"Anyway, let's talk about the kind of stuff you guys wanna do before you die."
Orihara Izaya asked this morbid question in a karaoke box. Izaya was holding a drink, his steady voice resounding through the quiet compartment.
The two women in the compartment with him merely shook their heads in response to his question.
"I see. But, do you really want to die with someone like me? Aren't there loads of other great guys who could do it with you?"
"It's because there aren't any. That's why we wanna die."
"Yeah."
Izaya nodded in a rather lighthearted fashion, and silently studied the two women. Their expressions weren't particularly depressing, and someone who didn't know the details, would never expect that they wanted to kill themselves.
The reason for them being here was in fact a response to the invitation: "Let's die together!" Izaya had posted on a suicide pact website.
The contents of Izaya's invitation had sounded oddly cheerful and positive. This couldn't really be helped, because it was really an ad for a social networking site that he'd modified a little and then pasted on the message boards. But, if you browsed through the other stuff he posted, you'd notice that most of them sounded just as upbeat.
The messages were clear and to the point, and explained in great detail, various methods of suicide and gave a tremendous amount of encouragement (to kill themselves), not at all like someone who was intending to commit suicide himself. There were even some which were written very formally, like official documents for some renowned enterprise. Izaya loved looking these impressive 'Suicide Invitations' he'd written.
The two women before him had chosen to die. One because she couldn't find a job, and the other was because she hadn't been able to recover from the blow of a failed relationship, and both were despairing as such.
At first glance, it seemed unacceptable for someone to kill themselves over such reasons, but ever since the declining economy, the number of people who were committing suicide over their failed careers were increasing steadily each year. If you classified these people according to their state of employment, you'd find that most of them were in fact unemployed. Also, if you considered them according to age, you'd see that the number of suicides by people who were below twenty was far lesser than those in other age groups. Recently, after media coverage on suicides driven by bullying in school, people were given the impression that the majority of people who committed suicide were youngsters. But in actuality, most of them were in fact the so-called 'adults'.
Like the two women before Izaya. They were both adults, around twenty five to twenty six years old.
Meeting with people who wanted to kill themselves-he'd already done it over twenty times. During these meetings, Izaya noticed that many of them didn't have much in common. The attitude people had towards death varied widely, with some people maintaining a smile at all times. There were even some who clearly wanted to die, but still recorded TV shows before they went out.
But-none of the people Izaya met had ever really committed suicide in the end. This made him feel rather 'disappointed'.
The news loved to cover suicide incidents like the ones occurring in the recent years, especially after the media's influence, where people met online on websites to join suicide pacts. The media did not cover however, the solo suicide cases, which were in fact maintained at around over thirty thousand people these few years.
What were they thinking when they decided to die? Was there really no other way? Or perhaps, who did they want to die for? When people decided to die, just what kind of deep despair did they have in their hearts?
