Kenji leaves the apartment bleeding from his stab wound, carrying the knife. He stands at an intersection and almost falls in front of the traffic, but someone catches him. It's the kid who he was supposed to pick up at the airport, the son of Kenji's parents' friends. Somehow the kid made it into the city from the airport and he's bumped into Kenji purely by accident. Kenji tells him he'll see him tomorrow but he can't talk now. Kenji staggers off. He goes over to the building where Pola was staying the night before. Pola is supposed to be in Paris by now, but Kenji sees a light on in the apartment upstairs and he decides to ring the bell. Her voice answers over the intercom, and when Kenji hears her voice, he's devastated: she lied to him about going to Paris. She knows that it's him downstairs. She says, "Kenji, is that you?" but he doesn't answer. It's like that's the last straw, knowing that she lied to him, that she didn't want to see him again. He goes back to his apartment, gets inside, leans against the white door and leaves a bloodstain on the door from his stab wound. He looks at the clock. Now it's about 8:15. 45 more minutes to go. The next thing we see is a close-up of his face and upper body. What's he doing? He's plunging the knife into his stomach, gasping for breath, speechless from the pain. Then he's lying on his back on his bed, with a large bloodstain spreading out from his stomach over the bed and onto the floor. But he's real calm, and Mira's sitting there with his head resting on her lap. "Is it time yet?" he asks. "Not yet, 5 more minutes," she replies. "I feel cold," is the last thing he says. When he breathes his last Mira cries a little. This is a surprising conclusion for me. I went into this movie assuming that he would the 9:00 deadline, that he would fight for his life every inch of the way and either die from some completely unexpected, odd, slightly comical ccident, or that he would not die at all. Wonsuk has come up with a much darker conclusion altogether. I suppose one could say that it's a little fatalistic: why is Kenji so willing to accept, from the beginning, that it's inevitable that Mira will come and claim him? He passively accepts this with no argument. He believes that we are all controlled by a higher being and that if our number is up there's nothing we can do about it. And yet, by choosing to commit suicide it's as if he's trying to say "I will determine my death, when and how I will die." This plot and pacing are so good that I thought that it was all over for Kenji when Anouk stabbed him in the back and that his obsession with making the most of his last few hours of life was the very thing that led to his murder and that if he hadn't insisted on having sex with Anouk he never would have been killed. But then Wonsuk surprises me again by making the stab wound relatively superficial. Instead Kenji kills himself. What if he decided that he didn't believe Mira was going to come and claim his soul? Maybe he wouldn't have died.

I think half of the reason that Kenji kills himself is because he wants to have some control over his own death, but the other half is because he is devastated by shattered illusions. People have been lying to him. He believed that he would die and that Fabrizio would live and then Fabrizio is killed almost in front of his eyes. Pola has deceived him. Underneath every illusion is an uglier reality or at least another ugly illusion. Or an ugly perception. Eastern concept of death versus western: Wonsuk said during the interview afterward that traditionally death is not feared in the east as much as it is feared in the west, and that Kenji is most definitely a Japanese man who has just come to New York and has barely gotten used to life in America. It is not such an unreasonable stretch of the imagination that he would choose suicide and not be afraid of it. Death can sometimes be a comfort. That is why the last scene when Kenji dies is very peaceful and comforting. He is very quiet, doesn't seem to be in any pain.