by Jeremy Bates
“Stupid guy,” Tomo mumbled.
“You shouldn’t have pissed him off,” I said.
“I was joking, right? He don’t like joke?”
I was pretty sure Neil could hear us, and I didn’t want to get into his bad books, so I merely shrugged. I looked for Mel, to see if she’d calmed down, but didn’t see her anywhere.
I sat up straighter. Glanced at our tent.
“Mel?”
No reply.
I scanned the forest. It was ghostly in the near dusk. She was nowhere in sight.
I stood.
“Mel?”
Nothing.
“Mel?” I shouted.
“I’m here,” she replied. She sounded far away.
“Where?”
No answer.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going to the bathroom!”
“Oh—sorry.”
“I’m hungry,” Tomo said.
“I have peanuts in my bag—” I stopped midsentence, mentally slapping myself on the forehead. “Shit.”
“What, man?” Tomo asked.
I was shaking my head. “My Swiss Army knife. I think I forgot it back at the crevice, where I cut the vine.” I set the whiskey aside and went to my backpack, knowing the knife wouldn’t be there but wanting to check nonetheless. I stuck my hand in the main pocket and felt around.
“Ow!” I bellowed, jerking my hand free.
For a moment I thought the knife had pricked me. But the pain consumed my entire hand, as if I had stuck it in a hot flame.
Tomo was asking me what was wrong, but I barley heard him. I was staring at my hand in horror. It was covered with dozens of ants—and they were still stinging me.
“Fuck!” I shouted, shaking my hand madly. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
The pain was incredible. I tried smacking the ants away, but the little fuckers had sunk their mandibles in and wouldn’t let go.
I felt a sting on my ankle. Then another. More.
I looked at my feet.
The ants were crawling all over them.
I kicked off my Reeboks, launching them ten feet away. Then I stripped out of my jeans, all the while suffering more bites on my ankles and calves.
I brushed at the ants frantically, my mind reeling.
Where were they coming from? How many were there?
What if I went into anaphylactic shock?
Tomo and Neil, who had been quick from his tent upon hearing the commotion, charged past me, taking the offensive, shouting and stomping, looking like a pair of Native American rain dancers.
Tomo nudged my backpack tentatively with the toe of his shoe, then sprang back. “Ah!” he shrieked. “So many!”
Neil yelled, slapping his ankle.
In the poor light I made out an undulating mass of ants beneath where my backpack had been sitting.
I had set it right on top of their bloody colony.
“Ethan!” Mel said, reaching me. “What’s going on?”
“Ants! Get back! They’re everywhere! Pack up the tent. We have to move.”
She was scanning the ground at our feet.
“I don’t see—”
“Go!”
She ran back to the tent.
I jumped atop a rock and told Neil to get my shoes. He collected them, banged them against a tree, then tossed them to me. I slapped them against the rock for good measure, then slipped them on. My right hand was thrumming with heat. I shoved it under my left armpit.
We spent the next few minutes dismantling our tents and packing our bags while at the same time keeping well clear of the agitated colony. My backpack was squarely in enemy territory, covered by the angry little things, and I decided to leave it. I would pick it up on the way back tomorrow.
Then, with a last glance at the swarm, we got the hell out of there.
We followed the white string for another ten minutes, to make sure we were well out of the ant colony’s territory, stopping at an area padded with spongy pine needles at the base of a one-hundred-foot spruce.
I put my jeans back on and examined my hand. It continued to throb and had developed dozens of tiny bumps. Neil had a few bites on his ankles, while Tomo and Mel had gotten away scot-free.
After we set up our tents again, Mel rubbed some face moisturizer on my bites, though this did little to soothe the pain and irritation. Then Neil offered me more whiskey, which I accepted gratefully.
“What kind of ants do you think they were?” Mel asked.
“I couldn’t really see the color,” I said. “They might have been red, or ginger.”
“Killer ants,” Tomo said.
“Fire ants,” Neil said knowingly. “And I reckon we’re lucky we escaped with only a few bites. They’re responsible for more human deaths than any other predatory animal on the planet. Vicious little buggers, they are.”
