The friend's suicide

The friend’s suicide is a sudden loss that transforms an ordinary afternoon into the narrator’s lasting encounter with death. The friend dies by suicide in his garage on the same evening that the two boys had played pool; because he leaves no explanation and the narrator was the last person to see him alive, the death becomes both a police inquiry and a private wound. The narrator’s effort to forget does not erase the event. Instead, it leads him toward the conviction that death is already part of life, while the friend’s unexplained absence continues to shape his understanding of grief and survival.

The Last Afternoon

On an afternoon in May, after school had not yet let out, the two friends skipped class and stopped at a pool hall. They played four games. The narrator won the first; his friend won the remaining three. As they had agreed, the loser paid for the games. The sequence offers no evident warning: the friend wins three times, and the boys part after an ordinary meeting. That everyday detail later becomes difficult to reconcile with the death that follows.

That night, the friend died by suicide in his garage. His parents discovered him when they returned from visiting a sick friend. The car radio was still on, and a gas-station receipt remained under the windshield wiper. These ordinary traces of a routine evening offer no account of what led to his death. He left no note or other clue to his motives.

The Inquiry and Its Limits

Because the narrator had been the last person to see his friend alive, the police called him in for questioning. He told them that his friend had seemed no different from usual. The narrator’s own recollection of the afternoon—the three consecutive games his friend had won—became part of his attempt to make the death intelligible: he wondered how someone intending to die could have won three games of pool in a row.

The questioning did not yield an explanation. The police regarded both boys with suspicion, and the narrator understood their attitude to imply that a student who skipped class to spend time in a pool hall might also be capable of suicide. The case entered public view only briefly, in a short newspaper article. His parents disposed of the car, and white flowers stood on his desk at school for a few days. These small public responses marked the death, but none disclosed why it had happened.

Forgetting and Its Failure

After graduating from high school and moving to Tokyo, the narrator decided that he should try not to think about the death. He attempted to put aside the green-felt pool tables, his friend’s red car, the white flowers on the school desk, the crematorium chimney, and the paperweight in the police interrogation room. The effort seemed at first as if it might work, but something remained beyond his grasp, like air. With time, that indistinct remainder took verbal form.

The narrator’s account connects forgetting not with release but with the delayed emergence of a meaning. The objects he tries to banish are not incidental decoration: each keeps the death attached to the everyday world of school, games, police procedure, and burial. Their recurrence in memory helps turn what he could not initially articulate into a statement about life and death.

Death Within Life

The words that eventually give shape to the narrator’s experience are: “Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.” At first, this is not an abstract conclusion he arrives at by reasoning. He describes it as something like air filling his body. Death seems to be present in the objects around him, including the paperweight in the interrogation room and the four balls on the pool table.

Before his friend’s death, the narrator had treated life and death as separate realms: death was inevitable, but until it arrived, it seemed to have nothing to do with the living. His friend’s death at seventeen breaks down that separation. The narrator comes to feel that the death that took his friend also seized him, though he survived. The shift does not explain the friend’s motives or make the loss understandable; it changes the narrator’s sense of what being alive means.

Lasting Grief

The narrator was eighteen, too young, he says, to find safe, neutral ground from which to regard what had happened. He did not want to think about death, but the thought that it was already within him could not be shaken. His grief thus persists alongside the ordinary passage into adulthood rather than resolving with the police inquiry, the newspaper report, or the removal of the car.

His later understanding of the death remains bound to the particular afternoon that preceded it: four games, a payment agreed between friends, and a companion who appeared unchanged. The contrast between that familiar encounter and the death that followed gives the event its enduring force. What the narrator carries forward is not knowledge of why his friend died, but the recognition that survival does not place him outside death’s reach.