Last year I spent six months in Japan, I did this because I needed to get away from the world I knew.
When you’re a writer, things that look too familiar become tedious, and can kill your inspiration. You’re always seeking adventure. However the adventure has to be safe. So I didn’t choose skydiving or rock climbing, I chose Japan.
I was there for about two months when the first death occurred. I had been properly settled in, been back to writing my novel regularly and I wanted to take a break by discovering the nightlife.
I found a small, but clean club and sat down to have a drink. The night progressed and I found myself aquatinted with a fairly good looking young woman. We went back to my apartment, events transpired and I woke up the next morning feeling good.
Unfortunately the young Woman wasn’t. She awoke a few minutes later, calmly walked to the balcony on my apartment and leaped off.
I can’t explain the feelings I had at that moment, but in the numbness and the shock of it all I was able to call the police.
This was not good for me at all, being foreigner in a new land, I was of course the key suspect. The police questioned me over and over again, tore my apartment apart and looked for any shred of evidence they could get on me. However they found nothing, and weeks later I was free to return to my normal life.
The next death happened soon after I was released, a young Japanese girl had used a curtain to choke herself to death. Apparently she got a high from it, however she went too far this time. Luckily I wasn’t implicated in this one.
Around my fourth month in Japan the police decided to finally call me and explain the first death, the young Woman who leapt off my balcony was on a new type of experimental drug. An illegal one that was being sold in the streets to the youth. Luckily the police had infiltrated there business, arrested the manufacturer and supplier and shut everything down.
Soon after that the third death occurred. This one was very graphic. A young woman had decided to drive herself into oncoming traffic right outside my building. The accident she caused took out four cars and killed seven people.
In a news report a while later, I learned that the drug that was taken of the street, the one that my one night stand took, was called “The Call of the void”.
The final death in Japan was too much for me to handle. I was at a restaurant eating dinner , having a pretty calm and serene night, when the chef walked out in front of all of us, and stabbed herself in the eye with a knife.
I left Japan the next Friday, packed everything up and returned to my home town of Durban South Africa. Luckily at that point my book was ready to get published. Unfortunately it never hit the press.
I was invited to a photoshoot at the printing press to sign the first copy that way printed. However as the large printing machines started up, my agent thought it would be appropriate to run up to a feeder and throw herself in it.
More deaths occurred around me, people doing the absolute strangest things and dying. About nineteen people had lost their lives when I finally figured out what was happening.
I learnt, and I’m not sure how true this is, that when person dies in a tragic way. They hold on to the emotions they felt in their last moments, as well as the people they were with.
I also later found what the call of the void is, it’s the feeling that makes people consider doing strange things, just for a moment. Like jumping of a building or driving into traffic. However the drug that briefly hit the markets in Japan, took away people’s inhibitions when they felt this.
Unfortunately the young girl who jumped of my balcony, felt this in her last moments and attached herself to me. I brought her home from Japan, or at least her spirit, and now she’s making others feel what she felt.