As a gauge of where this country is heading and what kind of mood it's in, consider this fact: Last week, almost every mainstream weekly news magazine ran at least one story on old age and/or death.

Shukan Asahi's was titled, "I want to die (quickly) of a sudden illness." Shukan Shincho offered "major research" on how to select a senior-citizens' home. Shukan Post featured a package of articles on funerals, introducing newly popular alternatives to traditional observances and demanding whether, in these cost-conscious times, a funeral is even necessary. A Shukan Gendai headline read: "I want to die at home." Most people do; it's "a kind of instinct," the magazine affirmed, and in the immediate postwar period, 90 percent did die at home. Today, the family having evolved into an entirely different sort of organism, only 10 percent do; 80 percent die in hospital.

Speaking of family evolution, the biweekly Sapio (Oct. 13-20) launched its 15-page spread on old age with a provocative question: "When did the Japanese family sink to this feral state?" The symbol of the moral morass it diagnoses is the discovery in Tokyo's Adachi Ward last August of the mummified remains of a man who had been presumed alive at age 111. His 81-year-old daughter and 53-year-old granddaughter were arrested on suspicion of fraudulently receiving his pension payments — some ¥9 million worth. If Shukan Gendai is right, the man was fortunate in one sense: He died at home — in 1978, apparently.