Kaz S. Matamura

I was raised by a Pollyanna mother.When I broke my nose, she praised the fact that I had the guts to physically take on boys. When I ran from home at the age of eight, she encouraged me to become an explorer in the Amazon. Having her permission to smoke, drink or fight took away the excitement and desire to do these things. In her eyes I could do no wrong. But in my teen years, as typical as a teen can be, I rebelled against her view of the world. I started to train myself to be pessimistic.

By seventeen, I was running an independent advertisement agency in Tokyo. My job required no previous training because each situation was different; I was a troubleshooter. When one thing went wrong, such as a client getting red roses instead of white, or the color of the invitation didn’t come out like the proof, I showed up and met with the frustrated client. I talked for thirty minutes and walked away with a client who couldn’t wait to work with our firm again. The only training I ever had was a theatre improv game.

I was a superman who flies site to site. I was a savior whom people sought when there was no one else to turn to. The pessimist Kaz was ready for any worst situation.

That was until the morning a friend of mine jumped off the building.

It was early and we were all suffering from hangovers from a night before.

“Mr. Suga is dead,” a man shouted as he is warning an arrival of William the Conqueror.

We knew only one Suga. Suga with the glasses. Suga, the communicator between a designer and a client. Suga who speaks so low on the phone, you preferred to just go to his office to avoid the trouble of asking him if he could please speak up?

Out of uncomfortable silence, a couple of guys started to mumble.

“What is the next meeting he was supposed to take from the fuji Company?”

“Do you know how far he along he got on the samples?”

The Wall Street-like chaos started. A few of us wondered how Mr. Suga died, but no one dared to ask. I stood there, awaiting the time to jump in to solve the problem.

Later that evening, another man from Mr. Suga’s office joined our gathering at a local bar. He told us that Mr. Suga’s wife wanted to see where Mr. Suga’s body hit the asphalt. The police told her that by the time she got there it would be all cleaned up.

One guy who saw it happen said, “It was just like a watermelon – squashed and spread everywhere.” Mr. Suga didn’t jump off from the building he worked at, but from a building none of us ever heard of, but only two minutes away. We wondered. He was always there when we called his office. He too had lost a lot of money in the stock market a year before. But we all did. He was a cushion between creativity and productivity – and he made sure everything he promised was delivered to his clients on time.

There was no way to get Mr. Suga out of this mess. He was gone. There was nothing I could do about it.

Then I was told that there would be a fee charged the family for clearing away the body. It would be more than $10,000.

My last attempt to claim my Superman-ness. “Shall we all chip in to support his family?”

“No, they will be ashamed.”

“They are not hurting for money.”

“It’s suicide. Not an accident.”

That was end of my being a problem solving super hero. I was tired of speculating. I just wanted everything to be as it is. I couldn’t or didn’t need to change anything.

Even after the suicides of four close friends, I have never come to understand why people kill themselves. I couldn’t see how ending your life is the only way to troubleshoot a problem.

One day your hope is vivid – that you can make anything possible. The next day, you start to believe you cannot go on any longer.

But no matter how bad things gets, I always had my mom talking, “C’mon, nothing can be that bad.”

I’m a lucky son of a bitch…or daughter of a bitch, to have to be able to believe in that. I still love this life and people on this planet (and their imperfection included – I find it very amusing…).