It's 12:05am, New Years Day, my birthday. I am 103 million yen in debt, of which 75 million is held by my
tonight. For the first time since I can remember, I neglected my
midnight
. The past 11 years of hatsumoude
all resulted in the same fortune
. Fearing another daikyou, I put off my hatsumoude until the morning. Tonight was very important. I had yet to make a complete payment on this 75 million debt. As a result, two weeks ago, my now-toimen, Fukumoto made me take out an extensive life insurance policy, with him as the beneficiary. Were I unable to pay off the debt by January 2nd, I would be killed, and my debt cleared. After failing to scrape together 75 million in just two weeks, yesterday I went and took out another 38 million yen from yet another debtor, and returned to where I am now. Staking my 38 million yen against Fukumoto, tonight is my last and only chance to escape the fate which has been predicted for the past 11 years. We are about to play an 8-
long
. If I am unable to reach and hold the top position by the end of the 8th hanchan, I will die. In my headphones plays "au revoir" by Malice Mizer. I hate the way those Viz Kei bands look on stage, but something about the style of their music perfectly fits the mood of tonight.
We're located in a tiny
called daisangen with just four tables in a small farming village in Mie, and the persistent rain is overflowing from the adjacent rice field into the street. We are on the second floor, and the bright neon lights of the adjacent 24-hour convenience store are reflecting through the rain drops on the window like Christmas lights. We're sitting in oversized rotating seats around an automatic table from 1988, and once the two stand-in players finish drinking their Kirin beer the game will begin. I've brought with me three packs of Mevius Option Yellow 8 milligram cigarettes, one of which only has 5 sticks left in it, which I am just now realizing are probably not sufficient to make it to 8 or 9am, around when the game should be ending. Of note, were playing with hakoten; if any one player's points go below zero, the hanchan immediately ends. Before I can make my way to the convenience store to buy a few more packs of Mevius Option Yellow 8 milligrams, the stand-ins finish their beers and make their way to the table. They sit down, and my heart rate is already higher than it should be, so I light my first cigarette. At the same time, I have two VELO Red extra-strength nicotine pouches packed into my lower left lip. In the past two weeks, my nicotine intake has reached a personal high, so this usually vomit-inducing triple dose has about the same effect of my first low-tar cigarette.
We roll the dice built in to the table, and my
wins; he will play first. He presses the yellow button and the tiles shoot up through the table. Quicker than I had expected, it comes to be my turn to draw my first block of four tiles. Sooner than I could have hoped, I'm already in
. However, I've managed to tenpai not for any ordinary trash hand, but instead am one away from
. If I win, my chances of surviving the night go through the roof. However, the only problem is that it's an unlikely win. There's only one of my winning tile left in the game, jigokumachi. However, while I am still mid-thought about my now-unlikely yakuman win, Fukumoto opens his mouth, the first utterance since the game has started. With a too-wide grin on his face, he says “Your wait is too easy to read, Suzuka. The only way out is a tsumo; you can't make it out of here tonight with this strategy.” Then, before I can respond, he slams the tile onto the table with far too much force, risking damage to the mechanics, and slowly releases his finger from the tile. Ii-pin!
! Kachi! Kachi! “Ron! Chinroutou, 32,000 points!
!” Dopamine floods into my brain. I'm too distracted by the win to even register what sort of reaction Fukumoto is making. To calm me down a little bit, I reach for a cigarette, just to realize I've already made my way through the first pack. As I open up my second pack of the night, the point sticks tumble down onto the table and I snatch them up like an orphaned child who hasn't eaten in days picking up bread scraps. With my brain on autopilot, the words “Since the hanchan is over, let's take a break, I need to go to the convenience store” spill and stutter out of my mouth. “Okay, just be sure to come back, if you ditch on us tonight you know what happens.” I grab my purse and scurry down the stairs.
As I step out into the exterior stairwell, I realize I forgot my umbrella, and the rain is still pounding down. I can't go back in this soon to get it, they'll try and make me start the second hanchan, so I try making my way down the slick stairs as fast as I can, an obvious mistake. With one misplaced step, I fly down the slick stairwell and collapse into a misshapen collection of limbs at the bottom, now not only covered with rain but now also with mud and bruises. It takes me at least two minutes to stand back up and get my bearing, and I rush over to the convenience store. I shakily utter the sentence “Three packs of number 278 please,” while the clerk looks at me with a face sharing the emotions of disgust, curiosity, and concern. I quickly pay with my last two thousand-yen bills and collect my 320 yen of change. As I pick up my smokes and turn around to go to the bathroom the clerk utters “M-Ma'am? Are you okay? I can call the police for you.” Confused, I whip back with “I'm fine. Why would you call the police.” “O-okay then...” I swing open the gender-neutral bathroom door only to instantly realize why he suggested calling the police. I look in the mirror and it's not good. I look like a murder victim. My nose is streaming blood, I have a black eye, and I'm covered in scrapes and mud. Shit. He must have seen me come out of the jansou and walk in here covered in blood and bruises. Even though I told him I'm fine he might still go and call the cops on the jansou. At this point my thoughts are racing even faster with the idea of a possible appearance of the police. I splash some water over my face to wash off the mud and blood and take what I came to do out of my pocket. As I head over to the toilet to sit down, I catch one more glimpse of myself in the mirror. I didn't realize before because of the dirt and blood caked over my face, but I have a pretty deep cut on my cheek, right outside of where my #15 tooth sits. It doesn't cut completely through, but you can definitely see the flesh inside. I stand back up and look closer into the mirror, the little splash of water wasn't enough to really clean anything, so there's dirt inside and little fragments of glass stuck inside. Shit. I must have fallen onto a piece of glass when I fell down the stairs. How the fuck did I not notice? The adrenaline? Whatever it is, I've got business to do and then need to head back to the jansou.
