KODOKUSHI

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Kodokushi

Kisetsu takes his last breath at 12:47 AM on January 1st.

Shogatsu. The New Year. The most important moment of the Japanese calendar.

Outside, in the distance, the village prepares for celebration. Temple bells begin their counting 108 times to cleanse 108 earthly desires. The sound carries across the rice fields, across the winter darkness, through the bare persimmon trees, reaching his small traditional house at the edge of everything. Fireworks burst in the distance beyond the mountains, faint colors reflected in the low clouds. Families gather in the village center, in their warm houses, eating ozoni and osechi, the sound of their joy a distant murmur, like the ocean heard from far inland.

Inside, Kisetsu's house he sits alone on the tatami mat.

Legs folded beneath him in seiza, Kaguya would always scold him for not sitting correctly. But tonight it feels right, proper. The way things should be done on the first day of the year. Before him, on the low table, an open bottle of sake. He had been saving this particular bottle for a special occasion. The ceramic tokkuri sits beside it, still half-full, the sake inside gone cold long ago. He'd poured it at midnight, one cup to welcome the new year, one cup for Kaguya his wife, who'd been gone since February.

He'd meant to toast something. The future, maybe. Hope, perhaps. But the words wouldn't come. The sake sat. The silence pressed in from all sides, not the silence of neighbors through thin walls, but the profound silence of rural isolation, of being the last house before the fields give way to forest, of being alone not just in a room but in all the space around him. The temple bells fade. The distant laughter fades. The fireworks end. And there is nothing but the darkness and cold. The house traditional in nature, built by his grandfather seventy years ago. Sliding shoji screens, their paper yellowed with age. Dark wooden beams that had deep separations, showing age and reflecting years of atmospheric changes. A small genkan entryway with his shoes neatly arranged. The engawa veranda that wraps around two sides, looking out over the small garden now winter-bare, over the rice fields beyond, fallow and frozen. The main room where he sits. A small kitchen. A room where the futon is stored, folded precisely the same every day. Clean. Everything in its place. Maintained with the care of a disciplined man, attention to detail and tradition.

He's been watching the New Year's programming on the small television with its glass convex screen, dark grey reflecting the room's image when not plugged in, it is the most modern possession he has. The countdown. The celebrations in Tokyo at Shibuya crossing, thousands of people, more people in that one intersection than in his entire village and surrounding areas. The camera cuts to families at shrines, to couples making wishes, to children running through temple grounds in new clothes.

Somewhere between a pop star's performance and the Emperor's New Year address, he feels it, a loosening. A gentle unmooring. The exhaustion that's been building since Kaguya's funeral, where he used the ceremonial chopsticks to place her bone fragments into the urn, starting with the feet so she'd stand right in the afterlife, since he came home to this house, their house, and realized the rest of his life would be this. Silence. Isolation. A step across the threshold into irrelevance, invisible already, into the category of the elderly who live alone in forgotten areas of Japan, where the young who have no past recollection fled to cities, and the elderly waiting to die in houses that will outlast them standing empty.

His eyes slowly close, shutters drawn against a familiar world.

The breath whispers from his lungs, saying its last farewell.

Outside in the distance, the village celebrates. Firecrackers are lit and explode, barely audible. A group sings an enka ballad, the sound carrying across the frozen fields, off-key, happy, alive.

He slumps forward, a peaceful collapse. His forehead slowly comes to rest on the tatami, his head is tilted to one side as if to peer from under his brow, one shoulder leaned into the mat, both arms at his side, legs folded beneath him. The posture of supplication, absolute surrender.

The sake sits on the table, undisturbed. Cold. Waiting. Undrunk.

The television continues. A comedian tells jokes about the new year. The audience laughs. Applause. Bright lights. Life.

The small kerosene heater fades out, the fuel spent. The temperature inside the house drops. The winter night creeps in through the gaps in the old shoji screens, through the spaces where wood has warped over time, through the roof tiles shifted by shaking earth and wind.

Kisetsu remains on the tatami, forehead pressed to the woven rush, as if listening for something deep beneath the floor. As if the earth itself might answer the question his life had become.

His son lives in Osaka. Right now, at this moment, he's at his wife's family home. Drinking sake. Warm sake. Laughing at his father-in-law's stories. His children Kisetsu's grandchildren, seen twice in their lives, are running around in new clothes, high on sugar and attention. His son thinks about calling his father. Thinks about it. Even pulls out his phone. But it's late. And he's had sake. And the old man has no cell phone, only a landline, calling the house at this hour might wake him. Tomorrow. He'll call tomorrow. There's always tomorrow.

