Suicided

Directory:

About

Scans

Downloads

Gallery

Translations

Tutorials

Misc

ADAMS

This website is not intended for those under the age of 18. Please read the full FAQ before browsing. Viewer discretion is advised.

Do you have a tech support question or want a place to discuss theories with other denpa fans? Check out the Denpa Forum or the Discord Server

Chapter 2: Memories of Nekojiru

May 10, 1998.

Nekojiru passed away.

She committed suicide. She was 5’1” and weighed around seventy-five pounds.

She was an androgynous woman with short hair.

Looking back, this was the first suicide of a close, cherished friend and coworker I ever experienced.

Because Nekojiru’s death occurred shortly after hide of X JAPAN’s suicide, and because she used the same method of tying a rope to a doorknob and hanging herself, there was speculation among the press and fans that Nekojiru was inspired by him.

In this chapter, I would like to share everything I know about her death.

Nekojiru as I knew her, an irreplaceable friend who will never return.

Meetings

I first met Nekojiru in 1990.

I was on the rise as both an editor and writer, and I was brimming with energy.

I was interested in everything I saw and heard, enjoyed my work, and my future looked bright. I was a film buff and a young man on the verge of turning thirty. I’d even dabbled in drugs.

But other than my family issues, I didn’t have any particular hangups and was lived honestly.

One of the manga magazines I read at the time was Garo.

Whenever I found a manga I liked, I’d get in touch with the editorial department and ask to meet the artist so I could feature them in magazines I worked on.

My favorites in Garo were the works of Nemoto Takashi and Yamano Hajime. I knew both of them and often asked them to do illustration work for me.

At the time, Yamano Hajime’s works were goofy, realistic, end-of-the-century manga about the worldly desires of the poor and foolish.

His absurd, resigned style, which repeatedly portrayed how helpless people are, was not well-received by those with common sense; nonetheless, he attracted a cult following.

For those like myself, who identify as outcasts and harbor resentment, Yamano’s manga had a unique, almost healing effect.

“Ah, that’s exactly how I feel…” I would mutter to myself as I read.

In 1990, long after my favorite Yamano manga ended publication, his debut work was published in Garo under the Yamano Hajime pen name, featuring the artist “Nekojiru Mama,” or “Nekojiru.”

It was called Nekojiru Udon.

A mother cat appears at an udon shop holding a mewling kitten in her mouth, demanding that he be neutered. The udon shop owner is perplexed and stabs the kitten in the testicles with a knife. The kitten dies. A customer comes in and says, “One bowl of nekojiru udon, please!”

The cat dies, and so does the other customer.

Cute cats and graphic violence.

There was a unique blobbiness to her style. I was charmed by its crudeness. At the same time, I was hypnotized, a feeling similar to schizophrenic madness. It was a shock to the system.

“Oh, Yamano, you’ve done it again.”

With that in mind, I knew I just had to request a manga featuring those striking cats.

When we met at a cafe, Yamano introduced me to his wife. She was a small, thin woman. She had short hair and a boyish look, like something out of a Hagio Moto manga.

“Actually, the cat illustrations were drawn by Chiyomi (Nekojiru’s real name), but I helped out quite a bit too. It was a collaborative project.”

Nekojiru seemed a little shy, but she was friendly towards me.

“My wife is pretty rude to most people. She says things like ‘we don’t get along’ or ‘I don’t like them,’ so I was wondering if this meeting would go well…”

Despite Yamano’s concerns, Nekojiru and I quickly became close friends.

From that point on, we met up frequently but I hardly ever remember her wearing a skirt. Maybe she didn’t even own one.

Shortly after her debut in Garo, Nekojiru took the manga industry by storm. One male music journalist even went so far as to say, “After one interview, I was completely smitten.”

Nekojiru was the type of person who seemed like she couldn’t survive without someone taking care of her.

Even though she was such a lovely woman, she harbored a strange desire. A dangerous one.

It was so intense that I was afraid to ask. When I found out, I was left speechless by that murky passion that was so far removed from the Nekojiru I knew.

Taking Up Arms

“I want a knife,” Nekojiru occasionally muttered under her breath.

She was obsessed with the idea of arming herself.

“I want a knife,” she’d say earnestly as she swept on her army jacket.

Nekojiru truly desired a weapon to protect herself.

Having known her, I can understand why. Her desire stemmed from the fact that she disliked everything about people and the world.

The world was probably full of danger for Nekojiru. She couldn’t let her guard down with anyone.

She inevitably sought refuge in her own mind. And when she couldn’t, she wanted a knife.

Nekojiru had other quirks as well.

