What is death?
11 Do not spare your money or your life.
28 Cowardice is the worst
40 Endless Fireworks
53 People with bad personalities don't know that they have bad personalities.
64 No one is immortal

77 Even if I die and my world dies, don't make a fuss

Things I didn't know
122 I'm dying of pain
131 Curiosity is shallow
144 No one's name was attached to it.
158 Cherry blossoms blooming next year
168 Everyone seems to be sliding in a certain direction

179 About Yoko Sano

197 Translator's Note

A new life after cancer recurrence
The author of "What is Life?" cries out, "I want to die gracefully."

Yoko Sano, author of “The Cat Who Lived a Million Times” and “What Is Life?”
She showed a chic attitude towards life and left a record of her life up until two years before she passed away after a relapse of cancer.
"What is Dying?" depicts Yoko Sano humbly accepting death as a natural part of life, while upholding the belief that "do not spare money or life."
This attitude is fully reflected in the prose and dialogues that make up this book, as well as in the memoirs of author Natsuo Sekikawa.
Yoko Sano consistently says in a detached voice, “I don’t care about dying.”


The world won't be in trouble no matter who dies.

So there's no need to make such a fuss about dying.

If I die, my world will die too, but the universe will not disappear.

I wish you wouldn't make such a fuss.
-Page 119

Tatsuo Hirai, director of the Neurology Clinic, says this attitude is “due to my profession as a writer, and the fact that I have a good grasp of questions like ‘What is life? What am I? What is death?’”
However, even the meticulous Yoko Sano had one thing she couldn't do: pain.


I don't mind dying, but I don't like being sick.

Being sick is scary.

I don't mind drooling with a dazed head, but I just want to avoid pain.
-Page 72

Eventually, she ends up paying a lot of money and going into hospice.
There, he meets people who, like him, have fled the world and its suffering, people who are sliding towards death day by day, and their families.
In this book, unlike his previous work, "What is Life?", the author goes beyond the personal relationships between himself and his acquaintances to meet strangers and observe their demise up close.

It has disappeared.

In my little universe.

I couldn't express it in words,
That feeling is the realization that something precious is gone forever.
It was a loneliness that made me realize that I had to accept it.
A person I have never spoken to and who has no relationship with me,
Now, there will never be a time when it will pass before me in a transparent and silent manner.
-Pages 152-153

Yoko Sano, admitted to a hospice, observes death from a somewhat objective distance.
It is a perspective from a person (2.5 person) that is neither too far away nor too close to be heartbreaking.
At some point, she stopped whining and getting angry.
I just feel lonely.
In this moment, we see Sano Yoko's personal wish to "die well" expanded into a universal death preparation education.
Furthermore, as the author expresses his sorrow for the disappearance of others, not his own, we also gain the realization that people only regain their humanity through others.



A sharp and powerful voice
A grumbling that becomes sharper at the end of life

As in the previous work, you can easily find Yoko Sano's signature quotes in "What is Dying?"

I, too, believe that the most precious things cannot be bought with money. (Page 40)
Language is very important to humans.
It could be said that language alone proves humanity. (p. 50)
Each person is different.
Yes, each person is different. (Page 55)
I think people should die at home. (p. 70)
Nature never fails to become a picture that you want to tear apart. (p. 151)
You will know as time goes by without asking. (Page 174)

To a writer at the end of his life, even the monotony of daily life comes across as an unfamiliar image.
In this book, Yoko Sano displays keen insight into conversations and trivial phenomena that can easily be overlooked.
It is often a matter of frustration or irritation about one's situation, but it is also intertwined with questions about life that we have accepted indifferently.
So, Sano Yoko's grumbling also serves to bring to light contradictions that are buried in everyday life to the point where we are no longer even aware of them.

Animals have strong, still eyes that can withstand solitude.
But animals that use language have lost their solitary eyes.

Such eyes become tools for expressing all kinds of desires and twinkle greedily.
We humans have become so fatefully.
-Page 50


There is no one who does not die
But I'm alive until I die

Yoko Sano has been familiar with death since childhood.
When she was three, she witnessed her 33-day-old brother die from a nosebleed, and when she was eight, she watched indifferently as her four-year-old brother, whom she had cared for like a son, was buried in an unclaimed grave.
I didn't know what it was at the time.
It was only when her older brother, who had been like a part of her body to her, died the following year that Yoko Sano began to feel the reality of death for the first time and cried.
I felt “the greatest loss” of my life.
After that, she became “a person who only cries when things break up.” She also became a person who “doesn’t know how to live until I die.”
The deaths I witnessed in my childhood made me constantly question the rest of my life.
What kind of scenery did Sano Yoko discover anew when she faced her own inevitable death?

Even if I die, weeds will grow as if nothing happened.
Little flowers will bloom, rain will fall, and the sun will shine.

Every day a newborn baby is born and a ninety-four-year-old mummy dies in a nursing home.

Nevertheless, I want to die thinking that this world is beautiful.

I, who am as dirty and poisonous as mud mixed with shit, think that way.
-Page 157

A person lives until he dies.
-Page 175

In this book, Yoko Sano never says that she wants to live.
I don't even give you the advice to reflect on life self-sufficiently or to live without regrets.
Since I'm alive until I die, I just want to live (and die) properly for the rest of my life.
This polite detachment.
The generous embrace of one who has gained knowledge through the pain of cancer.
In this way, in “What is Dying,” Yoko Sano expresses her admiration for life without reservation.