The neighbors are scattered. The nearest house is a kilometer away, the widow who keeps to herself, who he used to see in the village sometimes, who nods but never speaks. Beyond that, houses are even more spread out. Half of them are empty, akiya, abandoned houses, their owners dead or moved away, their children in Tokyo or Osaka with no intention of ever returning. The village is dying. Has been dying for decades. Kisetsu is just one more old person waiting for the end.

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January: The First Weeks

The Shogatsu celebrations continue, people visiting shrines, eating traditional foods, the village busier, more connected than usual. Except in the house at the edge of the fields.

The cold slowed everything. The bacteria in his gut, unbalanced by the sudden absence of regulation, begin their work sluggishly. His body temperature falls to room temperature in a matter of hours. The blood, no longer pushed by a beating heart, settles to the lowest points. His forehead, pressed to the tatami, pools with dark purple. His underside, where gravity pulls everything down, his abdomen, his thighs, his shins, all bloom with livor mortis, resembling large old bruises, the color of dark plums, death rendered visible.

The house remains pristine around him. The dishes in their drainer, washed on December 31st. The books on their shelf, old books, books about farming, about local history, books from another era. The photograph of Kaguya on the small household altar, water in a cup before it, placed there on New Year's Eve, his last act of devotion. The incense he'd lit at midnight, burnt down to ash. He'd lit it to welcome the new year for her, to include her in the celebration even though she was just bone fragments in a white urn, buried in the family plot at the village temple.

The futon, folded and stored in the closet. He'd stopped sleeping in the bedroom after Kaguya died, preferring to sleep on the floor in the main room, too lonely to sleep in the room they'd shared for forty-seven years.

By January 3rd, within the sacred Shogatsu period, the rigor mortis had locked him in his slumped position. The muscles contract, stiffen with calcium and the last ATP burning out in the dark of his cells. His back curves like a question mark. His fingers, curled up at his sides, grasping at nothing. He looks like he's bowing. The cold sake, the television's endless stream of New Year specials.

The bloating begins.

Slowly, in the winter cold, it starts. The bacteria, Clostridium perfringens, Bacteroides, all the invisible citizens of his gut, multiply in the oxygen-free darkness. They feast on him from the inside. They produce gases as waste: hydrogen sulfide, methane, putrescine, cadaverine, molecules with names like curses. The intestines swell first, then the stomach, the abdomen pushing against his thin undershirt, distending beneath him. The unwanted pregnancy of death.

His internal architecture begins to fail. The intestinal walls, no longer maintained by living cells, no longer defended by an immune system, weaken. The bacteria breach them like invaders through a city fallen, spill out into the abdominal cavity. The organs, liver, kidneys, spleen, begin their transformation from solid tissue to liquid. Cells rupture. Membranes dissolve. The careful structure he maintained for seventy-three years unravels.

January 7th, the official end of Shogatsu. The winter sun warms the house to 8°C for a few hours, the pressure inside him finds release.

Purge fluid wells up from inside. Dark. Reddish-brown like rust, the color of decay given form and substance. Thick, the consistency of motor oil and spoiled cream. It fills his mouth, face-down. It seeps between his teeth through his mouth and pools beneath his face in a widening circle.

The tatami absorbs it. The woven rush surface, the rice straw core beneath, natural fibers, porous, hungry for moisture in the dry winter air. The fluid soaks in like ink to paper. The stain spreads outward from his face, a dark halo beneath him, a map of everything he's becoming. Six centimeters. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty. The golden-brown rush turns brown, then deep brown, then black.

More comes. From his nose, both nostrils, thin streams of congealed fluid join the pool beneath his cheek. The tatami drinks it all, darkening, spreading, the stain growing. The tatami beneath him is saturated. Soaked. Heavy with him. The area where his body rests, from his forehead to his knees, is black with fluid, the liquid that was once a man. Kisetsu. The stain is perhaps a meter long. The shape of a man in prayer. Loneliness given form, color and smell. The shape of dying alone on the happiest day of the year.

The smell. Faint in the cold, present. Organic. Sweet, putrid. The odor of boundaries breaking, of inside coming out, the body transforming. It fills the house, molecule by molecule, infiltrating the clean spaces, the organized corners, the careful life he'd maintained.

Outside his house Shogatsu is ending. People return to work on January 4th, 5th, 6th. The decorations come down. The kadomatsu pine and bamboo arrangements are removed from doorways. Life returns to normal. The celebrations fade.

