Shinjū-心中

When Giriko asked me to jump with her, I didn’t bat an eye. I’d already thought of it myself.

Seventy-five stories above Tokyo, the wind lashed at my exposed neck. The murmur of cars from the busy streets below couldn’t reach me through the whistling in my ears. The night lights sparkling off their microscopic windshields failed to reach the crushing darkness enveloping us above.

Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath, the air smelling as crisp as atop Mt. Fuji, where we met. I’d come to Tokyo for a solo trip, just a brief escape from the responsibilities of my engagement. One last adventure, alone, while I could still be alone. Atop Mt. Fuji, my fears waited the farthest they could from my mind, and I found her in their absence.

“Jēmuzu.” My name came in a whisper carried on the breeze as she squeezed our freezing, interlocked fingers.

In the depths of her dark eyes I saw tearless sadness, but also. . . . love. Her jet black hair swept over her dollish face in long wisps, and my heart broke again. Never in my life had I met a soul which called to me so strongly and demanded my protection and affection.

With a smile and a tender squeeze of her hand, I turned to the starry night as tears ran down my face. The mass of millions below scurried through the metropolis like ants, oblivious to the beauty above.

Staring at the full moon, I thought of Melissa for the first time in weeks, soon to awake in New York a free woman. When she stares at the same moon, on the same night hours from now, she won’t see the witness to her fiancé’s last moments, only a reminder of the day just past.

“We were never meant to be.” The strength in my voice startled me as I confessed to the moon. “My soul was destined for Giriko.”

We gazed at one another. Her lips turned in a subtle smile as we stood at the peak of Tokyo. She turned toward the net of pavement cast between the buildings and trees.

“This will always be my favorite place to come. I love the view.” She spoke to me, but kept her sunken eyes on the city sprawled out before us. “So many people hurry around in futile attempts to extend their lives, their time, hoping to eke out more pleasure before they die. They waste away through so much effort in vain.”

Despite what was to come, this mood of hers bewitched me. She could never be more beautiful than when she brooded over the vanity of life or the disloyalty of humanity.

“You might find it strange, but this is where he betrayed me.” She turned to me with an irked grimace. I held her delicate hand tighter, though it felt ephemeral. “He showed me the view for the first time, back when I thought he loved me.”

“That night was much like this, cold and dark, with a sea of glimmering lights around us. He brought me to the ledge, my heart hammering with anticipation. I just knew he would propose and take me back to America. He’d promised me luxury away from the cramped life of big cities, a home with many rooms and lots of space, a yard of lush grass, and children to raise in peace and comfort.”

Her voice broke, and a tremor ran down her arm into her vice-like grip. “He promised me love. Then he ripped my heart out.” Giriko bent over the ledge, snarling in contempt.

“He left me here to jump while he fell into bed with another woman.” Curtains of black hair obscured her face and hung dangerously over the edge toward certain death.

“Giriko.” Holding her back with my unrestrained hand, I raised her to face me. My hand beneath her chin, I kissed her gently. She returned it, full of anger and then passion. In a writhing embrace, we kneeled inches from the open air. Pausing to breathe, we held our foreheads together in silence.

“I love you.” Between sobs, I cried. “I always will.”

My life back home, constricted and dependent on an engagement, laid out step by step for my success, loomed in the future like a hangman’s noose. My time with Giriko, a doomed parole before my time would no longer be my own.

Melissa and her family’s carefully planned future would suck the life out of me as fast as the fall to the crosswalk below. Engaged for years, just to be married at the most appropriate time. . . . only just finding love in my last days.

“Jēmuzu.” We locked eyes and time stopped. The cars and people below froze, the wind died, and I saw my hopeless soul reflected in the dead eyes of Giriko. Standing together, she held my face in her hands and spoke to me.

“I don’t want to live without you. I will never find love after you. If you leave Japan, I will come back here and remember this night with you. I will remember the strength of your hand in mine.” Taking my hand in hers again, she squeezed it. “I will remember your voice in my ear and your breath on my neck.” She whispered in my ear. “I will remember your lips upon mine.” Our last kiss. “And I will jump from this ledge and wait in the afterlife for you to join me.”

With that, she faced Tokyo and closed her eyes. I dug my fingertips into the back of her hand and sighed with resolution.

“I can’t live without you, either. There is nothing for me back home. Nothing to return to. I can’t leave this tower, because if I do, I leave not only Japan and return to someone else’s life, but I leave you, and I won’t.”

We both hung our toes over the edge, hand in hand, and looked at the brilliant moon one last time. Closing our eyes, we felt our weight tip forward and through rushing wind we fell toward the street below.

The wind did not rip Giriko from my grasp, but halfway to the Earth her hand simply disappeared.

With a start, I opened my eyes and stared between my feet at the scene gathering at the foot of the tower. A lone broken body lay in a circle of spectators spilling onto the street. I could not feel the wind nor hear a sound, and the color from the world had vanished.

As I stood floating in the air beside the skyscraper, I looked back and saw Giriko for what she was. Her beauty, which struck me in life, now enhanced by death, stunned me. She stood perfectly still with her hands tucked into the pure white sleeves of her kimono.

“Giriko?” My voice sounded distant and muffled, as if I spoke underwater. She studied me serenely. Then a malevolent smile twisted her exquisite delicacy into a horrifying mask.

Speechless, I gaped as her hair turned oily, her eyes enlarged, turning a solid, pustule yellow. Short tusks erupted from her upper and lower jaws. Her sweet voice, spilling from the ugly maw of the creature, tore my soul in two.

“Do you still love me?” The creature asked and tilted its head. “They all say they love me, just like he did before he let me jump alone.”

“What do you mean?” I asked in a daze.

The creature shrieked and writhed, clawing at its face with long gray fingers and knife-like, black talons. If I still had a body, I’d have felt a terrible chill down my spine.

“We made a pact and stood on this ledge years ago. When I jumped, he let go of my hand and watched me fall to my death. He didn’t say a prayer for me or show up at my funeral. He just fled out the back of the tower and found his new love.” She griped the last words with mocking impudence.

“He escaped far beyond my haunting reach, losing me over Mt. Fuji. Now I wait there for his return, catching men like him in my trap. It’s only convenient that you foreigners visit Fuji so frequently.”

Thoughts of my potential life with Melissa mocked me as I stared again at my abandoned body below. Clouds extinguished the heavenly bodies, and a drizzle washed my blood into the sewer.

“Now.”

I snapped my head back to the creature, Giriko, as it opened the kimono. Where in life her sensuous body would be, its gray flesh writhed with the wailing faces of her victims, lured to death and. . . . And?!

“Time to eat.”