Like Saki, she was overly critical of others to the point of cruelty, saying X, Y and Z were unacceptable.

She barely ate. She couldn’t eat meat or fish. Even when we went out to eat, she’d only order soup.

One time she visited us, my wife offered her an avocado.

“It’s delicious. Try it.”

Nekojiru studied the fruit curiously.

“Thank you for the meal.”

Nekojiru took a bite.

“Ugh!”

A moment later, she spat out the avocado in disgust.

Nekojiru was perfectly satisfied with a liquid diet.

Her appetite was low, or maybe even nonexistent.

Towards the end, her will to live faded, too.

Like my wife Saki, she didn’t discriminate when it came to love and gender.

I think Nekojiru’s first love was a girl.

In later years, Nekojiru and my wife became very close.

We visited several times as newlyweds.

Saki and Nekojiru immediately hit it off.

We’d all hang out together and talk on the phone.

Nekojiru only accepted my wife because of me. And to my wife, Nekojiru was like a family pet. She was constantly petting Nekojiru.

The sight of them pressed up against each other evoked the delicate feminine softness of a Renoir film. They were radiant.

And now both of them are gone.

Flash of Intuition

As editor of a travel magazine, I decided to serialize Nekojiru’s manga, running two pages per issue.

I sensed it best not to micromanage her, so I left her to her own devices. We agreed to stick with cats in the style of her debut in Garo.

Despite my sense of trepidation working with a new artist, Yamano, as co-creator, assured me that he would oversee her work.

Yamano later told me, “Looking back on it, I’m still surprised Nekojiru gave you the green light. That’s unusual for her.”

I don’t really understand why Nekojiru agreed to it, or why she took a liking to me. She generally rejected most people looking to hire her, someone who was picky about who she worked with.

I became one of the few people Nekojiru approved of. Maybe because of my right-braindedness, or maybe because she instinctively realized that I had family issues too. I had a very rough relationship with my parents.

Nekojiru’s gaze seemed to pierce through my exterior and straight to my core.

I found that she was very intuitive. I frequently witnessed her flashes of intuition and began to think that she was something of a shaman.

One day, she used her powers on me and proclaimed,

“You won’t live past thirty-five.”

I was still living in my apartment in Kita, caught up in hard drugs, when Nekojiru muttered those ominous words.

For a moment, everything went black.

Why would I die at thirty-five? Would I be murdered? Would I overdose? Or…

I didn’t want to die. Nekojiru’s ominous prophecy left me greatly disturbed.

Maybe she’d seen something.

But it turns out that Nekojiru’s prediction was directed not at me, but at herself…

I cherished our conversations.

Even though Nekojiru was a shut-in with terrible social skills she somehow grew attached to me.

She had no friends and spent most of her time alone. Strangely enough, she also became friends with an Israeli street vendor.

Even though they could barely communicate, they somehow managed to connect. Nekojiru had unusually high standards and could be quite difficult to get along with. But she caught the eye of the Israeli street vendor and myself, a freelance writer and editor. Perhaps we were more compatible with the vagabond type than the respectable type.

“What do you think of the manga artist Nemoto Takashi?” I asked her.

“He’s my colleague who draws interesting manga,” she replied.

While they weren’t close, she respected him. Nemoto knew potential when he saw it. He noticed Nekojiru’s potential early in her career, even before her official debut.

She had practically no interest in making money. Even after she started drawing manga, she never chased fame.

Was she a humble woman, then? No, not at all. I’d never met someone as wholly selfish before. She was incredibly strong-willed.

Garo didn’t pay its artists, so she was used to drawing for free.

“Thank you for being the first person to commission me,” Nekojiru said gratefully.

We got along strangely well, and we became close enough to visit each other’s homes even if it wasn’t to work.

Before I knew it, I’d become her older brother.

Yamano was both mother and father to Nekojiru. She’d call him “mom” and call me her “big brother.”

It reminded me of the relationship she had with her real family.

The three of us were like a happy family, even if it was short-lived.

Trip

Nekojiru, Aoyama Masaaki and Isaki. All three of them became acquainted through me.

Nekojiru began drawing manga for Dangerous Issue No. 1 at my request.

That’s how Aoyama and Nekojiru met, and Aoyama ended up writing the commentary for the Nekojiru Dango collection (Asahi Sonorama).

That was a decision made by the editor, of course. While Nekojiru and Aoyama met through me, they didn’t seem particularly interested in each other.

In the early ‘90s, Nekojiru was still able to draw manga at her own pace.

I often went to Nekojiru’s place and stayed up all night listening to music with her. At the time, I discovered and became obsessed with techno and trance; I’d dance at seedy clubs with foreigners and frequent Goa trance rave parties, which were still in their infancy at the time.