No one checks on him. He's always been quiet, always kept to himself. The widow two hundred meters away sometimes sees smoke from his chimney in winter, she hasn't looked, hasn't thought about it. The mailman delivers to the box at the road, doesn't walk up to the house. Another elderly person living alone, one of dozens, one of hundreds across rural Japan. Eventually he will be found.

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February: The Coldest Month

The temperature outside drops below freezing. Snow falls, light dustings that melt by afternoon, but enough to cover the bare garden, the fields, the path to the house. Inside, no heating, the temperature hovers around 2°C. Some nights it drops below freezing. The house becomes a refrigerator. A morgue.

Kisetsu has begun to mummify.

The dry winter air, the cold preserves him in ways summer never could. The fluids that leaked out in January have mostly drained, leaving channels through the tatami, dark rivers in the straw, paths carved by his dissolution. The soft tissues are drying, hardening. His skin, no longer supported by flesh beneath, no longer maintained by blood and life and the work of living cells, turns leathery. Dark brown like old parchment, like leather left in the sun. It clings to his skeleton, wrapped across bone, pulling tight across the architecture of his skull, his ribs, his spine.

His face has become a mask of death. The eyes, behind half-closed lids, have collapsed inward, the vitreous humor leaked and dried to nothing, leaving only sockets. His nose, cartilage, has flattened against the tatami, crushed by the weight of his head over weeks. The cheeks have sunken deep, creating caverns of shadow, craters where flesh used to be. The mouth has fallen open, the jaw unhinged by weight and decay, revealing teeth, white, still perfect, intact, the only part of him that refuses to rot, the only part that will remain recognizable as human long after his flesh is gone.

The tatami beneath him.

The fluid has dried, soaked deep into the mat, into the layers of compressed organic material, saturated with him, rotting from within. The straw, once golden, has turned black, fermented by bacteria and broken down by enzymes.

Mold begins to grow. Black at first, toxic, insidious, the kind that makes buildings uninhabitable. It spreads from the saturated area in fractal patterns, mathematical in designs more complex than any human could render. It follows the moisture. It climbs up his back, feeds on the cotton of his shirt, the fabric of his pants, the organic fibers that are breaking down almost as fast as his flesh. It spreads across the tatami in rings like ripples in water, a visual echo of nature's proceedings.

Green mold. White mold. Grey mold. A garden of fungi blooming on death, a forest of microscopic life feeding on the failure of macroscopic life. The walls near the body develop patches of growth. The wooden beams above him darken with moisture and spores. The shoji screens nearest him begin to warp, the paper spotting with mold. The clean house begins to transform. Nature reclaiming what was always hers, what was only on loan, what must always be returned.

His face, pressed to the mat has now merged with it. The skin has dried, stuck to the rush, fused by his fluids, bacterial glue, by time and the patient chemistry of decay.

Deep inside, where the core is protected from the dry air, decomposition continues in slow motion like a clock winding down. The organs, liver, kidneys, pancreas, liquefy in their cavities, turning to a thick black sludge, a primordial soup of proteins, fats and minerals. It seeps out through the paths of least resistance, his mouth, rectum and the splits in his skin where bloating has caused ruptures, adding to the stain beneath him. The black pool spreads, a self-portrait painted in decay.

The sake on the table remains. The tokkuri. The cold ceramic cup, still half-full, a thin film forming on the surface where alcohol evaporates faster than water, where dust settles.

The photograph of Kaguya lifelessly watches from the altar. Her smile frozen in 1987, thirty-eight years ago, when everything was still ahead of them. When they were young and the future was something to look forward to. She's smiling at him across decades, across death, across the space between then and now.

The mail accumulates in the box at the road. A New Year's card from his son, sent before Shogatsu, arriving after death, its cheerful message about hoping his father is well. No one checks the mail. No one walks up the path. No one looks in the windows.

Time passes. The sun rises over the mountains at 6:50 AM. Sets behind them at 5:10 PM. The days are short. The house stays cold, dark. Only the television casts light, its grey glow washing over the slumped figure on the tatami, the spreading stain, the mold creeping up the walls, the tendrils of a hungry organism, patient.

Outside, winter birds call. Crows land in the bare persimmon tree, their caws harsh in the silence. Frost forms on the garden stones, on the bamboo fence, on the engawa veranda. The village continues its slow fade into irrelevance, into abandonment.

Inside, death continues its patient work.

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March: The Thaw

Spring comes in violence, breaking open the healed wound.

