by Jeremy Bates
That last bit struck an awkward note with me.
The perfect place to die.
Silence ensued. I looked at Neil, then John Scott. Neil’s brow was furrowed, as if he were perturbed by the dark turn the conversation had taken. John Scott, too, seemed preoccupied with his thoughts. Ben said something to Nina in Hebrew. She said something back. She saw me watching them and smiled.
Ben said, “We will take a bus to Aokigahara now.” He pointed to a nearby bus stop. There was no bus there yet. “You know, you and your friends should come with us. It will be an adventure, what do you think? We do not mind the company.”
I was about to decline when John Scott said, “I’m up for that.” He shot a cigarette from a pack of Marlboro Reds that had appeared in his hand. “Beats an amusement park.” He lit up and blew the smoke out of his mouth in a long, relaxed stream.
I’d quit smoking a year ago because Mel had wanted me to. She’d said she was concerned about my health, though I suspected she simply didn’t like the smell of the smoke on my clothes and in my hair. Still, to this day, a freshly lit cigarette always unleashed a craving inside me I had to forcibly ignore.
John Scott took another long drag, blowing the smoke around his words while he spoke: “So how about it? We wanted to kill some time? Camping in a haunted forest sounds sick.”
Neil was gazing at nothing in the distance, which I interpreted as noncommittal. Honda had started shaking his head again. He was definitely not cool with the idea.
“Neil?” John Scott pressed. “What do you say, big guy?”
Neil wasn’t a big guy, and considering he was about twice as old as John Scott, I thought “big guy” sounded disrespectful.
Neil shrugged. “I like camping, and I’ve heard of the forest. It could be interesting. But it’s going to rain. The last thing I want to do is spend the night cold and wet.”
“Aokigahara, it is special,” Ben said. “The trees, you know, are very dense. The canopy keeps most of the rain out.”
I found that hard to believe, but I didn’t say anything—because I was warming to the whole camping idea. It was a long weekend, which meant we could still climb Fuji on Sunday and return to Tokyo on Monday without anyone missing work. “We’re pretty well prepared to camp,” I said tepidly. “Food, tents, warm clothes…”
“Dude, let’s do it,” John Scott said.
Honda made an X with his arms and bowed apologetically. “I’m sorry, I cannot go, not there. But you go. I think you are crazy. But you go. No problem.”
Ben shifted his weight from one foot to the other, as if impatient for us to make up our minds.
“Give me a sec while I run this by my girlfriend,” I said.
I climbed in the front seat of Tomo’s souped-up Subaru WRX. Mel, I noticed, was still sleeping. I said to Tomo, “What do you know about Suicide Forest?”
“Ah! Is that what you talk so fucking long? Leave me here?”
“You could have come over.”
“You say watch Mel.”
“What do you know?”
“It’s famous for Japanese. Guys go there to suicide.”
“So that’s true?”
“Crazy, right?”
“What would you think about camping there tonight?”
“Are you fucking kidding, man?” Tomo was a hip guy, and it was hip for young people in Japan to use swear words when speaking English. It showed off their fluency. But some used four-letter words too much. They didn’t grow up with them, weren’t lectured against their use as children, they were just words. Tomo was one of those guys. “You want camp there?”
“We can’t climb Fuji because it’s supposed to rain. So we either go back to Tokyo or do something here. Honda doesn’t want to camp. But Neil and John Scott are okay with the idea. Those two there”—I pointed to the Israelis—“are going.”
“She’s so hot.”
I think Tomo currently had two or three girls chasing after him. He was handsome, with the shaggy hair popular with Japanese guys, almond eyes, and a sharp nose and cheekbones. He could use a visit to the dentist, however, because his teeth were crooked every which way. But that was only my opinion; yaeba, or snaggletooth, was commonplace in Japan and considered attractive. I’ve even heard of people paying for a dental procedure to get their own fake yaeba.
