A Kandid Little Korner

I took this from Paulo Coelho's "Like the Flowing River". I never got over this sad story after I read it a couple of years back. At times, I'd suddenly remember this unexpectedly and my heart would break for this Japanese man. Read on and you'll share my sentiment, for sure.

On 10 Jun 2204, Tokyo, man was found dead in his pyjamas, in his bedroom. There was no sign of struggle or violence. An official from Metropolitan Police, in an interview with the newspaper, stated that the man had almost certainly died of a sudden heart attack.

The corpse was found by the employees of a construction company on the second floor of a building in a housing development that was about to be demolished. Everything would lead us to think that our dead man in the pyjamas, having failed to find somewhere to live in one of the most densely populated and most expensive places in the world, had simply decided to live in a building where he wouldn't have to pay any rent.

Then comes the tragic part of the story. Our dead man was nothing more than a skeleton wearing pyjamas. Beside him, was an open newspaper dated 20 February 1984. On a table nearby, the calendar was marked the same year.

He had been there for 20 years.

And no one noticed his absence.

The man was identified as an ex-employee of the company who had built the housing development, where he had moved at the beginning of the 1980s, immediately after getting divorced. He was just over fifty on the day he was reading the newspaper and suddenly departed this life.

His ex-wife had never tried to get in touch with him. The journalists went to the company where he had worked and discovered that the company had gone bankrupt immediately after the project was finished, because they had failed to sell any of the apartments, which would explain why they did not find it strange when the man stopped turning up for work. The journalists tracked down his friends, who attributed his disappearance to the fact that he had borrowed money from them and hadn't been able to pay them back.

The man's mortal remains were returned to his ex-wife.

Tsk..Tsk.Tsk... I can't really imagine a person so alone that no one noticed his absence for two decades. His existence never mattered to anyone, even to his ex-wife. I can't help to think what kind of person he is. How did he deal with those around him to deserve such solitude? Worse, much worse, than the hunger for food is his hunger for companionship. For that even one person to care for you, to love you and to make you feel important. For that one person looking forward to seeing you everyday or even hearing your voice. For that one person to check out on how things are going. This man never had that One Person.

Thank you for making me realize how important my family are. That I am lucky to have my friends who keep in touch. I don't have just one, I have many.