Some attribute Japans high suicide rate not just to the number of people who attempt suicide but also to the fact that people use more fatal methods, 1 though to what extent the book has contributed to this trend is unknown. Moreover, the book shows that certain popular methods of suicide have very low success rates.įor this reason, some argue that since its publication the book has made suicide attempts more fatal. The book neither encourages nor discourages suicide, and as well does not tell those considering suicide to seek help, though wordings such as completely painless and marvelous experience are used to indicate that certain methods are less painful and more fatal than others. There are many suicides where the book was found along with the body, including several cases of the suicides of junior high school students. Some prefectures designated the book as yugaitosho (book harmful to youth), which restricts the sale of books to minors, while some prefectures, such as Tokyo, decided against doing so. The book provides matter-of-fact assessment of each method in terms of the pain it causes, effort of preparation required, the appearance of the body and lethality.Įach of these matters is also rated by skulls, with 5 skulls indicating the highest rating. The fact that one can easily identify the least painful and easiest method of suicide was controversial at the time of the publication.Īlthough he does rhetorically pose the question Why must one live Wataru simply lays out the methods of suicide one by one and then analyzes each of them in detail.
And in every suicide method, he rates different aspect of suicide such as painfulness, gruesomeness of the body, probability of failure and costs in event of failure, and so on.
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