by Jeremy Bates
I was standing in the middle of a gravesite.
CHAPTER 7
To the right of me, strewn on the ground, were a number of innocuous items that wouldn’t have been out of place in anyone’s home. But here, in the middle of the forest—this forest—they were a ghastly sight. There was an old, torn umbrella. A ruined handbag, covered with dirt and dead leaves. A pack of Seven Stars cigarettes. An empty bottle of Smirnoff vodka. A broken mirror, a toothbrush, a hairbrush, a tube of lipstick.
And, perhaps most disturbing of all, an upside-down doll nailed into the trunk of an adjacent tree.
I couldn’t move, couldn’t look away from the eclectic arrangement of items as my mind raced, trying to make sense of what lay before me. The lipstick indicated that the person who had apparently died here had been a woman. That made this gravesite even more tragic to me. I don’t know why. Women kill themselves too. I guess I just expected if we found someone, it would be a man. A woman dying in this way—in the wilderness, alone—it didn’t seem right.
I wrenched my eyes from the sad remnants of a life and looked up. No body hanging in the trees. No broken noose. I scanned the surrounding forest. No bones, no clothes.
A darkness rose within me, mirroring the darkness that permeated the forest, and I wondered about the woman herself. Who was she? A secretary? A housewife? A flight attendant? I’ve taught housewives and secretaries, dozens of them, and I realized this woman might once have been a student at my school. I tried to imagine one of my students taking their own life. I couldn’t. They were all so happy, so bubbly, eager to learn English, curious about the world.
Neil was moving. The sound of his feet crunching leaves startled me out of my trance. I blinked and looked at him. He scavenged an old stick from the forest floor, returned, and poked the bag. It was as stiff as a board.
I wanted to tell Neil to leave the bag as it was. Viewing a dead person’s belongings was intrusive enough; rifling through them seemed sacrilegious. But I said nothing while he worked the end of the stick into the large pocket and dragged out something white.
“Underwear?” Tomo said. He’d crept up next to me. “This kinky shit.”
Neil kept digging and extracted a purple T-shirt, a pair of socks, a small-cup bra, a pair of scissors, and a paperback book. The book was partially obscured by another shirt, but I could see some kanji and the English letters IDE.
“Flip the book over,” I said.
“Why?”
“I want to see the cover.”
“That is the cover.”
I forgot that in Japan books were read right to left. “Move the shirt then.”
Neil did so. The cover image was a two-dimensional coffin in which rested what looked like some sort of crash test dummy. The title read: The Complete Manuel of Suicide.
“Holy shit,” I said. “That’s the book Ben mentioned.”
Neil nodded. “The one that describes this forest as the perfect place to die.”
It’s one thing when someone tells you something; it’s another thing entirely to witness it with your own eyes.
Seeing this book was like being slapped in the face with cold, cruel reality.
“Hey, look there,” Tomo said, pointing at the forest floor. I didn’t see anything but leafy mulch. He dropped to his knees, brushed away some dead leaves, and snatched up a small piece of plastic. He uncovered five or six pieces in total.
“Is that an ID?” Mel asked.
“Driver license,” Tomo said, examining the snippets of plastic he cupped in his hands. “Yumi Akido. January 18, 1983. Damn, she young. Where picture?”
He spread out his search, brushing aside leaves and twigs. He unearthed more of the driver’s license, as well as a destroyed VISA credit card and a Softbank debit card.
“She’s hot,” he said, examining one piece. “Why would hot girl suicide?”
“Let me see,” I said.
He passed me the small section of ID. I held it so Mel and Neil could view it as well. The woman’s hair was dyed a reddish blonde and cut in a layered shag. She had a small mouth and a perky nose. Her black eyes were heavily lashed—those fake ones you could buy from a 7-Eleven that all young Japanese girls seemed to favor. Her face was a little too round, but Tomo was right. She was attractive.
I visualized her dead, her head flopped sideways, her neck broken, the color drained from her over-blushed cheeks, the sight gone from her eyes, her skin shriveled like an orange peel left in the sun.
“Why did she cut them up like that?” Mel asked.
“I reckon for the same reason she nailed that doll to the tree,” Neil said. “They represented a society to which she no longer felt she belonged. This was her way of saying screw you to everyone and everything she left behind.”
As we stood there, silent, each of us thinking our own thoughts, I tried to piece together the bizarre ritual this woman performed before she killed herself. Judging by her scattered personal belongings she—and in no particular order—put on clean undergarments, got drunk, destroyed her identification, nailed the doll to the tree, applied lipstick, brushed her teeth and hair, smoked a few cigarettes, then ended herself.
“Let’s go,” Mel said, taking my hand.
“Okay,” I mumbled, but I didn’t move.
The woman—Yumi—would have arrived here during the daytime; she couldn’t navigate the forest in the night. Given that she had brought the book about suicide, she was likely one of the hesitaters that Tomo had described. She was still contemplating killing herself, trying to convince herself it was a necessary evil. So what had she been thinking about while she sat here on her own? Whether to turn back, head home, and go to work on Monday morning? Her parents and siblings? The problems that drove her here? And what could those be? She was only twenty-fucking-one.
