The definition of suicide is confusing. People have long looked at suicide in a negative fashion, although someone who dies to save others is more likely to be seen in a better light than someone who has done so to relieve mental or physical pain. Further, someone who continues to commit an act that has a high probability of leading to death, for example cigarette smoking, is not considered suicidal. Yet, a terminally ill person who asks someone else to hasten death is committing suicide. In addition, many philosophers question

In high school, Naoko and Toru's are close friends. The two have great difficulty accepting the suicide of their 17-year-old best friend, Kizuki. In fact, they do not see each another for nearly a year after the funeral. They meet by chance in Tokyo, while going to college, see each other once and a while, and make love one time. After Watanabe sleeps with Naoko, he says that "her cry was the saddest sound of orgasm I had ever heard" (40). Naoko, who is emotionally unstable because of the earlier suicide, leaves Tokyo and returns to her family and then goes to live in an institution.

Norwegian Wood by Murakami is also a flashback. The novel begins with the introductory chapter in which the 37-year-old narrator, Toru Watanabe, hears the sweet orchestral cover version of the Beatles' song "Norwegian Wood" and is reminded of his life almost 20 years earlier. The rest of the book retells the events of those times.

Every second is eternal,' Trip told us, describing how as he sat in his desk the girl in front of him, for no apparent reason, had turned around and looked at him. He couldn't say she was beautiful because all he could see were her eyes. The rest of her face-the pulpy lips, the blond sideburn fuzz, the nose with its candy-pink translucent nostrils-registered dimly as the two blue eyes lifted him on a sea wave and held him suspended. 'She was the still point of the turning world,' he told us, quoting Eliot, whose Collected Poems he had found on the shelf of the detoxification center. For the eternity that Lux Lisbon looked at him, Trip Fontaine looked back, and the love he felt at that moment, truer than all subsequent loves because it never had to survive real life, still plagued him, even now in the desert, with his looks and health wasted.

Further, a competent adult has the legal right to refuse to take food and water whether administered normally or artificially. Incompetent patients may be denied nutrition and hydration if they had, when competent, expressed their desire to be so denied or, in some states, if such denial is in the best interests of the patient. In cases where the family and the physician agree that the patient should die, the issue never gets to court and the patient can be quietly starved and dehydrated to death. Yet, despite such changes in the law, suicide most remains a hidden, sometimes taboo, topic.

The latest National Police Agency data confirms that youth suicide is emerging as a serious social problem in Japan. The number of elementary and middle school pupils killing themselves is especially of concern. The suicide rate for this group rose by a substantial 57.6 percent, representing a total of 93 innocent lives lost, 34 more than in 2002. Among high school students, there was also a sharp rise of 29.3 percent. In total 225 young lives were lost in this age category. There was also an increase in the number of college students killing themselves. The overall suicide rate among people aged 19 or younger rose by 22 percent. Suicide is the most common cause of death among Japanese in their 20s and 30s. The World Health Organization puts the country's suicide rate per capita at more than twice that of the United States, and higher than any other economically advanced nation. Youth suicide in Japan has become such a common phenomenon that it no longer grabs press attention and reports are usually consigned to the back-pages of newspapers (Curtin).

Unlike the U.S., Japan has a historical experience with suicide, and numerous terms have long been part of the Pacific island nation's vocabulary. Hara kiri means a samurai's suicide, or a way to "honorably" escape from death at the hands of an enemy, or to escape disgrace. Shinju is the double suicide of two lovers, oyako is the death of an entire family, obasute is the suicide of the elderly, and the kamikaze is remembered from the war. People often get praised for committing suicide in Japan.

whether someone has to die to actually be a

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Approximate Word count = 3420
Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page double spaced)