“I just wanted to free myself from all the suffering,” he said in an interview, 12 years after that August afternoon in 2005. Suicide in Japan surged in 1998, a year after a major brokerage went bankrupt, triggering an economic crisis. His encounter with two younger roommates during two months in a hospital reminded him that he was not alone. “I kept thinking about death, but my body was trying to live and it wanted to live,” he said. “When I said I wanted to die, what I really meant was life was too painful.

Source: Washington Post March 23, 2017 06:33 UTC