A newsboy cap with a stiff peak sat atop his head while a cashmere scarf was looped around his neck, the tails dangling down over a vintage motorcycle jacket. It was leather, like John Scott’s, but somehow it seemed less pretentious.
“Who’s hot?” It was Mel. I turned and saw her stirring. She sat up, blinked, and rubbed her eyes, which were a sparkling blue. Her blonde hair was messy and all over the place. She had the same makeup on from the night before. The right side of her face was red, from where it had been pressed against one of her arms.
“Hey,” I said, leaning between the seats and kissing her on her cheek.
“Thanks,” she said, brightening up. She was always thanking me when I kissed her. You might think she was being sarcastic, or bitchy even, but she didn’t have a sarcastic or bitchy bone in her. I believe she simply enjoyed it when I showed affection. I was flattered she felt this way. I’ve known couples who can’t stand each other after six months of steady dating. The fact Mel and I still got along so well was a good sign of our compatibility, I thought.
“Are we here?” she asked.
“Almost,” I said. “We’re in the town at the bottom of Fuji. There’s a bit of a problem.”
“Of course there is.”
“It’s supposed to rain. It doesn’t look like we can climb today.”
“Good, I can keep sleeping.” She flopped back down on the seat and closed her eyes. “Wake me up when we get back to Tokyo.”
“Actually, we just met a couple who were supposed to climb Fuji today too. They’re going camping in a forest nearby. We’re deciding whether we should join them.”
She opened one eye and peered up at me, pirate-like. “How far is it?”
“I don’t know. Right around here somewhere.”
She considered this for a moment. “Okay.”
“Really?”
“Why not? We’re already here.”
“There’s a catch.”
“What?”
“It’s called Aoki—?” I looked at Tomo.
“Aokigahara.”
“So?” Mel said.
“It’s also called Suicide Forest,” I told her, “because Japanese apparently go there to kill themselves.”
She frowned.
“I’m sure it’s more hype than anything,” I added quickly. “A few people have probably killed themselves there over the years, and it’s gotten a bad reputation—”
“No, I’ve heard of it,” she said, sitting up again. She pulled her hair back over her shoulders, revealing her slender neck. She slipped an elastic band off her wrist and used it to tie her hair into a ponytail. The pair of emerald studs I’d given her for her birthday back in June glittered in her ears. “My students told me about it. And it’s not hype. I think a lot of people kill themselves there every year.”
“We don’t have to go far in—”
“You don’t have to baby me, Ethan. I’m not scared. I’d like to see it for myself.”
I nodded, pleased with how easy that had been.
I turned to Tomo. “So how about it, T-man? You up for this?” I waited expectantly for his answer. With Honda out, he had the only car.
“Yeah, okay,” he said, flashing those savage chicklets of his. “Let’s go see some fucking ghost, right?”
2
Before we left for Aokigahara we visited the restrooms in the train station and bought some extra snacks from a Mini Stop, given that weight was no longer much of a problem. I stopped by the ticket booth to get a map of the area. A uniformed woman greeted me pleasantly. As soon as I mentioned “Aokigahara,” however, her eyes narrowed and her cheery smile vanished. She studied me, perhap
s trying to piece together my intentions. All she knew was that I was here by myself, asking how to get to a place where people went to kill themselves. I didn’t know how to explain I was with my friends, and we just wanted to check the forest out, so I adopted a guileless expression to alleviate any concerns she might have. Apparently it worked, because she gave me the map, though I felt her eyes follow me as I walked away.
Back outside I found everyone already packed into the vehicles. I climbed into the Subaru, then we were on our way.
Tomo cranked the stereo and rapped along with some Japanese-English hip hop band. He knew all of the Japanese, but when it came to the English he would keep the beat by tapping the steering wheel and only belt out the words he could catch such as “nigger” and “fucking hoe” and “my bitch.”
When I’d first met Tomo over eight months ago, I’d had him pegged as a sex, music, and party type of guy. But after I spent a day with him and his younger sister, who was autistic, I discovered he had a surprisingly caring and nurturing side as well, though this was something he would never admit and, of course, something I often teased him about.
