure, it would be enough to make anyone snort with derision, or heave a sigh or two, if a man turned into a baby and looked back over his own life.

Dreams were the sort of thing that seemed at first glance to have some meaning, but in fact you could interpret them any way you wanted. With the one he’d just had, though, he’d certainly feel a lot better if he treated it as completely meaningless. Being able to interpret dreams any way you wanted meant in effect that you could rewrite them as much as you liked. In the hands of someone who had a way with words, a nightmare could become a harbinger of good luck, while a pleasant dream might turn out to be simply the flip side of harsh reality. Dreams get used according to the needs of the moment. If something’s preying on your mind, take a look at your dreams and you’ll discover what it is. If the future’s weighing on you, ask your dreams for the answer. It will help you prepare yourself, if nothing else.

The traveller had never been psychoanalysed. Nor did he have any particular worries. He never remembered his dreams. Trying to recall them only made you feel anxious, after all. As to the question of where he came from and where he’d go when he died, well the answer had always been perfectly clear. The fact was, there was nothing he could do about it. What his dreams told him was: you yourself are quite meaningless.

On a sudden impulse, the traveller had just been to visit the grave of his father, who had died four years ago. His father’s name was inscribed on a gravestone in Dazaifu, his birthplace. At the age of sixteen he’d left Kyushu for Tokyo in search of fame or fortune, and for the following forty years he’d moved from one suburb of Tokyo to another, working virtually without a break all that time. He’d gone to his final rest still dreaming of returning home in triumph. He’d requested that he be buried back home in the family tomb, but there were no longer any family members left in Dazaifu to look after the ancestors, just the lonely grave. The priest in charge of the cemetery had intended to make the plot over to another family, and this new addition foiled his plans. The traveller and his mother had also come up with a plan to move the grave to a new site in the suburbs of Tokyo so that they could look after it, but his father had stuck to his guns. I may have nothing else in the world to call my own, he declared, but that grave is home and I want to go back there. Nothing had gone his way in life, thought his son, so the least they could do was follow his wishes in death.

It was four years since he’d visited the ancestral grave, and it was an overgrown wilderness. The traveller weeded it, cleaned up the gravestone with a scrubbing brush, and placed fresh flowers and sake before it. As he worked, he had to smile. What on earth had his father been thinking to want to come back to his birthplace, even if it was as a corpse? Did he believe that the soul should return to its place of origin? Or was it that forty years after he’d left home, forty long years of Rip Van Winkle existence, he still wanted to go to his eternal rest in the bosom of his ancestors?

His father had gone through life a good-natured dupe, too spendthrift ever to make his fortune and too gullible ever to make his mark on the world. And his son had quite a lot in common with him. His father had named him Yoshio, “good man,” and his own foolish good nature had come down to the boy. Yoshio Kita was thus at the mercy of genes that inclined him to serve others. In reaction, he longed to try a life devoted to the impulse of the moment, to follow his instincts, to give way to explosive emotions.