The underwear and bra.
Why?
Because, like I’d theorized, she wasn’t completely sure she wanted to kill herself, and she wanted to remain hygienic until she decided? I didn’t know about that. It seemed a little like worrying about a fever when you were standing before a firing squad. And what about the toothpaste and hairbrush and lipstick? Hygiene again? Keeping up appearances? Or was I not thinking symbolically enough? Brushing her teeth, combing her hair, applying lipstick, these were actions she’d performed every day of her life. Perhaps she’d wanted to go through the motions in an effort to experience humanity one last time. And if that was the case, did she have tears in her eyes while she brushed her teeth? Anger as she smeared lipstick over her lips? Regret as she combed her hair, one hundred strokes?
Or was she smiling, relieved her pain was finally coming to an end?
I knew I was oversimplifying all of this. But rationalizing, whether correctly or not, was my way of coping with death.
I turned away from the belongings. I couldn’t recall whether I’d been looking at them for thirty seconds or two minutes.
Mel, I noticed, was faced away, staring into the trees. I thought she was having her own moment of reflection when she said, “Can you hear that?”
Those words put me immediately on edge. They weren’t the words you wanted to hear in the woods, standing on a gravesite.
“What?” I said softly.
“I thought I heard something.”
I listened. I didn’t hear anything.
“We should call the others,” Neil said.
“It’s not a body,” I said.
“No, but it’s good enough, I reckon.”
“Okay. Mel?”
She turned, frowning. “Yeah?”
“Can you call John Scott? Tell him to come here?”
“Come here?”
“To see the grave.”
“To see the grave?”
“He and Ben and Nina, they’ll want to see it.”
“Oh. Right. Wait—I don’t have my phone. But I know his number. Give me your phone.”
I frowned at her. She had John Scott’s number memorized?
&nbs
p; What the fuck?
Still, I passed her my phone.
She took it and dialed his number.
CHAPTER 8
“John? It’s me. Can you hear me?” Mel asked him how they’d fared with their path, listened for a bit, asked a few questions—asked him to repeat himself several times, indicating a bad reception—then explained that we found a gravesite. She told him how to reach us and to watch out for the crevice she fell into. She recounted everything that happened to her, getting more and more worked up in the process. Then she ended the call.
“Did they come across anything?” I asked.
She nodded. “He said they found a metal dog kennel.”
“What?”
“Those carrying things you take your dog to the vet in.”
“Was there a dog in it?”
“I didn’t ask. I doubt it. John would have said so.”
“Why someone bring dog?” Tomo asked.
“Because they didn’t want to die alone?” Neil suggested.
“Like a murder-suicide, only with your pet?” Mel said.
I wondered about that. Did the person kill the dog before they killed themselves? Or did they just want its company in their last hour? Was there a wild canine running around the forest now, surviving off of small rodents—and perhaps human bodies?
I pushed aside the thoughts and said, “So what do we do? It’s going to be an hour or more until they get here.”
“I still want to see dead fucker,” Tomo said.
I raised an eyebrow. “A grave’s not good enough?”
“No, man.”
“Then go look. I’m going to rest here.”
“Me too,” Mel said.
“Neil?” Tomo said. “You wanna come?”
“I don’t think so, mate.”
“Come on, man. I don’t go alone. Maybe I get lost, die. Then you blame.”
Neil shook his head.
“Please, man?” Tomo said. “Just little.”
“I told you, no.”
“Don’t be chicken guy.”
“I swear, Tomo—”
“Okay, okay. But come. Please?”
“No.”
“Please?”
“No.”
“Please?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Tomo!”
“Please?”
Neil sighed.
“So you come?” Tomo said.
“Will it shut you up?”
“I don’t say nothing.”
Neil told me to keep an eye on his backpack, then he joined Tomo, and they wandered off deeper into the forest together.
“Let’s go that way a bit,” I said to Mel, nodding past her.
We moved a respectable distance from the gravesite and flopped down on a flat patch of ground at the base of a large cedar, our heads on our packs, staring at the canopy overhead.
We didn’t say anything for a while. I wanted to talk about the woman named Yumi, but I didn’t know how to break the ice or what to say. Specifically, I didn’t want to trivialize what we’d experienced. Finding the grave the way we had, raw, untouched, the personal belongings spread bare on the ground, it seemed as though there should be some moral weight behind my words.
Mel said, “Do you remember when we first met?”
That caught me off guard. “Yeah, of course. At work.”
“Remember Elise?”
“Yeah.”
“She was in your group.”
“My group?”
“You know what I mean.”
I suppose I did. Like in any working or social environment, there were cliques at our school. One “group,” to use Mel’s terminology, consisted of the older, married teachers, like Neil, who for the most part kept to themselves. Another group was the guys in their early thirties. There were four of them. Every day they swapped stories about their late-night debauchery: Russian prostitutes, transvestite bars, street fights with other expats. They were funny, friendly to everyone, and I got along with them well enough. My group was made up of those in their twenties, recent college graduates, traveling for a year or two to see the world. Lumped in there with me were the Canadian Derek Miller and three girls, Jennifer, Karen, and Elise. Mel was half in, half out. Derek liked her; the girls didn’t.