He changed CDs now, crowed “This nigger is shit, man!” and began rapping to some misogynist song.
Doing my best to ignore him—I was pretty sure he’d meant the shit—I opened the map the ticket-booth woman had given me. Mt. Fuji was represented by a triangle. There were railway, bus routes, and expressways, each marked in different colors. The five nearby lakes and other tourist attractions were labeled in both English and Japanese. Off to the side was a magnified inset of the area surrounding Lake Saiko, which was pronounced “Lake Psycho.” It showed a number of walking trails that connected certain lava caves that had formed when Fuji last erupted.
Aokigahara, which should have been in the vicinity, was notably absent.
I tossed the map on the gaudily carpeted dashboard and tried to imagine what lay ahead of us. How many people killed themselves in Suicide Forest every year? A dozen? Two dozen? Would we stumble across a skull half buried in leaf litter? A corpse hanging from a tree branch? That last thought gave me pause. Not bones. A corpse. Was I prepared to experience something like that, something so dark?
Abruptly, against my will, I saw my older brother Gary in his shiny beige casket, his hair washed and brushed, his ears and nose stuffed with cotton, his lips waxed over, his eyes glued closed, the makeup on his face thick and caked, the red tie perfectly knotted around his throat.
Blinking away these last images, I shifted uncomfortably in my seat and focused on the trees passing by outside the window.
Some twenty minutes later Honda’s minivan pulled off the highway onto a back road, and we followed. Dense forest crowded us on both sides. Honda turned into a nearly empty parking lot. We parked two spots down from him. I got out and closed the door, which echoed loudly in the stillness. More doors banged closed as everyone else got out.
“So here we are!” Ben announced. His delicate features almost gave him an effeminate appearance. He pulled Nina against him and kissed her on the forehead. Then he hooked an arm around Tomo, who was standing next to him, and kissed him too.
“Hey, man, I’m not gay, right?” Tomo said, pushing himself away.
But Ben’s enthusiasm was infectious, causing everyone to smile or chuckle. It was a welcomed diversion from the overcast sky and stark, somber parking lot.
Tomo, blushing, popped the Subaru’s trunk. I retrieved Mel’s fern-green Osprey backpack, which sat on top of a jack and lug wrench, and helped her shrug into it. I tossed Tomo his bag, looped mine over one shoulder, then shut the trunk lid.
“You’re sure you don’t want to come, Honda?” I said.
“This forest, it is not for me.” His eyes flicked nervously to the trees. “Daytime maybe. But nighttime?” He shook his head.
The seven of us said goodbye to him, shaking or bowing awkwardly—foreigners rarely master the bow—and started toward the sole path that led into the trees. Parked next to it was a late-model Mitsubishi Outlander. The white paint job was patchy with dust or grime. Numerous dead leaves protruded from the groove where the windshield met the hood.
“Does that car look abandoned to any of you?” Mel asked.
“Shit, you’re right,” John Scott said. He peered through a window. “Hey, check it out.”
The rest of us squeezed in for a peak. The backseats were folded down. On them rested a tire pump, a first-aid kit, and a spare bicycle tire. A black sheet covered most of the available cargo space. Beneath it were two humps, one beside the other.
John Scott opened the back door, which unsurprisingly was unlocked. Theft was virtually nonexistent in Japan.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“I want to see what’s under the sheet.”
“You can’t break into his car.”
“I think we know he’s not coming back.”
“Maybe he’s camping.”
“He’d have to be camping for a hell of a long time. Look at all those leaves.”
“I want to see,” Ben said.
“Me too,” Tomo agreed.
John Scott pulled the sheet clear, revealing a dark blue suit, a pair of black dress shoes, and a rectangular leather briefcase.
We stared at the belongings for a long moment, nobody speaking. The sight was quietly disturbing, and I don’t think any of us knew what to make of it.
“Let’s go,” Mel said, and her voice had changed. It was sharper than before.
John Scott made to close the door.