Winter only paused the inevitable. What had dried began to weep. What had solidified became fluid. What had held together fell apart.

New fluid seeps out. Not the reddish-brown of January, but darker. Blacker. Thicker. It's everything he was, reduced to. Pretensions of permanence, all the illusions of solidity, all our beliefs that we are something more than temporarily organized matter.

It pours out of him.

The smell overpowering now. It fills the house completely. Saturates every surface. Seeps out through the gaps in the shoji screens, through the spaces in the walls, through the roof tiles. A stench that would cause anyone to retch that came near, would make them turn away.

But no one comes near.

The widow next door notices something on the wind one afternoon. A strange smell when the breeze blows from the direction of Kisetsu's house. But she's elderly herself, her sense of smell not what it was.

Inside the house, Diptera have come. Flies, metallic green, their bodies catch the morning light like emerald jewels. They find their way in through gaps in the shoji screens, through the spaces around the doors, through any opening, drawn from across the fields by the smell, by the chemical signals of decay, the molecular advertisement that there is food here, that there is opportunity here, that death has come and left a feast.

They land on him, on the fluid, on the tatami, on the walls. They lay eggs in clusters, thousands of them, millions of them, countless white specks that will become countless writhing maggots. In his clothing, his hair, in the wet places where flesh meets floor, where all boundaries have failed, where the distinction of self has collapsed.

They hatch, they feed immediately, mechanically. They grow. Double in size. Double again. Fat white bodies, thousands of them, tens of thousands, moving across him, pulsing, the maggots consume what's left of him in days, indifferent. Death's janitors. They eat. The stain spreads further. The old wooden floor is stained, warped, rotten. The very house is being consumed by death.

Outside, spring continues. Plum blossoms bloom in the village. Cherry blossoms will follow. The fields are being prepared for planting. Life continues.

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April: The Discovery

Cherry blossoms bloom across Japan. The village celebrates hanami at the small park by the temple. Pink petals drift through the air, beautiful, captivating. On a Tuesday, one hundred thirteen days after his death some one comes. Not a neighbor. Not a friend. But an office clerk, sent because the pension payments haven't been collected, months of payments sitting in an account. Standard procedure, check the elderly who stop collecting money. The clerk is young, city-educated, sent to this dying village for a mandatory rural posting. He doesn't want to be here. He parks his small car by the road, looks at the overgrown, the mailbox overflowing with three months of accumulated mail. He sighs. This is probably nothing. The old man probably just forgot, probably went to stay with family.

He walks up the path. The grass on either side is overgrown. No one has walked here in months. The garden is wild, untended. The persimmon tree is budding. The bamboo fence leans at an angle.

He reaches the engawa veranda. Calls out: "Sumimasen! Hello? Is anyone home?"

Silence.

He tries again. "This is from the village office! We need to confirm some information about your pension!"

Silence.

And then a draft of air from the house hits his nostrils.

Even outside, even in the spring air with cherry blossoms and fresh green growth, he smells it. A stench that makes his stomach turn, makes his eyes water, he knows immediately what he's going to find.

"Oh no," he whispers.

He pulls out his phone. Calls his supervisor. "I'm at the house. I think... I think he's dead. I can smell it from outside."

"Don't go in," the supervisor says. "Call the police. Wait for them."

The police arrive thirty minutes later. Two officers from the local koban, middle-aged men who've seen kodokushi before, who know what they're dealing with, who steel themselves before approaching.

They slide open the genkan door. Unlocked, it has always been unlocked, since the old days, when there was still trust, still community.

The smell that emanates is far beyond anything pleasant. One officer gags, turns away, vomits in the garden. The other covers his face with his sleeve, breathes through his mouth, forces himself forward.

"We need to confirm," he says. "We need to see."

They slide open the shoji screen to the main room.

The television is on. Still flickering.

They see the tatami first. The massive black stain spreading across it, glistening wetly in the afternoon light that filters through the warped screens, mold climbing the walls, covering the wooden beams, spreading across every surface. Clouds of flies disperse as the room is disturbed.

Then they see him.

A man. Slumped forward. Face-down. Back curved. Legs folded beneath him, clothing merged with fluid and flesh, skin black and leathery, wet and glistening, where the maggots have kept it moist with their feeding, their relentless consumption.