I’d leave with a mountain of techno CDs. Yamano, Nekojiru and I would chat and slip into a “music trip” until dawn.

“Music tripping” happens when you lose yourself in the music.

This was back when I was single, before I married Saki. Nekojiru and I would drink, smoke weed and sink endlessly into the music.

“This is dub. It’s a sub genre that grew out of reggae and goes great with weed,” I would babble endlessly. “This is German trance. It’s characterized by its unapologetic hedonism and shrieking. The ‘wailing’ is the best part.”

We’d lay on the floor and spend all day listening to music.

The occasional sound of delirious laughter. Physical touch. Endless lectures on musical knowledge. Sharing our favorite artists. Life and death.

Time passed slowly before our eyes.

Boarding a little ship, we traveled through time, plunging into the world of music and light.

What a decadent sight that must’ve been.

Fearless and confident, we became one as the music oozed through my veins.

Psychedelic days and nights. We danced wildly to the music. All our worries of the futures melted away as we tripped endlessly.

Nekojiru listened to everything. As her ears gradually became accustomed to techno, her own preferences began to emerge, so she started saying things like, “I like it faster,” or “I like it edgy and shrill.”

After listening to a variety of music, she determined that Aphex Twin and Hallucinogen, a Goa trance artist, were the best.

Even among Goa trance, Hallucinogen’s songs are particularly well-produced, making them pair great with LSD.

But Nekojiru didn’t need it. Her drug of choice was Jack Daniel’s.

At first she was amused by the musical complexity and druggy feel of my favorite band, Jam El Mar (one half of the German trance unit Jam & Spoon), but later said she didn’t like it because it sounded cheesy and “gay.”

Eventually, near the end of our Sound Addict Society meetings, Nekojiru’s preferences took priority.

As Goa is basically dance music, I’d flap my hands to it. Nekojiru always watched me intently.

She never danced. She was the type to curl in on herself and get absorbed in her own little world.

Come to think of it, one time while we were “sound addicts,” Nekojiru was in a particularly good mood and gave me a Hindu painting she bought in India, even though she cherished it. She could be really generous like that. The painting was used on the back cover of Volume 2 of Dangerous Issue No. 1.

Nekojiru traveled to India in 1994. I had actually wanted to tag along but I couldn’t find the time, so she went with Yamano.

When she witnessed ascetics idly smoking cannabis in places like Varanasi, she wondered, “Why isn’t Japan this laid back?”

Nekojiru had never used drugs in Japan but after trying marijuana in India, she fell in love with its gentle high.

Personal Life

Nekojiru started seeing Yamano because of his work in Garo.

She was so moved by his work that she barged into his life one day and refused to leave.

She had just graduated from beauty school, so she was around eighteen or nineteen.

Nekojiru tended to stay holed up in her room, but one day emerged and proclaimed that she wanted to start helping Yamano with his manga. Her art style was completely different from his. Yamano’s work is quite detailed, whereas Nekojiru’s lineart was bold and childish. Her drawings, however, had a mysterious allure.

Yamano sensed something special in Nekojiru’s art. They decided to collaborate on a piece, and that was Nekojiru’s debut as a manga artist.

She worked on Nekojiru Udon on and off for a while after her debut in Garo. I occasionally asked her to draw illustrations and comic strips.

This was the early ‘90s, before she became pressed with deadlines.

Her works included a story about two cat siblings bullying a dog for no apparent reason, or running to tell their dad about a homeless drunk on the train who ends up vomiting on the dad… It was pure Nekojiru. I was fascinated.

The editors asked us to workshop it into something more mainstream, but I sensed great potential there and let her do as she pleased.

Before she became famous, Nekojiru operated on her own schedule. She’d sometimes stay awake for thirty hours or slept all day, ignoring her body’s natural circadian rhythm.

Nekojiru had a cat. She named him “Nyansuke” and trained him in a way I had never before seen. If he didn’t listen to her, she’d whip him over and over. Sometimes she whipped him hard enough that it was unquestionably animal abuse. As a result, he never listened to me or Yamano, but obediently followed Nekojiru’s orders.

Believe or not, Nekojiru chased after what she wanted.

She wasn’t interested in most people, but when she had her sights set on someone, she went to great lengths to pursue them.

“I once forced a guy I liked to accept my notebook,” Nekojiru told me.

Her first target was Sato Kaoru of the Kyoto funk band EP-4. The second was Yamano. Eventually she fell for Aphex Twin.

Nekojiru was very picky about looks. Richard D. James of Aphex Twin wasn’t a looker, but he had a certain boyish charm. His music is beautiful at times, violent at others. It really makes you wonder, just how much of this is contrived, and how much is his true self? His music is playful, sinister and free.

