Kaori Shinomiya had been an ordinary woman leading an ordinary life. At sixty-seven, had she lived another ten or twenty years, she would have likely died an ordinary death. But everything changed when she won a lottery prize for a stay at a five-star hotel.

   When she arrived, a team of staff greeted her warmly. “Welcome, Madame Shinomiya,” they said. “We’ve been expecting you.”

   Kaori was given the finest room, and for the next two weeks, she indulged in every luxury the hotel had to offer. “It’s like a dream I never want to wake up from,” she said one day when the hotel owner came out to greet her. “My life has been a long series of hardships. But here, I have a soft bed for my back every night. Each morning, I can stroll through the hotel’s garden. Every afternoon, I enjoy jazz at the restaurant. My life has become harmonious and trouble-free. I am so happy now that I could die.”

   “We wish that you would stay with us forever,” the owner replied.

   That night, Kaori hung herself.

   After a month, her family finally noticed her absence and called the police. Eventually, they discovered her body hanging from the ceiling—but to everyone’s bewilderment, the room where she was found was an old, burned-out space inside an abandoned hotel. “There was once a hotel here,” said an old investigator. “It was destroyed during the war, and the owner, along with many staff members, perished. Ever since, we’ve found people coming here to end their lives.”

   Nobody could comprehend what had happened, except for the sight of Kaori’s decayed corpse. Her face remained smiling. She died happy.