Autopsy of an Eldritch City: Ten Tales of Strange and Unproductive Thinking

by James Champagne

  “Birth is ended, the holy life fulfilled, the task done. There is nothing further for this world.” —The Buddha

  DYAD

  The following excerpt is taken from Prof. Howard Kingfisher’s The New Kwaidan: Modern-Day Ghost Stories and Urban Myths from the Land of the Rising Sun (Fludd University, 2014). This is chapter 4 of that work, the chapter in question being entitled “The Case of the Absent Twin.”

  In the Yamanashi Prefecture of Japan, there is situated, at the northwest base of Mt. Fuji, a forest known as Aokigahara, which is Japanese for “Sea of Trees.” Spread out over 14 square miles and being home to over 200 icy caverns, over the years this notorious forest has acquired a large measure of infamy on account of the fact that not only is it a popular site for suicides (the second most popular site in the world, with the first being the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco), but also due to legends which state that the forest is haunted by angry spirits known as the Yūrei. During the famine years of the 19th century, poor Japanese families would sometimes take their elderly relatives or even their very young and infirm children out into the depths of Aokigahara and abandon them there, an act known as Ubasute, and perhaps it is the spirits of those who were left behind to die in such a cruel way that now haunt the forest.

  Three villages border Aokigahara: Narusawa, Ashidawa, and Kamikuishiki. However, within the forest itself and near Shoji Lake there is a tiny village named Shoji. Home to less than 1,000 residents, aside from the homes of its inhabitants the only other notable buildings include a school, an inn, a Shinto shrine, and a few other municipal buildings. So in these most peculiar woods there was this most peculiar village, and residing in this peculiar village were two most peculiar twins, known simply as the Yotsuba Twins. These twins, whose first names were Yoshi and Shitai, had been living in Shoji for many years now, since 1970 at least, and much idle gossip and wild speculation swirled around their name. This was primarily because, in the 40+ years that the twins had been living there, no one in Shoji outside of Yoshi had ever seen Shitai. Whenever the question of his twin brother was raised, Yoshi would simply state that his brother suffered from a rare genetic illness and thus could not set foot outdoors, and this was all that he would say on the subject. Of course, he wasn’t deaf to all the crazy rumors that the townsfolk of Shoji spoke concerning Shitai, but he tried his best to just ignore such banter. I know of this because I am Yoshi Yotsuba. But I’m uncomfortable writing of myself in the first person, so I have chosen to attempt “…writing this in the third person to gain much-needed objectivity,” to quote Philip K. Dick’s Valis and his assumption of the mantle Horselover Fat.

  Yoshi himself was seen as something of an odd duck, actually. His appearance could be described as eccentric, at best. First off, he was a very old man, being 91 years of age, yet in spite of this he was extremely spry and seemed to be in robust health, his mind still quite sharp. Most of the younger people who lived at Shoji (and most of the people who lived in Shoji were young) were amazed that Yoshi had never retired, and was still working at the same job he had been doing since he had first moved to the village over forty years ago. His hair was shockingly white and extremely unkempt, making him resemble an Oriental version of post-World War II-era Austin Osman Spare, while his eyes were of a dazzling malachite hue, as green as the color of Frank Gorshin’s Riddler outfit from that old Batman TV show of the 1960’s. His clothes were shabby, outdated and covered in cat hair (even though he owned no cats), and he almost always had a tattered umbrella on his personage, even on days when there was nary a cloud to be seen in the sky.

  Yoshi Yotsuba made a living as a forest worker. Every week, Monday through Friday, he traveled through Aokigahara, keeping an eye out for suicide victims. As far as jobs went, that of an Aokigahara forest worker wasn’t in high demand. Many people found the forest to be eerie, for the above cited reasons, and those who entered the forest with romantic notions that Japanese forests were nothing but miles upon miles of scenic cherry blossom trees were in for a rude awakening when it came to Aokigahara: the forest was primarily made up of white cedar, pine and boxwood trees, and because most of the forest’s floor was volcanic ash, many of the roots of these trees were aboveground like giant ligneous worms, thus creating a most uneven and treacherous forest floor. The forest was also extremely quiet, with little to no birdsong, the only real sound being that of the wind, and the only fauna being snakes, foxes, and wild dogs. Scattered throughout the forest were black signs with white Japanese characters inscribed on them, these characters spelling out inspirational messages such as “Your life is a precious gift from your parents” and “Please consult with the police before you decide to die.” On the days when Yoshi did stumble upon a suicide victim, he would need to bring the body to the police station of one of the towns that bordered Aokigahara (usually it was Narusawa), where he and the other forest workers would then play a game of Janken (known in the West as “Rock-Paper-Scissors”) to see who would have to sleep in the same room as the corpse that night. Aokigahara was the sort of forest that could drive mad those with overactive imaginations: it seemed like the type of locale that could have come straight from the pages of some lost Lafcadio Hearn collection, an outtake of Kwaidan. Walking through this forest of suicides, one could easily picture oneself encountering the man-eating goblins known as the Jikininki, the demon-fires of the dead known as the Oni-bi, or monstrous-sized versions of the Heikegani crabs.

  If Yoshi was intimidated by the forest, he didn’t show it, and after 40+ years of traveling through it almost every day like some modern-day version of Ahasverus, the Wandering Jew, this nonagenarian nemophilist knew the place better than anyone, to the point where he could probably have navigated it with a blindfold on. He didn’t mind his work, and sometimes he even enjoyed it: in some ways, it was an escape from his problems at home. Of course, it was no fun when he would come across a body, but over the years he had seen so many corpses by this point that they all just started to blur together in his mind. As it were, even before he had moved to Shoji, he had become used to the sight of corpses, thanks to his stint with the Imperial Army during World War II. There were even some parts of the forest he quite liked to visit, the main one being a small grove that he thought of as his own personal locus amoenus, a place that, when he visited it, made him think of works of art like Thomas Cole’s The Garden of Eden or the left panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. In the center of this grove there were two trees. These two trees, which were spaced no more than five feet apart from each other, were very tall, and their upper branches were conjoined, thus linking the two of them together (the scientific name for this phenomenon was inosculation). According to local legends, many years ago a cult had worshipped these trees, believing that they were symbolic of the souls of the dead: supposedly the leader of the cult had even married himself to the trees, and when he had died, some of his followers had sprinkled his blood on the bark of the two trees. While Yoshi found the trees quite beautiful to look at, at the same time they also reminded him of his situation with his twin, for even though he and his brother weren’t conjoined physically, in a spiritual or psychic sense, they were.