#OP
“How much money would your life be worth?”
I was once asked a question like that.
Yes, I believe it was part of a lesson on morals in fourth grade.

Most of the students, after much debate, settled on somewhere between tens of millions of yen and hundreds of millions.
Of course, some students were firm in their belief that money couldn’t buy life.

You’d probably get the same sort of responses from adults.
Personally, if you asked me before that day I really sold my own lifespan, I would say my life was worth around 200 or 300 million.

I figured that if I sold ten or twenty years of lifespan for a few tens of millions of yen, it would be a clever way to ensure my remaining life was easy.
Between a happy sixty years and a not-so-much eighty, I was sure I wanted the former.

That all got turned around when I saw my results.
It seemed my life didn’t even make it to a million yen.

#OP
One July when I was twenty, I was tight on money.

I wasn’t eating anything but white rice and miso soup.
In the past few days, I had collapsed three times while working as a waiter, so I knew I needed to eat more nutritious.

I considered what I could get some money off of, but all I came up with was furniture, a bunch of CDs, and a large collection of books.

The stuff was all mostly old and used, and not worth much, but I figured it might be enough for a month of food.
So I cleaned things up to look as new as possible, and went down to my usual bookstore and music shop to sell it.

#OP
The old man at the bookstore, seeing me bringing in piles of books to sell, worriedly asked “What on earth happened?”
I was surprised, since he was usually a very blunt man.

“Paper doesn’t make for a good meal,” I said, and the old man seemed to understand and sympathize.
But he wouldn’t pay me any extra. Then again, he was poor, too.

After getting my money, I went to leave, and the man called out to stop me.
“Hey, I wanna talk to you about something.”
“Yes?”, I said, hoping for some pity money, and he said:
“You wanna sell some of your lifespan?”

#OP
Thinking he had just gone senile, I decided to entertain the old man’s story.

In short, this is what he told me.
There’s a building not too far from here with a shop that’ll buy your lifespan.
You can sell your time and your health there too, but lifespan fetches the best price.

The man drew a map and wrote a phone number with his shaky hands, but I was sure it was only a fantasy of the old man’s to make himself feel better.
I really felt sorry for him. Must be fearing that death was approaching.

#OP
However, when I next went to the CD shop, I was told the very same thing I had been told at the bookstore.
What’s more, this time it was from a man in his late twenties, so it was hard to say he was senile too.

“Hey, just between us, bud…”, he said to me.
“But there’s a place where you can sell your lifespan near here!”

He claimed to have sold some lifespan himself.
“How much did you get for it?” I asked bemusedly. “Can’t tell you, dude!”

I felt like the whole world was teasing me.

#OP
Yet in the end, I went to that building I was told of.
My CDs, books, and furniture hadn’t made me much money at all.

I certainly didn’t believe the story about selling your lifespan.
Rather, I considered the possibility that the old man and the younger man were using some kind of metaphor to allude to a lucrative job.
Something like “at the risk of shortening your lifespan, you can make a million yen in a month!”

I climbed the dimly-lit stairs and opened the door.
I met eyes with a woman at a counter, and she asked me:
“Your time? Your health? Or your lifespan?”
And I couldn’t help but laugh.

(to be continued)