I didn’t want to talk about ants—I was in too much discomfort—so I lay back down with my head on Mel’s backpack and found myself thinking about our ubiquitous companion Mt. Fuji out there somewhere. We would have been halfway up it by now. We’d either be in one of the seventh- or eighth-level huts, or outside them in our tents, trying to catch a few hours’ sleep before we completed the final leg to the summit.
Would any of us have the energy or desire to still climb it tomorrow? I wondered. I was pretty sure Neil and Mel felt similar to how I did: spent, both physically and emotionally. This had been no stroll through the park. We’d gone a lot farther into Aokigahara, experienced a lot more, than I’d imagined we would. Then again, what had I imagined? An hour or two hike, a campfire, marshmallows, ghost stories?
The truth of the matter was that I wanted this whole weekend to be over already. I was cold and hungry and in pain and…empty. There was no longer any sense of adventure left inside me, no curiosity, no excitement. There was nothing. I was numb.
If Mel’s scare in the hole in the ground had started me down this track, Yumi’s gravesite, I was convinced, had been the turning point. Up until then this had still been a game of will of sorts, like fasting for two days, or swimming across a small lake. You did it to see if you could. After witnessing Yumi’s scattered belongings, however, so pathetic, so desperate, it hit home that this was as real as it got. People did indeed kill themselves here. They flocked here like lemmings, hundreds if not thousands over the years, each of them tortured in their own private way.
And in our ignorance and selfishness we had come to rubberneck, drawn by the morbidity of the spectacle, just as motorists slow as they pass a roadside accident in the hopes of glimpsing something gruesome.
Clearing these thoughts from my mind, I imagined I was someplace far, far away.
“You in the jungle, baby,” a tinny voice trilled. “Wake up. Time to dieeeee!”
I must have dozed off for some time, because when I opened my eyes it was fully dark and John Scott and the Israelis had returned. Everyone was sitting at a fire they had gotten going. My phone continued to ring—or, more precisely, Axl Rose continued to sing—which was what had awakened me.
“Ethan?” Mel called over to me. “Your phone.”
“Yeah, I’m up.” My right hand, I noticed, had swelled and begun to itch. Ignoring the temptation to scratch it, I fumbled inside my jacket pocket, flipped open my yellow KDDI phone, and checked the display. It was Derek Miller, the Canadian coworker who’d labeled Neil an oddball serial rapist.
Derek and I had an almost nightly ritual. After we got off work at 9 p.m., we would stop by the Family Mart down the street from the school, buy a couple cans of beer, Kirin or Asahi, find a spot off to the side of the stream of suits and skirts flowing in and out of Shinagawa station, and hang out there while admittedly looking conspicuous. Regardless, it was affordable. A beer at a bar, even at a dive, cost about seven hundred yen, or roughly seven bucks, and it wasn’t uncommon to pay ten.
In fact, it was during one of these budget evenings when we’d first met Tomo, who had been doing th
e very same thing.
Although it was legal to drink alcohol in public spaces in Japan, the only people who really did it—outside of the national cherry blossom festival/drinking party in April—were foreigners. Japanese tend to worry too much about what other Japanese think of them. So when I caught Tomo’s eye as he merrily gulped back a tallboy, I tipped my can to him. He tipped his back, flashing me his toothy smile for the first time. Then he did something else that was very un-Japanese: he came over and started chatting with us. He was funny, Derek and I were having a good time, and we all bought another round. About thirty minutes later a girl showed up in hooker boots and a miniskirt. Tomo introduced her as Minami and invited us to join them at a nearby bar. It turned out to be packed with other hot university-aged girls. Some of the guys there thought it was cool to be hanging out with foreigners and bought Derek and me tequila shots over the next two hours. All I remember after that was ending up in a dungeon-themed karaoke room and somehow stumbling back to the guesthouse at two or so in the morning, to a suitably unimpressed Mel.
“Miller Time!” I said into the phone now. “What’s up?”
“Mr. Childs!” Derek said. “I didn’t know if you’d get reception up there. You guys reach the top yet?”
“We postponed the climb. It was supposed to rain.”
