Management: The issue and act of the episodes of these two shows, Shigofumi’s Episode 3: “Friends”, and Death Parade’s Episode 11 “Memento Mori” and Episode 12 “Suicide Tour,” is, of course, a rather controversial point of discussion in popular and private discourse, and so my intention, with this essay, is to posit Shigofumi’s and Death Parade’s musings on the subject in a thought-provoking way. Additionally, while I may hold a positive opinion overall of this show, this piece in no ways serves as a comprehensive review of the series, but rather an articulation and analysis of an interesting set of ideas brought up.

This piece also references a previous post of Shigofumi I wrote, which can be found here.

I published a little thematic piece on Shigofumi when I started out blogging. The piece is somewhat of a reflection of how far my blogging voice has come since. My writing then was less lengthy than it is now, by a considerable degree. It was more structurally rigid and emotionally reserved. Now, I’ve gotten to the point where I’m more confident saying a whole variety of different things. The Shigofumi piece ended up drawing some debate, and that debate pertained both to how I interpreted the show’s targeted message as well as the acceptability of the targeted message itself. I made no secret that I was supportive of that message.

That message was anti-suicide.

While it tells its a separate story, Death Parade makes the same message. It is critical of the reasoning that has driven many people to kill themselves. I understand that suicide is a sensitive topic for a lot of people, and what I will say will sound like suicide victim blaming. Consequently, I will make pains to clarify what kind of suicide these shows and I are calling out on. However, if the creators behind Shigofumi and Death Parade are willing to make these points unreservedly, then it would behoove me to not hold back.

The scenario illustrated in Episode 3 of Shigofumi, “Friends,” appears incredulous on face value. A kid by the name of Daiki Senkawa jumps off a building and commits suicide. Everyone, distraught, curious, or some synthesis of the two, from news media to his school to friends, are wondering… why. Why? One friend of Daiki’s, Tooru, is particularly troubled by this question. Barring the indignity of not coming to his friends about this at all, he didn’t seem the person you’d think would commit suicide. He didn’t seem to be depressed, nor did he seem to be concealing any symptoms of depression. By all appearances, the kid was a model student and son.

His father was perplexed too, perplexed enough to hold his classmates hostage with a double-barreled shotgun until he could get an answer out of them to alleviate his anxiety. The father insists with the utmost sincerity Daiki wasn’t being abused at home. The next likely place for harassment left, thought the father, must have been school-related.

Was he being bullied at school? Which one of you was responsible? I just want to know. I’m his father after all.

The unique plot device of the show kicks in as the main recurring character, Fumika, effortlessly bursts through desk-barricaded door and points her own firearm at the father before he can stop her momentum in the form of a hand-mail delivery to Tooru.

What she delivered, a shigofumi, is a letter (fumi) delivered from the afterlife (shigo), and what do you know? The letter is from the recently deceased Daiki. Tooru reads it aloud, and Daiki’s words end up clearing all the misunderstanding. Daiki killed himself because he was curious about the experience.

“In it, he wrote that he himself became curious of what it would be like to jump. He stated that while he had no particular reason to die, but he had no particular reason to leave either. And that’s that.”

Tell that to his terrorized classmates. Tell that to his traumatized father.

But, you know, taking a disinterested step back, you can’t help but feel this is a little too convenient. Barring the supernatural, of course, even if this hostage scenario is something that could plausibly occur in real life, it’s not like it’s probable that it would escalate to the extent it did in this show. Additionally, it’s not like this kid knew it would end up as disastrously as it did, that his father would take up a gun in his son’s name to secure justice, revenge, or some synthesis of the two.

I’d tell these commenters that they’re missing the point. What they’re claiming threatens to undermine any attempt by creators to use the fantastical and surreal to demonstrate the real. I’d also accuse those commenters of lacking imagination, or at least some historical depth. World War I is essentially a potpourri of numerous worse case scenarios, like the one involving death of the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and a sandwich, making up a worst one, a disastrous event on a global scale that lead to the deaths of millions. I’d also challenge this implication that the suicide in question would have been less serious if people weren’t physically injured as a consequence. Malaise can be psychosomatic, after all, but suppose the health of one’s mind and body was dualistic. People still end up emotionally upset, and that make people do destructive things. These commenters, however, seem to imply that that kind of hurt deserves much less merit, if any merit at all.

That kind of hurt has made people kill themselves and kill other people, hurt themselves and hurt other people. Grief can kill, and even when it doesn’t, it hurts. It really hurts, and to put other family and friends into that potential kind of situation means some two-to-three combination of:

1. Being certain that there’s no potential for them to suffer,

2. Being negligent about their potential suffering, and/or

3. Being self-centered.

You can argue that he was being negligent, if not about hostage scenario per se, then at least about the grief he caused his friend, his classmates, and his father. But why was he negligent?

Because he only thought to sate his curiosity.

He thought only about himself.

Daiki was self-centered.

Now, I’m not denying that Daiki’s case isn’t exactly representative for the majority of suicides that have occurred. If not unique, his case is probably rare, and when we discuss suicides in society, we typically discuss them in the context of depressed individuals abruptly taking their own lives.

I’m going to qualify that the suicide I’m going to address are people who possess a relatively decent amount of agency to do independent things other than suicide, and I’m going to exclude cases where euthanasia is concerned. I’m going to talk about individuals with the relative physical and social mobility of people like Daiki. These individuals take their own lives when their depression overwhelms them, when they either endure misery enough that they feel they have nothing and no one left to live for, or feel pained enough that they feel what and who they can live for isn’t worth the trouble. I’ve had another commenter criticize, albeit respectfully, Shigofumi’s message on suicide for being an attack on personal freedom, a defense I personally feel is dubious. People should be able to take their own lives if they feel like it so long as it doesn’t cause direct physical injury to other people. Said people shouldn’t have to cater to the feelings of others. It’s an individual choice, and we should respect it. After all, people are individuals.

