Creta Kano’s 1978 suicide attempt

Creta Kano’s 1978 suicide attempt began as a carefully chosen attempt to die and ended in an unintended survival that changed her experience of living. Driving her brother’s new Toyota MR2 into a condominium wall near the Tama River, she escaped with a broken rib when the poorly anchored wall gave way; afterward, she found herself without pain and, eventually, without sensation. The failed attempt thus became both a turning point in her physical life and a source of estrangement from her body and the world.

Background and the Attempt

At twenty, and only six months after obtaining her driver’s license, Creta Kano borrowed her brother’s car on the night of May 29, 1978. He had been reluctant to lend it, but she had previously given him money to help buy it, and she took the key. The car was a nearly new Toyota MR2 with barely a thousand miles on it. Her account makes clear that the drive was not an accident: she selected a substantial wall at the end of a dead-end street by the Tama River, allowed herself room to accelerate, and drove toward it at close to one hundred miles an hour.

The intended fatal impact did not happen as she had imagined. The condominium wall had not been properly anchored; it crumbled under the collision, absorbing enough of the force that the car’s front end was crushed but Creta survived. In the confusion, she had also forgotten to unfasten her seat belt. The attempt’s outcome therefore depended not only on her intention and the car’s speed but on the unexpected weakness of the structure she had chosen as the means of her death.

Survival and the Loss of Pain

Creta was taken to hospital and treated for one broken rib. When police questioned her, she said she could remember nothing and suggested that she might have confused the accelerator and the brake. They accepted this account, in part because she was young and did not seem to them like someone who had tried to kill herself. The discrepancy between her deliberate preparation and the explanation she gave investigators leaves the attempt concealed behind an ordinary account of a driving mistake.

The most consequential change came after the crash: Creta felt no pain, including from her injury. At first, she decided to keep living for the time being, wanting to discover what life without pain meant and believing she could die whenever she chose. Her survival was therefore followed not by a return to ordinary life but by a period of inquiry into an unfamiliar bodily condition.

Each morning she checked her body from head to foot, trying to determine whether nothing hurt or whether pain existed without her being able to feel it. She could not distinguish between those possibilities. The absence went beyond pain: she described having no sensations at all. Her body seemed so light and unfamiliar that she felt as if her spirit had taken up residence in a body that was not her own. Looking at herself in the mirror did not restore a sense of connection; instead, a distance remained between her and the body she saw.

Estrangement and Significance

The life without pain that Creta had once wanted did not give her a secure place in the world. She described a gap separating her from that life and said that the world she had previously hated for its unfairness had also been the world in which she knew who she was. After the crash, she felt unanchored: the world no longer seemed to be the world, and she no longer felt herself to be herself. The reversal makes the attempt significant beyond its immediate physical outcome. What she had sought as release from suffering became a condition in which sensation and belonging were both disrupted.

Elsewhere, Toru Okada describes an experience of bodily uncertainty in darkness: he grows less convinced that he exists, imagines his body losing density, and recognizes Creta Kano’s phrase “Prostitute of the mind.” These later passages are not part of the 1978 crash itself, but they echo its concern with separation between body and self. The connection is thematic rather than a claim that Creta’s accident caused Toru’s experience.

The attempt also stands in contrast to Creta’s later account of being unable to remember how she came to wake up naked in Toru Okada’s bed. That later memory gap is distinct from the crash and should not be treated as a direct consequence of it. The 1978 episode is nevertheless an early, clearly narrated rupture: Creta sets out to end her life, survives because the wall fails to behave as expected, and continues in a body that no longer gives her the sensations through which she had understood living.