Nekojiru first fell in love with Aphex Twin through his music. She was already obsessed by the time the Richard D. James Album came out. It’s the one with the creepy cover featuring himself sporting a grin reminiscent of Jack Nicholson in The Shining. In the end, it was buried in her casket, joining them together forever in accordance with her will.

While passionate about those she was interested in, her appetite for most people was like her appetite for food: non-existent. To her, they were all the same. Celebrities mattered no more to her than her fans. She was equally unpleasant to everyone, purely self-centered. She didn’t care for much, and her catchphrases summed it up: “I don’t care,” and “I don’t like it.”

Despite a blurb by Hyde of L’Arc-en-Ciel splashed across the cover of her books, and the theory that her death was a copycat suicide of hide from X JAPAN, Nekojiru had no interest in popular music. The idols she worshipped were fringe. She was completely unconcerned with public opinion or popularity.

“Jack Daniel’s is so yummy, nya~!” Nekojiru wrote in one of her books. She loved to drink.

She once got drunk at an izakaya and picked a fight when the bartender brought out some grilled sweetfish (on the house, mind you) because, “we didn’t order it.”

Other than that, she drank in moderation when we visited her house in the early ‘90s.

When her work blew up around ‘97-’98, her drinking took a turn for the worse.

Nekojiru had another distinctive personality trait.

She couldn’t lie. Lying never even crossed her mind. So she made it clear when she hated something.

I remember being shocked when we went out to a sushi restaurant with some colleagues. I thought the sushi was quite good. As we ate quietly, she suddenly announced, “This roe sucks. I bet it’s fake!”

The noisy restaurant went dead silent. The chef, still holding his knife, was stunned.

I froze, helpless.

“I can assure you, it’s real…” the chef said after he recovered from the shock.

I played it off with a laugh.

Nekojiru was frank to the point of arrogance.

She called the editorial department of a major publishing company late one night to make a casual request: “Change my editor.”

When they asked why, she said, “Because he’s fat.”

She doubled down when pressed further on the matter.

It would’ve been difficult for the editorial department to swap editors without a legitimate reason. I think she got her way in the end.

Nekojiru was endearingly selfish. But she didn’t do it to be mean. Her body would physically reject fat people by sweating profusely whenever she was around them. She was a very sensitive woman, unable to withstand the levels of stress that most could endure.

She was too sensitive.

I imagine the editors of big publishing houses had a really hard time with her. She stuck out like a sore thumb.

She criticized almost everyone around her and shut down when working with people she didn’t like. She must’ve been thought of as unreasonable.

Brimming with natural arrogance, Yamano dubbed her the “Child Queen,” because that’s exactly what she was. Pure, easily hurt, lacking resilience, yet haughty and quick to dismiss what she found “boring.”

If you try to cultivate an environment that suits your every need, you eventually have no choice but to retreat inward.

I'm Not Afraid of Death

Nekojiru was an active suicide risk.

Like Saki, Nekojiru was a proud woman with her own point of view.

Saki was a left-brained genius, while Nekojiru was right-brained with a schizophrenic streak. She could see things others couldn’t. I think we got along so well because of our shared intuition.

Nekojiru’s husband, Yamano Hajime, on the other hand, is an upstanding, serious and sensible man.

But Yamano is an enigma, even more so than Nekojiru. I can’t believe he’d create manga such as Sunset on Fourth Street and Pangaea, the Continent of Chaos.

And why, in these divisive times, works are credited to “Nekojiru y” rather than Nekojiru herself.

Yamano uses this pen name when drawing Nekojiru’s characters. His work appears similar on the surface, but has its own distinct flair.

Nekojiru often got depressed and would spend time in her room playing Final Fantasy.

I don’t play video games, but I once played a fighting game with Nekojiru and she tore me to shreds. I had gotten frustrated because I couldn’t figure out the controls.

“Hahaha, you’re getting so mad!” she laughed.

What caused Nekojiru to retreat into herself?

Looking back, I think she became isolated while still living with her family. By the time I met her, she had completely withdrawn into her own world.

Nekojiru was seeing a psychiatrist. She’d been diagnosed with depression.

“Death doesn’t really scare me,” she told me on several occasions.

Near the end of the publishing bubble, between 1992 and 1994, sales were still pretty good. I had it made. I was working on the self-described “brutal” subculture magazine, Dangerous Issue No. 1, editing and making books for fun, then living off the royalties.

In those days, Nekojiru could work at her own leisure relatively stress-free.