The skull is visible through the scalp in places, white bone showing. Hands, at his side, are skeletal, the soft tissues consumed, the tendons dried to strings. His face, pressed to the tatami has become part of it. The skin, the tissue, the cartilage of his nose, the flesh of his cheeks stuck to the rush, fused by his own liquefied remains. The officer backs out slowly. Closes the screen and stands in the garden breathing fresh air, trying not to give up his lunch, trying not to think about the fact that this is Japan, that this happens here, that old people die alone in houses like this all over the country.

"Call the funeral company," he tells his partner. "The one that specializes in... in this."

"How long?"

The officer thinks about the smell. The extent of the decay. The depth of the stain.

"Since Shogatsu at least."

A pause. "That's almost four months."

"I know."

The partner is silent for a long moment. Processing.

"We need to notify next of kin."

They find his information inside a wallet on a small shelf in the genkan. Insurance card. Contact information for a son.

They make the call.

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Afterward

The funeral company arrives. They've seen it all. They've developed protocols. They enter in full protective gear, breathing apparatus, sealed suits that make them look like astronauts.

They photograph everything. Document everything. The room. The body. The stain. The condition. They remove him piece by piece. He's come apart. The soft tissues have been consumed. The bones have separated, disconnected by decomposition. His goes skull first, carefully cutting away the tatami it's fused to, the rush coming away with fragments of skin and hair.

Then the vertebrae. The ribs. The pelvis. The long bones. The small bones, some scattered by maggots, found in the black stain, merged with the floor.

They bag everything. The bones. The clothing. The tatami. The contaminated floorboards. Everything touched by death.

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The crematorium is in the next town over, thirty minutes away through the mountains. They slide his bones into the furnace. What took years to build, what survived the days of decomposition, reduces to ash and fragments in hours.

The son arrives as the cremation finishes. Devastated. He hasn't slept since the call. Guilt crushing him.

They lead him to a room. On a metal table, a ceramic tray holds the remains. Bone fragments, white, gray and black.

The attendant hands him the saribashi. Hands a pair to his wife.

"Starting with the feet," she says softly. "So he stands properly in the next life."

He reaches out with shaking hands. Picks up a fragment. His wife takes it from him. Together they place it in the urn.

They continue. Foot bones. Leg bones. The pelvis. The ribs, so fragile, some crumbling, vertebrae, arms. The hands that worked for decades, that held Kaguya when she was dying, that poured sake on New Year's Eve.

The son's hands shake. He drops a fragment. It bounces on the metal table with a sound like wind chimes or bells, like the temple bells that rang on New Year's.

He breaks. Sobs. His wife steadies him, and continues the work. This is how we say goodbye, because this is all that's left.

Finally, the skull. Then the nodobotoke, the Adam's apple bone, the most sacred fragment. The last piece.

The son lifts it. His wife takes it. Together they place it in the urn.

It's done.

The attendant seals the urn. White ceramic. Clean. Perfect. No trace of the four months, the decomposition. Just ash and bone, made clean by fire.

________________________________________

The son takes the urn to the family grave at the village temple. Where Kaguya's urn rests. Waiting for the next generation.

He opens the small stone door. Places his father's urn next to his mother's. Together again.

He kneels on the grass. Spring all around him, cherry blossoms, new green leaves, the world continues. Indifferent.

"I'm sorry," he whispers to the urns, to the stone, to the silence. "I'm sorry I didn't call. I'm sorry... I'm sorry you died alone. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

His cries fall upon deaf ears.

________________________________________

Epilogue

The house is declared uninhabitable. Condemned. The smell of death has soaked into every surface.

The village office debates what to do. The son doesn't want it. Eventually it will be torn down. It will sit there empty, rotting, akiya, another abandoned house in a dying village.

Before they close it up, one of the cleaning crew finds the sake still on the table. The bottle. The tokkuri. The cup with its film of mold, its dust, its abandonment.

He picks up the cup. Examines it. The ceramic is of good quality. Someone cared about this once.

He carries it outside, pours the sake onto the earth in the garden. Long since spoiled. Returning to the ground.

"Gomenasai," he whispers. I'm sorry.

He sets the cup down. And walks away.

The house sits empty. Haunted. By the stain on the floor that will never fade.

A man named Kisetsu lived here. Loved a wife named Kaguya. Worked. Retired. Grieved. Died.

While distant bells rang 108 times.

While fireworks painted distant skies.

While the village celebrated.

He slumped forward.

In rural Japan, they will find another body today. And tomorrow. And the day after. In houses at the edges of villages, in apartments in cities, in traditional homes and modern buildings. More than 4,000 kodokushi a year. Bodies going undiscovered. Decomposing in silence.

This is Japan.

This is kodokushi.

The lonely death.

End