It is hard to talk about wanting to die. Most people you talk to can’t handle it; it’s too disturbing. If you call a suicide hot line, the person can handle it, but he will be some stranger who knows nothing about you. There isn’t much talk therapy in Japan—if you go to a psychiatrist, he will usually see you for just a few minutes and give you a prescription. Nemoto wanted to help suicidal people talk to each other without awkwardness, and so he created a suicide Web site. It was originally called “For those who want to die,” but then it was suggested to him that it might become a place where people went to find strangers to commit suicide with—that had become quite common in Japan—so he changed its name to “For those who do not want to die.” People communicated with one another on the site, and also they wrote to him.

He responded to everyone. He wrote back to all e-mails, and often, when he wrote, a reply would arrive within minutes, and he would reply to the reply. He answered all phone calls, day or night, and many came in the night. People would call and want to talk to him, but they didn’t know what to say; they didn’t know how to describe what was happening to them. What would come through the phone over hours of talking was an inarticulate, urgent, and bottomless anxiety that seeped into him and didn’t go away when the phone call was over.

He tried to practice what he thought of as Zen listening—letting the words and emotions flow through him, taking up all the space in his mind so there was no room for any reaction of his own. He felt that in order to help people he had to feel what they felt—he had to feel that he wasn’t an adviser but a fellow-sufferer, trying, as they were, to make sense out of life—but this affected him more and more, as their anxiety became his. He tried to meditate in order to purge himself of these emotions, but he could never purge himself completely. He thought about the suicidal people all the time. How could he help them? What could he do? He wasn’t sleeping enough. It was gruelling, but his practice in the temple had been gruelling and he believed that this was a continuation of his practice.

After three years, he sensed that he was near a breakdown, and he started to think about ways to take care of himself. He took up karate again. He meditated more, did more chanting. But new people kept asking him for help, and the people from before kept calling, and few cases were ever resolved, and so he felt himself responsible for more and more people who wanted more and more from him.

In the fall of 2009, he began to feel a heaviness in his chest. He felt that his neck was constricting; he found it harder to breathe. When it got very bad, a few months later, he went to the hospital and received a diagnosis of unstable angina. Five arteries were blocked; his doctor told him he could die of a heart attack at any time. Over the next two years, he had four angioplasties. During this period, Nemoto’s father became suicidal. Ten years before, the father had had a severe stroke and become partly paralyzed. By the time Nemoto was hospitalized, his father had lost the will to live. Then, a few months later, he died, of heart failure.

“We’ve been together so long we can finish each other’s divorce threats.” Facebook

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All this time, the e-mails and the phone calls kept coming, but for long periods Nemoto was too sick to respond. At first, he didn’t say why he had gone silent. Then, as the weeks went by, he felt he had to explain. From the hospital, he wrote to his correspondents and told them he was sick. When he checked back in to see how they’d responded to his announcement, he was shocked. They didn’t care that he was sick: they were sick, too, they said; they were in pain, and he had to take care of them.

Lying in the hospital, he spent a week crying. He had spent seven years sacrificing himself, driving himself to the point of breakdown, nearly to death, trying to help these people, and they didn’t care about him at all. What was the point? He knew that if you were suicidal it was difficult to understand other people’s problems, but still—he had been talking to some of these people for years, and now here he was dying and nobody cared.

For a long time, his thoughts were too dark and agitated to sort out, but slowly the darkness receded, and what remained with him was a strong sense that he wanted to do the work anyway. He realized that, even if the people he spoke to felt nothing for him, he still wanted something from them. There was the intellectual excitement he felt when he succeeded in analyzing some problem a person had been stuck on. He wanted to know truths that ordinary people did not know, and in suffering it felt as though he were finding those truths. And then there was something harder to define, a kind of spiritual thrill in what felt to him, when it worked, like a bumping of souls. If this was what he was after, he would have to stop thinking of his work as something morally obligatory and freighted with significance. Helping people should be nothing special, like eating, he thought—just something that he did in the course of his life.

Having arrived at this conclusion, he went online to look at his Web site, and saw that there were some messages of support that he’d missed the first time in his shock at the others. That was a relief. But he still needed to make changes in his life. Clearly, he had been doing something wrong. He thought about all the e-mails and all the phone calls and how those conversations could go on and on for years in circles with no progress at all; and he also thought about how strange and disorienting it was to swallow into himself terrible emotions from people he had never even seen. He decided that from then on he would not communicate with people until he had met them. If they wanted his counsel, they first had to come to his temple. It would be difficult for many of them—his temple was in a remote place, far from the nearest city, quite far even from the local train station, and he had been talking to people all over Japan. It would cost them quite a bit of money to get to him. But this was the point. If they didn’t want his help enough to get to the temple, it was unlikely that he could help them.

The new strategy reduced the number of people who came to him for help, and it also changed something for those who did. Was it meeting face to face, or was it the longer, more concentrated time he was able to give them? He wasn’t sure. But after these meetings he often felt that he and they had achieved some kind of resolution. And this meant, too, that he didn’t spend his life filled with anxiety, with the fear that any one of the many people he had spoken to or written to that week might be killing himself at any moment. As time went on, he developed other techniques. He started taking notes when he was listening to people, which helped him to maintain a certain distance from their despair. It also allowed him to remind them of things they had said before, to remind them of past happiness, and to help them construct a story that moved from one point to the next, rather than endlessly circling, and this allowed them, too, to view their suffering from a distance.

Once, a man walked for five hours to get to Nemoto’s temple. The walk was a heroic journey for this man, because he had been living as a hikikomori, and now suddenly he was outside in the sun, sweating and feeling his body move. As he walked, he thought about what he was going to say. It had been so long since he had really spoken to anyone, and now he was going to be expected to explain his most intimate feelings to a stranger. He sweated and thought as he walked, and when at last, after five hours, he arrived at the temple he announced that he had achieved understanding and no longer needed Nemoto’s help. He turned around and walked back home. ♦