She was more interested in getting together for fun rather than work. She hardly seemed depressed when I saw her. Maybe she was just hiding it.

Things were going well and everyone was still alive, so I couldn’t complain.

Listening to our favorite music, dabbling in drugs, shooting the breeze…

The mainstream ambition of the masses—the drive to succeed—may have finally taken root in us.

Aoyama, a hardcore editor and drug writer, had developed a cult following. Like myself, he was riding the wave of the publishing bubble. In that sense, he was the most successful of us all.

However, Nekojiru’s popularity exploded at a rate that she herself couldn’t believe.

It was the curtain call for her downfall.

The Boom

In the mid ‘90s, Nekojiru’s work suddenly took off.

She became a household name overnight, with everybody dubbing her work “dangerously cute.”

Her unique cat drawings appealed to the general public, even if they misunderstood Nekojiru entirely. That blobby linework was integral to her popularity.

"Abunakawaii (dangerously cute)." The perfect way to describe Nekojiru’s essence.

It’s particularly apt for her early works, with their innocent cruelty. It was disturbingly cute, just like Nekojiru herself. And once the public caught wind of it, she became a star.

Gone were the days of the Sound Addict Society.

Saki and I had married already, and Nekojiru and Yamano were too busy to sleep.

Nekojiru marched to the beat of her own drum. She wasn’t used to churning out page after page but the boom forced her to.

As she became more popular, she was constantly pressured to meet deadlines. She burned out.

Her work was featured widely from the pages of Garo to commercials for Tokyo Electric Co. There was no way that the fantastical, personal delusions she published on a whim should have become mainstream. But she forced herself to keep drawing in order to curry favor with the big magazines.

Neither Nekojiru nor Yamano could turn down work. They took every job that came their way. They were both very poor, so perhaps a part of them couldn’t live with turning down the money. They should’ve been more selective with the offers they accepted.

Collaboration

The name “Nekojiru” doesn’t refer to the late artist Nekojiru alone; more accurately, it encompasses both herself and her collaborator, Yamano. They were a package deal whose works combined Nekojiru’s right-brained, intuitive ideas and Yamano’s left-brained, logical approach.

The foundation of Nekojiru’s work is what appears to her in dreams. Perhaps the underlying theme of dreams is why her stories feature encounters with outlandish individuals.

For her, the line between dreams and reality was hopelessly blurred. This is likely how her unique worldview emerged.

The inspiration for Nekojiru’s stories was based on fact and fiction alike. Her delusions (rather, her strange ideas) were skillfully harnessed by Yamano. It was a balancing act, a tightrope walk to put Nekojiru’s trippy ideas into layman’s terms without losing that signature Nekojiru feel. The division of labor was unclear; it was hard to tell who did what. Like conjoined twins, there isn’t one work that’s entirely Nekojiru or entirely Yamano.

There are some works that are more Nekojiru than others. Her early unpaid work for Garo and myself (collections like Nekojiru Udon and Jirujiru Diary) are pure Nekojiru. It’s obvious she was coming up with short stories all by herself.

On the other hand, I imagine her later work, which was churned out in a short period of time, had Yamano’s fingerprints all over it. With new publishers came new restrictions. There were times where they adapted almost seamlessly, with works like Neko no Kamisama. But the more they pushed themselves, the stronger Yamano’s presence became.

Especially in stories like Invisible, which was published under the “Nekojiru y” name after Nekojiru’s passing. Although similar on the surface, Nekojiru and Nekojiru y produce completely different work. They worked as closely as if they were conjoined twins. Now Yamano, stripped of his other half, works alone as Nekojiru y.

Natural Acid

One of her earliest works, Nekojiru Udon, is a dangerous read for the faint of heart.

Cat siblings blithely commit massacres. They kill anyone and everyone that rubs them the wrong way. The art is full of cruelty, its only redeeming quality being the cute cat characters. Its style of writing drips with hatred. Of the self. Of the masses, even.

When featured or reviewed in magazines, Nekojiru’s work was often described as having a cult following thanks to its innocently cruel cats. If you dig deeper, however, you can find somewhat of a resignation to life, a fatalist belief that, “we’re all gonna die anyway.”

Nekojiru’s work suddenly gained widespread popularity thanks to its “dangerously cute” vibe. Why else would hundreds of thousands of people flock to it? Rather than resonating with Nekojiru’s message of “we’re all gonna die anyway,” the masses latched onto the powerful aura emitted by her art style. The cat’s mysterious allure is ultimately what captured her wide readership.

All of Nekojiru’s early works shared this unique, divisive, even trippy feeling. I called it “natural acid.”

