The Seven Deadly Sins III

Chihane Igarashi was an exceptionally patient thaumaturge of carnal desire. He never feared failing to achieve his aims, for he always perceived the yearnings people kept buried deep within, and he knew how to exploit them.

In his mind, the moment Koji Shiina raised his glass, he was already ensnared. All that remained was to wait for desire to ferment, for the soul to be corrupted.

He did not wish to waste precious time while waiting, so he decided to embark alone on the collection of one of the Seven Deadly Sins.

This world is one of duality—everything has its opposite. In a sense, perhaps this is the balance of the universe: as some revel nightly in indulgence and pleasure, so others remain isolated, cut off from the world.

In Igarashi’s hand was a small statue. The face of Belphegor, the embodiment of Sloth, was twisted, arms folded across the chest as if rejecting all that lay outside.

Walking through Yoyogi, Igarashi felt the statue grow warm in his palm until he arrived before a house that seemed long neglected. Though it stood in an affluent district, the property was overrun with weeds. The bamboo grove in the front yard completely obscured all paths.

“I have nothing to offer this world, but that’s all right. Humanity is, after all, lonely and frail.” Having penned this final line in pencil on yellowed paper, Shunsuke Matsuyama tossed his pencil aside, navigated around the piles of rubbish, and lay down on the tatami, worn into a hollow with age.

A clock, shrouded in cobwebs, had long since ceased its ticking, but Matsuyama gazed at it all the same.

The natto he bought last month was gone. Perhaps today was a good day to die.

No one would care, no one would ever know. Shunsuke Matsuyama, now sixty-eight, had lived alone in this house for over fifty years. He vaguely recalled having a younger sister, but everyone else was dead—only he, useless as ever, remained.

As his family dwindled, the house became an empty shell wrapped in beautiful memories, the last world Matsuyama possessed. Except for monthly trips to purchase necessities, every day was spent within these walls.

The boxes that once held natto covered every patch of flooring; rotting fruit peels bred black insects; save for the tatami beneath him, the house had become an ocean of refuse.

Apart from eating and sleeping, Matsuyama did nothing. He created nothing but garbage. Even the will he had just written had taken him the entire morning—he had forgotten the sensation of holding a pen, and it took him ages to recall how to form the characters.

After his father, mother, and sister died, Matsuyama’s own time had come to a standstill within this house.

Once the funerals were over and he returned home alone, he stopped cleaning, stopped tidying up. With no job, living solely on the inheritance left by his father, he survived in Tokyo—where the average monthly expenditure was 120,000 yen—on just 5,000 yen a month. He didn’t even like natto, but it was the cheapest food.

His relationship with his parents had never been good. His father, a government official, was especially strict with his eldest son, demanding he attend a university befitting their status. At the private school Matsuyama attended, everyone was an elite, a prodigy. Gaining entrance to a prestigious university and securing a good job seemed only natural.

Yet for Matsuyama, this was no simple task. The entire class was accepted into Japan’s top universities; only he failed the first year, and again the second, and for many years after, never meeting the definition of “elite.”

Matsuyama eventually gave up. He began to drink, unwilling to contemplate his “value to society.”

There were moments of sobriety when he considered pulling himself together, trying to live well. But in Japan, a single moment’s discouragement at a turning point could mean permanently missing the path of a normal life. One misstep, and society’s clock would forever leave you behind.

Once, everyone had rushed headlong into Tokyo, like a herd of beasts on the plain. No one imagined themselves prey. Yet even the sun would one day burn out—nothing was eternal.

All too often, humanity deludes itself with dreams of everlasting glory. The Romans believed it; so did the Japanese a millennium later. But when the great current that swept through an era quieted, all of Japan sank into the “Lost Two Decades.”

Nothing comes without a price. When the illusory bubble economy burst, social pressure in Japan soared, and the tempo of life accelerated. Students had to enter good universities to find good jobs, and the salarymen riding thirty-minute subway commutes, even with a 45-degree fever, were forced to overwork to keep their jobs. The older generation constantly feared their livelihoods would be snatched away by the younger. The whole of Japan seemed to be running a race—the ones who fell behind were left to watch others run toward the future.