The last group to speak of, if you could even call it a group because it comprised notorious loners, would be the freaks and geeks. I don’t like either of those labels, but I don’t know a better way to describe some of the fringe characters we work with. An example would be Brendan Christoffson, aka Blade. That’s what he changed his name to halfway through the year: Blade, as in Wesley Snipe’s Blade the Vampire Killer. Outside of work he often wore barrettes or colorful headbands in his long black hair, platform boots, and more chains than Keith Richards. He spoke effeminately and regularly stunk up the teacher’s room with his black nail polish.
There’s an ill-proportionally high percentage of Brendans teaching English in Japan, likely due to the fact the country is so quirky you can let your freak flag fly with pride, and the myth that if you’re Caucasian you’re some sort of Viking god in the eyes of the Japanese. A popular comic strip that contributes to the latter perception stars a scrawny, introverted Canadian who, once he moves to Japan, instantly morphs into Charisma Man, a Rock Hudson type with a bevy of girls hanging off his arms.
“What about Elise?” I asked, curious to see where Mel was going with this trip down memory lane.
“She had a thing for you.”
“I know.”
“Why didn’t you date her?”
Coming from your girlfriend, that was an odd question, and I struggled with how to answer it. “Because,” I said.
“Because what?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t attracted to her.”
“Why not? She was pretty.”
“She was loud.” Elise was Australian, from some country town in western Queensland, and she didn’t have a volume switch. She pretty much shouted everything at a nasally one hundred decibels, her vowels pinched and drawn out to excruciating lengths.
“She was so loud,” Mel agreed.
“And,” I said.
“And?”
“I met you.”
Although I couldn’t see Mel’s face—we were still side by side, looking up at the canopy—I could sense her smiling. This was the right answer. Even so, I wasn’t blowing smoke. A couple weeks into my contract I arrived at work one Monday afternoon and found Mel in the teacher’s room, keeping to herself, pouring over a textbook she had to teach. I remember Derek pulling me aside that same day and making a cock-sucking face, which seems surreal now, given he’s become one of my better friends and she my girlfriend.
Over the next few days I struck up conversation with Mel whenever an opportunity presented itself, though this proved difficult because as a new teacher she was busy learning the textbooks, the system, and so forth. Elise could see the effort I was making, and two things happened. First, she stopped flirting with me, which had been going on pretty much nonstop since we met. Second, she became frosty toward Mel, so much so they rarely talked in the two years before Elise eventually returned to Australia—which was the reason Mel never quite fit into our group.
“She was a bitch,” Mel said.
“You were a bitch,” I said.
“Me?”
“Remember the first time I asked you out for a drink? When we were taking the train home from work?”
“So?”
“Do you recall what you said?”
“I didn’t have an umbrella.”
“What the hell did that mean?”
“It was raining.”
“I wasn’t going to take you on a picnic.”
“I don’t know. I panicked. It was my first week at work. I didn’t want to seem like…that kind of girl.”
“I thought you had a boyfriend.”
“I did. Sort of. Like you.”
“Me?”
“You had a girlfriend
. Shelly MacDonald.”
I was surprised Mel knew Shelly’s surname. I didn’t think I’d ever told her. “We were broken up,” I said.
“Hmmm.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing.”
We fell silent again. I played over what we’d just spoken of, that first year in Japan when the country was still new to me. I imagined myself reminiscing about stuff like this—Japan stuff—at a dinner party in Madison in twenty years’ time. Would my friends back home care? Would they be able to relate? If Mel and I ever broke up, would all these memories cease to mean anything, cease to be? If a tree falls in the forest…
“Do you remember Degawa?” Mel asked abruptly.
“Degawa…?” I said, as if speaking the name would elicit a memory.
“He was one of the first students I taught. I used to tell you about him. He bought me the stereo system.”
Before we moved into the guesthouse near Shinagawa together, Mel’s apartment building had been adjacent to a used electronics store called Hard Off. She’d been searching for a cheap stereo system there one day when she bumped into Degawa. He helped her pick out a Panasonic setup with massive speakers and insisted he pay for it. She objected, of course, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer. Then, during one of their classes later in the week, he asked her to join him for dinner. He assured her he only wanted to practice his English.
I cautioned Mel against taking up his offer. He was a fifty-year-old man. He was divorced. She was a young blonde American girl. Nevertheless, she always takes people at face value. She looks for the good, not the bad. This was likely why she told him she’d join him—with the provision her roommate, an Irish girl, come as well.
Apparently Degawa had been the perfect gentleman, genuinely interested in improving his English. Come to think of it, I didn’t hear much about him after that dinner.
“What about him?” I asked idly.
Mel hesitated. Then she said, “He killed himself.”
I propped myself up on my elbow, stared at her. “When?”
“Couple years ago.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me this?”