It’s likely that she was playing house through her work. I don’t know anything about her family, but she seemed like someone with absolutely no home training. The family depicted in her work wasn’t a reflection of her own home life, but of the family she yearned for.

The character Nyako, who frequently appears in her work, is thought to be based on herself, while “Nyasuo” is based on Yamano. However, I don’t think Nyatta is necessarily based on her younger brother (she had a younger brother and sister).

In Nekojiru Travelogue, included in Nekojiru Diner, Nekojiru visits various places. In typical Nekojiru fashion, she says they suck. But the editors really do only send her to places that suck. It’s like they were deliberately asking her to write negative reviews.

There’s no way Nekojiru would have enjoyed a theme park.

Jirujiru Travelogue: India is, in my opinion, her most accessible work. It captures what she saw there through the prism of her unique point of view. I love this book because it bursts with the romance of travel. In Psychedelic & Trance, I had the opportunity to run her manga about her tripping in India after tasting Banglasi (yogurt with cannabis extract).

But the real Nekojiru shines through her late book, Jirujiru Diary.

She’d write about the strange things she’d witnessed, such as a woman taking a shit in the middle of the street. I wonder if she actually saw those things happen.

Perhaps she was the only one with eyes to see.

Memories of the Liquid Room

On February 1, 1997, Nekojiru and I went to see Aphex Twin in concert.

I remember it vividly.

The Liquid Room in Kabukicho, Shinjuku’s red light district. The venue was packed. There was barely any room to breathe let alone move.

DJ Cylob was the opening act. I asked Nekojiru what she thought of the music.

“It sucks. Hurry up and finish, dumbass.”

Unusually for the club, about a third of the audience was sitting on the floor. Nekojiru forced her way though the seated crowd and finally made it to the front of the DJ booth. She charged forward, ramming into people left and right. Though normally quiet, small and weak, she had tremendous drive.

Finally Cylob left the DJ booth. Two tracks from Mike (μ-sik) & Richie’s album started playing on the speakers. Richard was on.

It’s hard to say what Aphex Twin’s music is meant for. The venue was split evenly between people dancing and people listening. There may have been even more sitting. Nekojiru was sitting cross-legged, moving her body to the rhythm. Her eyes left the DJ booth for not even a second.

Meanwhile, Richard was hunched over the turntable the whole time. His long hair fell over his face, not caring a bit about the crowd before him.

Behind him, two teddy bears were fighting or, rather, playing with each other. Each bear had a photo of Richard plastered over its face.

After about an hour, Richard abruptly left the stage without a word. Nekojiru came over to where Yamano and I were standing at the back of the crowd.

“I’ve had enough. Let’s go.”

The party was supposed to go all night, but Nekojiru had no interest in the other DJs.

“How was Richard?” I asked.

“He kept his head down the whole time, so I couldn’t see his face. But it was good. The bears were a nice touch.”

Nekojiru was always like that. Short and to-the-point. She might sound curt, but she was actually quite passionate. Coming from her, a comment like that meant something like, “Wow, that was so good, I almost pissed myself!!”

In other words, she had fun.

Pandemonium

Towards the end of her life, Nekojiru’s workload increased so much that she was beginning to burn out.

She was focusing more on delivering manuscripts on time than drawing for fun.

Jirujiru Diary and Neko Kamisama were based on stories she’d heard from others, verbatim.

“I deleted a whole book’s worth of data from my computer…” I lamented. And Nekojiru wrote my story into a manga, exactly how it happened.

A young part-timer once took my place at a company event because I was busy and brought back a souvenir. It was a plastic pouch of dried seaweed (the regular kind you can find to sprinkle on breakfast at convenience stores) with five individually wrapped portions inside(!). He handed it to me and said, “Here’s a souvenir,” and Nekojiru drew it exactly as it was.

Hopelessly overworked, Nekojiru was running out of ideas. But she had deadlines to meet, and pushed herself through it. She had a strong sense of responsibility and just couldn’t say no. She was pressed for time and pushed herself past the point of exhaustion.

One time, there was a late-night knock on my door at the office.

“Can I stay the night?” Yamano begged, exhausted.

“What happened?”

“Well…”

Yamano hesitated. Apparently Nekojiru snapped and slashed at him with a box cutter.

I laid Yamano down on the sofa and gave him a glass of water.

Silence hung heavy in the air.

The phone rang. I answered; it was Nekojiru.

“I knew he’d be over there. Put Yasuo (Yamano’s real name) on the phone!”

“I can’t. He’s asleep right now.”

I tried to calm her down but nothing worked. “Put Yasuo on the phone right now! He ran out on me. Wake him up and put him on the phone!” She was furious.