This pressure made Japan the nation with one of the highest suicide rates in the world, with over thirty thousand people taking their own lives each year. It also gave rise to a vast army of “parasite singles.” The environment made it impossible for the majority of young Japanese to surpass their parents as the previous generation had; for every Showa-era man, there was a Heisei-era “failure.”

“Let it be, then.” When this thought first crept into Matsuyama’s mind, he resisted it. But as time passed, he found himself questioning whether it was worth enduring such suffering any longer.

He considered suicide, but was too fearful to attempt it. He lived simply for the sake of living.

Lost in this inescapable contradiction, an unexpected car accident showed him another way. Compared to their disappointing eldest son, his stern parents favored his talented younger sister. When she received her acceptance letter from Waseda University, the family planned a trip—of course, “the family” did not include the one who kept failing at job interviews. The Matsuyamas did not acknowledge incompetence.

When Matsuyama received the call from the police, his first thought, strangely enough, was that finally, no one would ever disturb him again.

To stimulate consumption and ease economic pressure, the Bank of Japan kept interest rates astonishingly low, but those who had experienced the bubble era no longer trusted investments and kept their money in the safest place: the bank.

Matsuyama was no exception. He inherited all his parents’ assets; aside from the savings and the house, he liquidated everything else, depositing it in the bank.

Though Matsuyama acquired a considerable inheritance, he had lost all drive. He made no investments, earned no income, and lived only to see the day the money ran out.

“Are you waiting for death?” Chihane Igarashi was unbothered by the rubbish underfoot. He stepped forward with a crunching sound and appeared before Matsuyama.

“Yes,” Matsuyama answered with perfect calm. He did not fear death. In Japan’s traditional view of life and death, death precedes life, and the two are of equal weight. Thus, life and death are linked; in the awareness of death, one experiences the hardship of living, and in the course of life, one becomes indifferent to the fear of dying—death becomes but a continuation of life. Yet for Matsuyama, it was not this philosophy that led him here. He simply wished to complete something that should have been done long ago.

In Japan, there is a custom called “bone-picking.” After the cremation of a loved one, the funeral staff summons the family to collect the ashes. They wheel out a small table, upon which the bones—except for the ribcage, which is reduced to fragments—are mostly intact. Family members, men on the left, women on the right, pair up: one picks up a bone with chopsticks, passes it to the other, who places it in the urn.

As the closest relative, Matsuyama was the last to place the skull in the urn. He remembered clearly, even after all these years, the words the funeral director spoke after the final bone was placed and the urn was covered with its golden shroud:

“The departed are like withered grass, returning to the earth, awaiting the next blossom.”

Perhaps it was then that Matsuyama ceased to fear death. All these years had been but preparation—dying too young would only arouse suspicion. Compared to the old, the passing of the young brings an unconscious, greater sorrow; people are ready for the former, even if they are strangers. Matsuyama did not wish for those who would deal with his remains to be burdened with excessive melancholy.

He did not want anyone to say, “What a pity, so young.” He wished to slip away quietly—that was why he had waited until now.

“Do you intend to die today?” Chihane Igarashi looked around with interest.

“Yes,” Matsuyama replied. He did not resent the young man who had come to disturb his final hour. What he hated was never the world; it was only that he had never made peace with himself.

Igarashi’s gaze fell upon a dust-covered photo album on the cabinet. In the photograph, a young boy held a little girl’s hand; behind them stood a father with a stern face and a mother with a gentle smile.

Matsuyama noticed his gaze. “Father, mother, sister—all gone. Even the neighbors are dead. No one knows me now.”

Igarashi walked over, blew the dust from the album, and even he found it difficult to reconcile the lively, smiling boy in the photograph with the old man before him, exuding a strange odor and awaiting death. It was not merely the difference of years—it was as if something had severed all connection between the boy and the old man.

After a moment’s reflection, Igarashi realized the source of that strange emptiness: Matsuyama lived in a complete vacuum. People could see him, touch him, speak to him, but he no longer formed any intimate bonds. He had long since lost the essential attribute of humanity—emotion.

In the dim, decaying house, the small statue, arms crossed in isolation, was quietly crushed to dust.