Sukurappu ando birudo
By: Hada Keisuke
Publisher: Bungei Shunjū
Published: 2015
Place of publication: Tōkyō
Language: jpn
Number of pages: 121
ISBN-13: 9784163903408
Description: Twenty-eight-year-old Kento Tanaka lives in suburban Tokyo with his mother, who still holds down a full-time job in her sixties, and his 87-year-old grandfather. Since he is unemployed and almost always at home during the day, it falls to him to look after his grandfather's needs and he sees it as a nuisance. His grandfather is constantly saying that he wants to die, but he does not suffer from any particularly debilitating diseases or conditions. Kento devises a plan to grant his grandfather's wish, by helping him along to a peaceful, pain-free death: knowing how quickly unused muscles lose their strength, he decides he will pamper his grandfather to the hilt so that his motor functions will atrophy from disuse. At the same time, he takes up a bodybuilding regimen for himself; in effect, to rub his grandfather's nose in what it's like to still be young and virile. One day, however, he goes out and returns early to find his grandfather moving spryly about the kitchen and chomping into some frozen pizza he's heated up for himself with added toppings. So does the geezer want to die or not?
Notes: Previously appeared in "Bungakkai," March 2015.

Winner of the 153rd Akutagawa Prize