Suicide Forest (3 page)

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?”

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, perhaps 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.

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 bit. 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.

I was about to mention this but didn’t know
how to convey it intelligibly in words. Instead I said, “Yeah, it’s
a crazy place.”

“It’s these types of trips I’m going to miss
when we leave Japan. We should have done them more. Why didn’t we
do them more?”

I shrugged. “We’re always working.”

“Because we’ve stayed at STD. We could have
had way more holidays somewhere else.”

She always called HTE that—STD. It was her
joke. Something we caught and couldn’t get rid of.

“You know,” she went on, “my friend Francine
got a job with a university. She gets six months off.
Six
months
. Half the year. And she still gets paid more than we
do.”

“We can apply at a university, if you
want?”

“It’s too late, Ethan. We’ve been here too
long.”

I didn’t say anything.

She glanced at me, apparently thought I was
angry, which I wasn’t, not really, and ballet-toed to plant a kiss
on my cheek.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Don’t make fun of me.”

“I’m not. I enjoyed it.”

Smiling, she said, “I’m going to go talk to
John.”

I glanced ahead at John Scott, who was
telling Tomo some story.

“Okay.”

She hurried to catch up. I watched as she
squeezed in between John Scott and Tomo. John Scott hooked his arm
around her shoulder, said something that made her laugh, then,
after what I considered to be an inappropriately long amount of
time, withdrew his arm again.

Neil took Mel’s spot next to me. He was
whistling that popular American Civil War song—the one everyone
calls “The Ants Go Marching” nowadays—though I couldn’t recall the
original title.

I glanced sidelong at him. Neil Rodgers.
More affectionately referred to as “Neilbo” or “Mr. Rodgers” or
sometimes “That Fucking Kiwi” when spoken about in jest by the
people we worked with. A Canadian coworker named Derek Miller went
after him the most for being what he called “an oddball serial
rapist.” That was going overboard, of course, but Neil was
admittedly a bit of an oddball. I think Neil would even admit it
himself if you asked him. He didn’t have tape holding his glasses
together or anything like that, but he did have a handful of
idiosyncrasies. He only owned one suit, for example, which he wore
every day. I knew this because there was a small hole in the seat,
next to the left pocket. He kept his cell phone in a pouch attached
to his belt, like he was Captain Kirk and it was his phaser. And he
would always eat the same thing for each meal. Rice, fermented
beans, some nuts, and a salad if he had a day shift. Rice, a piece
of chicken, and three or four pork dim sum if he worked evenings.
His wife prepared the dishes for him, packing them in a Tupperware
container that had his name written on the lid in black marker.