After I got diagnosed, I got into the habit of writing
. It made me feel like a samurai, about to run into a battle that left my fate uncertain. However, in the back of my mind, I thought it might not be the best idea. If God saw me writing a death poem, and I lived, wouldn't he punish me, kill me? It felt rude to write a death poem and then live. Maybe that's why I'm in the position I'm in now. Divine retribution for the crime of living. I decided that it couldn't hurt me to write another now; if I was going to be punished for writing a jisei-no-ku and surviving I was already living on borrowed time. I thought about Kozan
's jisei-no-ku,
来時は空手
去時は赤脚
一去一来
単重交折
When I came, I was empty handed
When I leave, barefoot
My coming, my going
Two simple things, that got entangled.
It was the first jisei-no-ku that I read, from the wikipedia page for "Death poem," and was the one I thought about the most. I fantasized a lot about Kozan Ikkyo. I bought a book about the life and death of zen monks, and read the chapter on Ikkyou over and over again. I treated my image of him like a big brother, a best friend, or maybe even a boyfriend. I figured that if I wrote a jisei each day, and each day I got better, by the time I died I would be remembered for it, like Ikkyou. I lit the second cigarette from my second pack of the night and opened my notebook. I scribbled a draft, scratched it out, and repeated the process a few times until I landed on something I was happy with. Raindrops and blood-drops scattered across the page enhanced the, to be frank, coolness, of the poem. If I did die tonight and someone found this, it would be perfect.
A small metal case. I struggle with the clasp, and when it finally snaps open the small unmarked glass vial and needle fling out and clatter to the ground. I scramble like a rat to pick them up as quick as possible, and in a series of motions so quick they make me feel like a b-tier-movie Samurai, I flick off the cap of the needle and nestle it into the vial. Not caring to mark the dose exactly right, I pull back the plunger probably too fast, but it's all the same to me. I rip off my shirt and slide the needle into the permanently surgically installed IV-port on my upper left chest. The port has an air release line built-in, so I have no need to waste a few precious drops to kick the air bubbles out of the syringe. With a slow push, the colorless liquid makes its way directly into my heart. I wait for the rush, the release, the dopamine, the serotonin, anything good. But nothing noticeable comes. Fuck. I've been using too much these past few days—how could I not with what laid ahead of me—but without realizing I built up my tolerance far past where I was comfortable. I'm not even sure if re-dosing at this point would be enough to feel something, but I'm unsure if I have an option.
I stumble out of the toilet, slamming the door shut on my way out. A big mistake, as the clerk snaps his neck around; my morphine and
-LSD-knockoff addled mind making it look like his neck rotated a full 180 degrees like an owl. The heroic dose I'm under makes forming thoughts hard, and I'm certainly not loquacious enough at this point to utter even a "sorry" to the clerk. On top of that, the morphine has turned the sharp sting that the gash on my cheek inflicts every time I move my mouth into a weird, inexplicable sensation that doesn't hurt, but certainly isn't enjoyable. As soon as the sole clerk looks away, I nab a pack of bandages and slip them into my pocket and rush out into the rain to make my way back to the jansou. While walking, I slap the bandage over my gash with a sting, and make my way up the stairs, being careful to watch my step this time. I grip the doorknob, but I fear I'm too high already. I got addicted to the morphine a while ago, but the RC-LSD-knockoff is a recent addition. It doesn't make you trip like real LSD, but is more like a thought-enhancer; you notice things more, feel things harder, etc. A necessity since I hate the brain-numbing feeling of the morphine. The euphoria is what I'm after. But it seems like under high enough doses the RC-LSD-knockoff turns into something like normal LSD.
Shit. I'm barely just coming up now and I'm in no state to play mahjong at a high enough level. I remember a tale this jack-ass in middle school told me about a baseball player who pitched a perfect game off a heroic dose of LSD. Maybe I can pull something like that off...