Sekiguchi’s terminal cancer

Chiaki Sekiguchi’s terminal cancer was a slow, painful decline that neither morphine nor his friend’s efforts could reverse. The account sets the disease against the indignity of Sekiguchi’s professional demotion and the practical distances imposed by treatment, then ends with his family’s assurance that he died at peace with them. Cancer remains a physical reality in the narrative, not a condition that friendship can cure; what the narrator can offer is limited comfort, witness, and remembrance.

Illness and Treatment

In the months before his death, Sekiguchi was in severe pain. Even intravenous doses of morphine no longer relieved it, and the cancer had spread throughout his body. He received outpatient care at the Ariake Cancer Institute in Odaiba, roughly three hours from his home in Saitama Prefecture. After chemotherapy and radiation, he had to make the journey home by train, sometimes in rush hour, when there were no seats. The treatment routine thus added exhausting travel to an illness already marked by pain.

Sekiguchi was still working as a police officer during this period. His continued service sits beside the account of his physical decline: he was undergoing demanding treatment, yet the narrator emphasizes that he had not stopped working. The narrative supplies no detailed medical prognosis or account of a decisive turning point. Instead, the accumulating facts—widespread cancer, ineffective morphine, repeated treatment, and difficult journeys—convey the severity of his condition.

A Room Offered, a Gift Refused

The narrator tried to make the trip for treatment less punishing by arranging for Sekiguchi to stay at the Grand Pacific Le Daiba, close to the hospital, and rest before returning home. Sekiguchi refused the offer because, as a police officer, he did not want to accept anything of monetary value from the narrator. The narrator answered that a company he worked for owned the hotel and that the room had been comped. That explanation was a lie; he believed Sekiguchi understood this, but the pretense allowed him to accept the room without openly violating his principles.

The episode gives the care between the two men a distinctly negotiated form. Sekiguchi could not simply receive a gift, and the narrator could not make the illness yield to his wish to help. By presenting the room as a business arrangement rather than a personal favor, he found a way to provide rest while preserving the appearance Sekiguchi needed. The help mattered, but it could only make the journey more bearable; it could not remove the cancer or the treatment that made the journey necessary.

Betrayal and Its Aftermath

The account connects Sekiguchi’s illness in memory with an earlier betrayal at work, while keeping the narrator’s explanation distinct from a medical cause. A fellow officer, resentful of Sekiguchi’s success, leaked damaging information to a reporter at the Mainichi Shinbun. The conduct exposed in the story consisted of Sekiguchi uncuffing an arrested yakuza and giving him ramen before taking him to the police station, and later breaking up a near-riot by letting a yakuza leave the holding cells for a smoke. Both acts violated police protocol. Once the first newspaper published the disclosures, other newspapers followed, and Sekiguchi was branded a bad cop.

He was stripped of his detective position, demoted, reprimanded, and assigned to traffic duty. He spent a couple of years in that professional limbo, and the experience ate at him. The narrator believes betrayal, humiliation, and frustration were the real cause of Sekiguchi’s cancer, and speculates that the illness began around the time of the demotion. The account presents this as the narrator’s conviction, not as an established medical finding. Its force lies in the contrast it draws between the officer’s humane, rule-breaking acts and the institutional punishment that followed, then in the narrator’s inability to separate that wound from the suffering he witnessed later.

Death and Remembrance

Sekiguchi was forty-eight. At 3:45 p.m. on a rainy day near the end of August, he died while the narrator and his family were in Japan. The day before they were due to return to the United States, Sekiguchi’s wife called while the family was eating Chinese food and told the narrator that he had died. The narrator wanted to cancel the flight and attend the funeral; after an argument with his wife and mother-in-law, he went that night with his wife to visit the Sekiguchi family and pay his respects.

The narrator had known Sekiguchi and his family for almost fourteen years. At the wake, he remembered a final visit when Sekiguchi had looked well enough to make him think death was near. Sekiguchi had spoken with his family the day before he died, and his wife later told the narrator that they had shared a good conversation and that Sekiguchi had said positive things to them. Her account gave the narrator reason to believe he had left the world at peace with himself and his family. That ending does not lessen the pain of the illness; it marks what the disease did not take from him in his last hours. The narrator’s memory holds together the grueling treatment, the failed attempt to do more than offer comfort, and the reassurance that Sekiguchi’s final conversation was with those he loved.