Dying the Japanese way

Dying has never been so melodramatic. Only the Japanese can die like that. Honestly, I find it hard to believe that the Zen monks can muster enough life to craft poetry and have it written down before keeling over. It's as if they could control life and death and hold the button until their pearls of wisdom are recorded before letting life pass out of them. Bizarre. Who did they think they were, that they could actually master Death? Even more strange is the way they characterise death as "quitting the world", like they, as human beings, can choose to quit or not. I guess in the suicidal sense, one can do so but these monks certainly didn't seem like they committed harakiri or seppuku or something like that. A lot of them, according to this book, just dropped dead right after they uttered their poetic pieces.