Hayashi's body was found in her Tokyo apartment early on the morning of June 28.
An autopsy revealed she had died two days earlier, the day before she would
have turned 35.
"About 11 o'clock that night, all this noise suddenly broke out. I looked out
the window and saw all these cop cars outside the apartment block. I wondered
what had happened and later learned she'd died in there," a neighbor of the
late actress tells Friday.
Hayashi's body was found by her mother, AV director Katsuyuki Hirano and an AV
production associate. The director was upset that Hayashi had failed to turn up
for work for a couple of days and contacted her mother to go up and check on
the actress, but instead made the ghastly find of her body.
"Yumika was lying in her bed and the three people who found her thought she was
sleeping. When they realized she wasn't breathing, they quickly called for an
ambulance, but it was already too late," a pal of the actress says. "Yumika's
mom was shattered, screaming, crying and going half crazy."
Nothing appeared to have been disturbed in the home and police have yet to
determine the cause of the actress's death, with neither suicide nor murder
ruled out.
"She had no particular health worries, so it's hard to tell whether she was
killed or killed herself," an AV production company associate says. "What
sticks in my mind, though, is the massive amount of sleeping pills found in her
room. She'd also packed down quite a bit of the booze she loved before she went
to sleep."
Yumika's friends deny any possibility that she took her own life.
"She was a really bright kid. She'd told me that she'd just found a new
boyfriend and was really happy. I cannot believe she could possibly have
committed suicide," Yumi Yoshiyuki, director of what turned out to be Hayashi's
final movie, tells Friday.
Others aren't so sure, pointing to Hayashi's busy love life that left a long
trail in its wake and past reactions to failed relationships.
"About three months before she died, Yumika broke up with the considerably
younger porno production company worker she'd been dating," another AV company
worker says. "They'd lived together for a while. She seemed to have been pretty
shocked when the relationship came to an end."
Hayashi's neighbor adds: "About three months ago, she had a huge fight with a
guy that forced the cops to be called to our apartment block. A pile of men's
photos and underpants came flying out of the window of her eighth floor
apartment and landed on passers-by." (By Ryann Connell)
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