In his sixth week as managing director of the Hanshin Tigers baseball team, Shingo Furuya, 56, ended a phone call to his wife Akiko with the word sayonara (goodbye) instead of his customary oyasumi (have a good night's sleep). Sensing something wrong, Akiko summoned a taxi and sped 300 miles from the family home in Ashiya, in southwestern Japan, to his hotel in Tokyo. By the time she arrived, early on the morning of July 19, Furuya had leaped from the staircase outside his eighth-floor room to the garden 92 feet below.
In a narrow sense, Furuya's suicide was simply the...
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