Entertainer Pooru (Paul) Maki died early yesterday morning after jumping from the balcony of his Tokyo apartment. He was 63. Police found evidence of his having climbed onto the railings of his 9th-floor Nishi-Shinjuku apartment and are treating the death as a suicide. He is believed to have jumped at around 4:48am and was found by a taxi driver seconds later. He was taken to the nearby Tokyo Medical University Hospital but died about two hours later. The driver said, “I was driving when I heard a thud. His lower body was bleeding very badly and he was already unconscious.” Maki had two children but divorced his wife in 2000. He is said to have had a history of depression and recently had been undergoing treatment after seeing his career on the variety circuit dwindle away. He also took an overdose of sleeping pills back in 1983, though he denied that it was a suicide attempt. Real name Hanzawa Kazumichi, he was born into a Hokkaido Buddhist temple family in 1941. He started to study to become a monk at the age of 10, but gave it up at 17 and came to Tokyo. he went through dozens of jobs before becoming a comedian. He achieved fame in the early 1970s with something as simple as a finger snapping routine, which became his trademark. he set up his own theater group in 1979 and also was a regular on the TV variety circuit throughout the 80s and early 90s.