Things like this happened frequently when a deadline was drawing near. Two people attached at the hip are bound to clash eventually. It was usually Nekojiru who’d lose it and end up attacking (rather, abusing) Yamano.

Seeing Yamano exhausted, sprawled out on my couch, reminded me of Nekojiru disciplining her cat Nyansuke.

Fearing for Yamano’s safety, I refused to let him leave.

Before long, dawn broke. The sparrows began singing and the newspaper delivery truck started making its rounds.

Nekojiru’s delirium must have subsided for the time being.

Yamano returned to Nekojiru. “She needs me,” he said, leaving me with those final words.

Looking back, their willingness to take any job due to their scarcity mindset is what made them so popular in the first place.

If they had been a little more selective, Nekojiru might’ve lived a little longer. Then we would’ve been able to interact with her a little more.

“You guys need to take a break.”

One day in 1998, when Nekojiru and Yamano were at their lowest, my wife Saki and I paid them a visit.

This was about three weeks before Nekojiru’s suicide.

We sat together and relaxed, listening to music. Nekojiru had a set of specialty Blue Room House Pod speakers. These were excellent speakers, with particularly clear hi-hats and volume.

Nekojiru barely spoke, listening intently to nerve-wracking, shrill techno. Meanwhile, Yamano was still exhausted from meeting the latest round of deadlines, and the pounding bass seemed to be bothering him.

Concerned, I suggested that we listen to something else for a bit and switched to ambient dub. Yamano seemed relieved, but Nekojiru, who was vibing with the frantic, synth-heavy beats, wasn’t a fan of slow, soothing dub and remained sulking throughout.

It was as if the psychedelic trance coming through the House Pod speakers only further agitated her.

Nekojiru seemed in an unusually bad mood that day.

Suddenly I became uneasy when I remembered Nekojiru saying, “Death doesn’t really scare me.”

As we left, Yamano and Nekojiru saw us off. I can still remember the look of pure exhaustion in Yamano’s eyes.

“Don’t go home! Stay a little longer! Don’t leave us alone!” his eyes pleaded.

They would return to working hellishly.

The final curtain call was fast approaching.

The Face of Death

“Chiyomi committed suicide. You’re one of her only friends, so I thought you should know.”

I learned of Nekojiru’s death via a phone call from Yamano.

By the time they found her body rigor mortis had already set in. I learned of her death only a few hours after she was discovered.

My wife and I were in Shinjuku, about to catch an IMAX movie when we received the call.

Yamano was in shock. He was trying to put on a brave face.

I had a feeling this day might come, but I never thought she’d actually go through with it.

We put the movie on hold and rushed to Yamano’s place.

I was more worried for Yamano, who had been left behind, than Nekojiru. For those of us who are still alive, losing one’s wife to suicide is an overwhelming shock. I couldn’t imagine it at the time, but I felt that comforting the living should take priority over funerary arrangements for the dead.

Nekojiru’s expression was calm. She didn’t appear to be in any pain at all. No regrets, not in the slightest. She finally looked at peace.

It made sense to me, but also terrified me.

A CD and video of Aphex Twin were placed in her casket.

Aphex Twin’s Ambient Works II was played at her funeral.

It was in accordance with the will she had written while she was alive.

Although originally a suicide note, it was workshopped into a proper will over years of failed attempts and plans. Her last will was dated from several years prior.

At Yamano’s discretion, however, not everything was done in accordance to her will.

Nekojiru didn’t want a headstone. Yamano decided otherwise, as it was necessary for family to visit. However, in a final act of defiance, there’s no name on the tombstone.

Only a single Sanskrit character is carved.

I once asked Yamano what it meant, but have since forgotten.

The will included a passage that said, “Never speak of the motive for my death.”

Yamano has consistently refused interviews.

Yamano’s state at the time was so painful that I couldn’t bear to witness it.
To think that five years later, I’d find myself in Yamano’s position…

Those Who Choose to Die and Those Who Choose to Live

Suicide hurts those who survive.

The pain cuts so deeply it never goes away.

Yet Yamano somehow managed to hold on.

As the Nekojiru duo took off and became busy, they became as inseparable as Siamese twins. The only way to come between them was to rip them apart. To do so would kill them both, as one can’t survive without the other.

The pain of losing one’s other half must have been unbearable for Yamano.

After Nekojiru’s death, her other half continued publishing under the pen name Nekojiru y. Though identical on the surface, the difference in Yamano’s work and Nekojiru’s is stark. Yamano is among the living. There’s no call of the void.

Many readers only discovered the world of Nekojiru after Nekojiru herself was gone. Those who read Nekojiru from the beginning may find the world of Nekojiru y to be unsatisfying. It was devoid of her nihilism, her longing for death. But I suppose it’s healthier that way.

