The Tama River is the destination of Creta Kano’s 1978 suicide attempt: she drives her brother’s new Toyota MR2 toward a massive wall near the river and crashes into it at high speed. The car is wrecked, but the wall crumbles instead of stopping her with the force she expects, and she survives. In her recollection, this place marks the failed passage from unbearable pain to death—and the beginning of an unexpected change in her body.

Setting and significance

Creta Kano locates the crash on the outskirts of the city, at the Tama River. She chooses a massive stone wall at the far end of a dead-end street, a setting that offers room to accelerate and an apparently solid obstacle. The wall’s seeming firmness is crucial: she expects it to bring her attempt to an end, but its construction proves weaker than its appearance suggests.

The river itself is not described as the site of the impact. It is the destination toward which Creta drives before finding the wall. The episode’s decisive physical landmark is the condominium building’s outer wall, and the contrast between its massive appearance and its failure under impact gives the scene its reversal.

The crash

At nine o’clock on May 29, Creta asks her brother to borrow his new Toyota MR2. He is unhappy about lending it, but she has previously given him money to help buy it, and he cannot refuse. The car has barely a thousand miles on it; Creta describes it as powerful enough to fly with a touch of the accelerator.

She drives for half an hour to the Tama River and finds the wall she has selected. After allowing herself plenty of room, she presses the accelerator to the floor and reaches close to a hundred miles an hour before striking it. The impact crushes the front of the car flat and knocks her unconscious.

Failure and aftermath

The wall does not hold. It has not been anchored properly, apparently to save money, and simply crumbles under the collision. Rather than stopping Creta with the immovable force she anticipated, it absorbs the impact; the car is destroyed, but she survives. She has also forgotten to undo her seat belt, another circumstance she recounts as part of the attempt’s unintended outcome.

Creta later explains that death seemed to promise an end to consciousness and pain, but the crash fails to deliver that ending. In the wider account of her life, the failed attempt is followed by a striking change: after the accident, her chronic pain disappears, leaving her numb. The Tama River episode therefore stands not only as a survival scene but as the point from which the relation between pain, feeling, and bodily change takes an unexpected turn.