“Put the sheet back,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because he covered that stuff for a reason. That’s what he wanted.”
“And he might still be coming back,” Mel added.
I knew she didn’t believe that, no one standing there did, but we didn’t say anything to the contrary. John Scott replaced the sheet, closed the door, and we continued toward the path. I glanced back over my shoulder and was surprised to see Honda still standing by his van, watching us. I raised my hand in farewell. He did the same.
Then I followed the others into Suicide Forest.
3
Suicide Forest, or Aokigahara Jukai, was unlike any other forest I had visited before. The variety of evergreen conifers and broadleaf deciduous trees grew too close together, bleeding into one another, confusing your eyes and creating the illusion of impassable vegetation. Their branches formed a tightly weaved canopy overhead, blocking out much of the sunlight so it was darker than it had been only minutes before in the parking lot. And everything inside this shadowed, sepia-toned world seemed twisted and primordial and…wrong. That’s the best way I can describe it. Nature gone wrong. The spruce and hemlocks and pine couldn’t root deep, because beneath the thin layer of windswept ash and topsoil the forest floor was an uneven layer of solidified magma left behind from when Mt. Fuji last erupted roughly three hundred years before. Instead, many of their roots grew aboveground, a tangle of gnarled, woody tentacles crawling over the protruding bluish-black volcanic rock in a desperate struggle to gain a foothold in life and survive. Consequently, several trees seemed to be a victim of their own success, toppled by their inability to properly anchor their massive weight, so they either leaned at angles, caught in the indifferent embrace of their neighbors, or lay flat on the ground, among all the other crooked branches and rotting deadfall. In fact, it wouldn’t have been hard to imagine the forest was sick and dying had it not been for the profusion of bright green leaves and mosses and lichen and liverworts, which painted everything with a much needed coat of color.
“Sort of like Middle Earth, I reckon,” Neil said, breaking the silence that had stolen over us. “The Ents. Treebeard.”
Eyeing a nearby nest of tree roots, I could almost imagine one of these trees coming to life and walking away.
“An enchanted forest,” Mel said. “That’s what I think. It’s so green. Like from a fairytale.”
The conversation continued for a b
it. It was trite, talk for the sake of talk, noise to fill silence. It petered out quickly. Over the next twenty minutes we passed several rusted, grime-covered signs. Some urged potential suicides to reconsider their actions and think about those who loved them, while others asked hikers to report to the local authorities anyone who was alone or seemed depressed or angry. One warned that camping was not permitted. This gave us pause, but Tomo insisted it was meant only as a suicide deterrent, because many Japanese would come here under the pretext of camping while they worked up the courage to kill themselves.
The farther we went, the more apprehensive I became. The forest was too still, too quiet. In fact, I had yet to hear a single animal. No bird calls, no insects. Nothing. How could a place so lush with vegetation be so devoid of life? And why? Animals certainly wouldn’t care that the forest was a suicide hot zone.
Mel, who was walking beside me, took my hand and squeezed it. I squeezed back. I wasn’t sure if she was being affectionate or wanted to talk about something.
When she didn’t say anything, I assumed she was being affectionate.
“You’re in a good mood,” I said.
“I feel good.”
“You’re not hungover?”
“Not anymore. I guess I slept it off.”
“You’re not weirded out or anything being in this forest?”
“I think it’s amazing. I mean, not in a good way. It’s just such a special place. It’s so different than Tokyo, you know?”
I thought about that for a moment and wasn’t sure I agreed completely. Tokyo was a forest of glass and steel while Aokigahara was a forest of trees and rocks, but both were graveyards of sorts. Because, if you knew anything of the merciless corporate culture in Japan, the shiny skyscrapers that dominated Tokyo’s skyline were really nothing more than impersonal tombstones, the people who worked within them slaves in an endless sojourn to get through to the next day, to reach the “golden years” of retirement. Ironically, many died spiritually long before that. Just ask that poor guy who’d left his suit and briefcase and dress shoes in his car.