Yamano was healing. And that’s why he could no longer draw the gruesome works of his past. He had grown beyond that negativity.

Five years later, when my wife committed suicide in the fall of 2003, Yamano was the one who saved me. Perhaps he was the only person to understand how fragile I was. And he guided me, on the brink of a nervous breakdown, back to sanity.

Yamano had recovered. That was a great comfort to me.

Kill or Die

Nekojiru’s suicide received extensive media coverage.

Since her suicide came shortly after that of X JAPAN’s hide, newspapers and magazines covered it as the death of a celebrity.

“...There has been idle speculation that she was following in the footsteps of hide, but I’ve never known her to be a fan of his. Besides, she isn’t the type to copy other people.”

Thus said a manga magazine editor in reference to manga artist Nekojiru (real name Hashiguchi Chiyomi, age thirty-one), who hanged herself from a doorknob on May 10th, 1998. The only thing she seemed to have in common with hide was a bright future ahead.

Nekojiru began drawing after marrying manga artist Yamano Hajime (age thirty-seven). Her cute cat characters and jarring cruel stories quickly garnered her popularity. She created commercials for Tokyo Electric, and she was expected to flourish.

The editor continues, “However, if you read her work, you’ll see that she was pessimistic with a strong tendency to self-destruct. In her most recent release, she writes about how Earth is destined to be destroyed anyway, and laughs about how she nearly lost her mind after eating hallucinogenic mushrooms in Bali. She was clearly on her last legs.”

If only she was as carefree as the cats in her manga…

What drove her to death?

Being overworked certainly didn’t help. Pandering to big magazines must have been stressful, too. It wasn’t surprising it made her depressed.

“Death is the only option” was a common theme in her work. Her general lack of regrets. Those were obvious red flags.

Nekojiru was the purest person I knew. My wife called her “authentic.” Pure, psychotic, shamanistic—essentially natural acid. This is what comes to mind when I think of her. It may have been difficult for someone so pure and innocent to live in this world.

In the eight short years that I knew her, Nekojiru’s appearance and behavior hadn’t changed a bit. Most women matured, but Nekojiru refused to grow old.

Sales of Nekojiru merch exploded after her death. Dying made her a hit. In the end, I don’t think it would have mattered to her.

In the end, the living can never understand what motivated the dead to take their lives.

I’m surprised she even made it to thirty-one. I think Yamano was the only thing keeping her alive.

In the end, she died because she wanted to. Simple as that.

No attachments to life. As refreshing as it could be at times, it was scary at others. I wanted to live life full of hedonism, so encountering someone unafraid of death was unnerving. But Nekojiru seemed at peace with this world. Maybe she didn’t need anything from it anymore.

She wrung herself dry then went up in smoke. A clean break. There was something frighteningly elegant in her death.

Perhaps she was preaching her gospel through her work.

“Kill or die.”

There was only one way out. The solution was obvious.

Memories of a Rave

There’s one memory of Nekojiru I’ll never forget.

I once overdosed at a Goa trance rave. I was in really bad shape.

Concerned, Nekojiru called an ambulance and anxiously waited for my return at the venue.

The friends that came with me, Aoyama Masaaki and Osamu Tsurumi, had bailed, likely fearing arrest. (Earlier this year, Tsurumi called me and protested, “I didn’t run away! Aoyama dipped and dragged me out without explaining a thing.” He never lies, so I believe him.)

Nekojiru might not have been afraid of dying, but she didn’t want her friends to die, either. She was selfish, but kind.

After being released from the hospital, I went to an onsen with Nekojiru and Yamano.

I came to my senses in our room. I was grateful to be alive, but terrified and profoundly alone. I’m prone to depression, too. And so, in that quiet onsen, I finally broke down in tears. I couldn’t help it.

“Why are you crying?” Nekojiru came to my side with a worried frown. She stayed with me for a long time.

Perhaps she thought I’d kill myself if she left me alone.

“Are you alright?”

Crying with my knees hugged to my chest, I had no idea how to respond.

How could she have taken her life when she cared so much about me?

I ask Saki and Nekojiru both.

Why did they have to die so soon, when the people they cared about had always been by their side?

I hesitate to accept the idea that they took the easy way out.

Despite her wishes, Nekojiru exploded in popularity. She accepted every job, worked herself to the bone, and made a lot of money over the years. But none of it mattered to her. Nothing mattered to her. She said I’d die at thirty-five; maybe that’s why she grew fond of me. Because I, like herself, am on the verge of death.

But I just act crazy. I don’t want to die.

previous x next ->