Individuals.

The first half of Episode 11 of Death Parade, “Memento Mori,” reveals the circumstances that led Kurokami no Onna, the Black-haired Woman, Chiyuki, to her death.

A person who developed a love for ice skating after her mother read her a children’s book when she was little, her rising career in the sport was cut short when an accident on the rink left one of knees badly injured to the point that could never skate again.

However, what ate at her to the point she slit herself in the bathroom wasn’t that she she couldn’t skate. She realized well enough that there were other in her life that were important, that she could occupy her time with. No, what led her to bleed out from wrists into a pool of bathwater was the fact she was an…

Individual.

She realized that the friends she made were ones she made through her passion for ice skating. Once she stopped skating, she noticed they weren’t around her like they always were. It’s not like they didn’t necessarily care for her, but the vast share of the time they spent together was correlated to something involving their mutual passions. A vast share of her time was spent distracted on skating.

The time she used to devote herself to skating, she now spent, for the first time, consciously alone. Her friends were off doing some skating-related or not, and in the silence of that solitude, her eyes ended up gazing into the abyss. She felt its chill, and she realized in the whispers the abyss mouthed from its gaping and fathomless mouth something about her that many philosophers had previously inferred about the concept of the…

…individual.

As individuals, we are fundamentally alone. It was in this smallness, in this existential despair of crushingly Lovecraftian likeness, in this…

…empty…

…voidless…

…cold…

…that she took her own life.

And that’s that.

“Except that it’s not.”

Episode 12 of Death Parade “Suicide Tour” has Decim taking Chiyuki on a tour of the consequences of her suicide. She wakes up in the house she grew up in and left behind, tours the kitchen and living space before her mother returned. Chiyuki’s mother can’t see her, nor can Chiyuki touch her, but almost automatically knelt down before an indoor shrine to reflect and pray for her daughter.

And then the mother gasps, shaking over how she could have let her daughter to this to herself. She cries, agonizing couldn’t foresee this as something her precious daughter would do. She wails, anguishing about how she couldn’t understand her.

And with that, Chiyuki gasps, repudiating under her breaking breath her previous personal assertion at the futility of understanding people. She cries. She screams and begs Decim through her sobs to help her make this right and apologize to her mother. Decim almost automatically whips out a solution hearkening to Mayu’s trial by Ginti in the second half of Episode 11.

If you press this button, you can save yourself from your suicide.

All you need to do is let someone take your place in death.

It’s true that perhaps one of your friends and family might be the one chosen, but in a world of 7 billion+ people, that’s highly unlikely.

It’ll most likely be a complete a complete stranger.

And with a great offer like that, coupled with her desperation, she makes for the button in Decim’s hand.

But then, memories of all the past games she helped facilitate where people bared their lives for Chiyuki to see and Decim to judge.

What of the people they left behind? The friends? The family? If I took another person’s life in order to live, wouldn’t I be putting that person’s friends and family into the same kind of pain that I subjected my mother to? The people I saw during these games who struggled so hard and cried so much.

Why am I the only one allowed to get special treatment?

It turns out that “who” Chiyuki was seeing was a “what.” It was a dummy that looked like her mother and acted like her mother based off of Decim’s imagination. Does the fact that Decim imagined this whole ordeal for Chiyuki mean that it was worthless? No, because like the hostage scenario in Shigofumi, what Death Parade was trying to illustrate in this scene was empathy, empathy in the face of callous assertions of personal freedom and maddening bouts of depression.

There’s no guarantee of an afterlife that would allow you to see the future when you commit suicide. Matters of afterlives are matters of faith, but hypothetically speaking (and consequently assuming), if there was no afterlife, then death could be really called the ultimate escape from life and the pain associated with it. There would be no regrets in death because you’re dead and gone.

But while your own life ends, life for everyone else on Earth goes on, and the people left behind might be definitely be feeling regret. They might be feeling remorse. They might be gasping for air, crying scalding tears, and wailing and screaming in terrible grief and self-loathing. Their depression might fall into a despair they can’t get out of. They might do something desperate and hurt themselves and other people physically. But that’s only physically. Emotionally, they might hurt. They might really hurt. And because you’re dead and gone, it’s impossible to perceive this and reply back like in Shigofumi or Death Parade. You can’t see, hear, or speak…

…but that’s okay. That’s okay because you can’t feel pain. Not your pain. Not their pain. Not their pain causing your pain. It might be an escape from life, but it’s also the ultimate escape from pain.

Does that not seem cruel?

“After all, suicide isn’t just about you.”

It’s a simple thought, I know, but when people are so self-absorbed that they can’t exercise a reasonable amount of imagination and not grasp this basic fact, it’s a victory for self-centeredness. It is the defeat of empathy. I understand how much individual liberation can be enriching. I understand how much negativity can be consuming. I’ve indulged and suffered from both. People are simultaneously individual and social persons.

People can commit suicide, and if they’re bent on it, they can usually accomplish it if they’re determined enough. It’s not that hard to die. But once you die, there are no regrets. You can’t regret killing yourself once you’re permanently gone. You can’t see the consequences of your act, hear the people you affected, and speak to the people you made suffer. Shigofumi and Death Parade gives many of its characters a second and final chance to in order to see through a perspective they otherwise neglected even glimpsing while they were still alive, but for us, the viewers, we can’t develop empathy post-mortem.

If you’re absolutely sure that none of the people you care for will suffer, you sincerely and straightly believe that your current pain is worse than any of the potential pain you might inflict on people who care for you, or you don’t even care, then go on ahead. Kill yourself.

If not, then develop some empathy for the living.