“It’s not raining here.”
“It’s not here either. Not yet. False alarm, I guess.”
Derek laughed. “You morons. So what are you doing now?”
“We’re camping in Aokigahara Jukai.”
“Aokigahara what—? Hold on a sec. Sumiko’s going nuts.”
While Derek and his Starbucks-employed, barely legal girlfriend yabbered back and forth, I examined my right hand again. The pain had dulled, and the little bumps had turned into white pustules. I touched one with a finger experimentally. It was hard and uncomfortable. Then Sumiko came on the line and said, “Ethan? What are you doing in Aokigahara Jukai?”
“Camping.”
“You shouldn’t be doing that. You should leave now.”
“We can’t. It’s already dark.”
“It’s not safe.”
“Ghosts, right?”
“You must be careful there. And don’t bring anything back from there. Okay?”
“Why not?”
“Just don’t. I really don’t think you should be there.”
She was beginning to freak me out, and I said, “Can I speak to Derek again.”
Static interference sounded as the phone changed hands.
“Suicide Forest!” Derek crowed gleefully. “Awesome. How is it? Have you found any bodies?”
“Listen, I gotta go. I’ll tell you about it when I get back.”
“If you get back. Kidding, man. Okay, later.”
I hung up, frowning. What was up with Sumiko? I got it that this place was taboo for most Japanese, but she’d sounded downright terrified for us. Did she really believe the legends associated with the forest? And what was that stuff about not taking anything from here? Was that part of the folklore too? Did you get cursed or something?
I stuffed the phone away and went to the fire.
“Who was that?” Mel asked.
“Derek. His girlfriend thinks we’re crazy for being here.”
“We are.”
John Scott said, “Heard you were attacked by some ants, buddy. How you feeling?”
“I’m fine.”
“Good to see you got your pants back on.”
Nina, I noticed, was staring intently at the ground, doing a bad job of trying to hide her smile. I was glad it was dark, because it masked the blush that had risen to my cheeks.
“You know,” John Scott went on, “I’ve heard the expression ‘ants in my pants’ before, but I’ve never known anyone who’s actually experienced it.”
He was grinning broadly, while chuckles spilled out of everyone else.
“Find anything down the ribbon?” I said, to change the topic. I felt stupid standing there, the butt of the joke. I was also pissed they’d been talking about me behind my back.
John Scott shook his head. “It ended at nothing. Maybe there was a connecting one at one point. Who knows?”
I sat down next to Mel, who suggested it was time for dinner, and everyone took out whatever food we had either brought from Tokyo or bought at Kawaguchiko station, which was similar fare to what we had at lunch. John Scott passed several cans of beer around, apologizing that they were warm. I waved aside his offer. I would have liked one, but I felt I would owe him somehow if I accepted.
The fire was comforting, keeping the night—and the forest—at bay. We fed it with the sticks we had collected during the trek here and talked about the day: the ribbons, the solo shoe, the gravesite. John Scott, apparently in his element with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, invented an entire backstory for Yumi. She was a journalist, he said. She came here to do a story on all the suicides and the yūrei. She planned to spend a couple nights. That’s why she had the change of undergarments, the toiletries. But then she ran into a man who came here to kill himself. A hesitater. She tried to interview him and he got angry and killed her—no, better, John Scott amended—he decided he wanted to fuck her. Nobody was going to know. Even if they found out, he was going to kill himself, so what did it matter? So he raped her over and over, hanged her from a tree branch, then hanged himself next to her. “Bam! It explains everything,” John Scott concluded proudly. “The underwear. The missing body.”
“What about the cut-up ID?” I said.
“What ID?”
“Oh shit,” Tomo said. “I don’t show you.”
He took the small pieces of plastic he’d collected from his pocket and passed them to John Scott. Ben and Nina crowded close.
John Scott whistled. “She’s fit.”
“I know, right?” Tomo said. “Why hot girl suicide?”
Ben said, “Maybe, you know, that is an old photo. Maybe she was in a fire and was disfigured.”
Nina nodded. “Or she had a brain tumor.”
I glanced at Nina. She’d been reticent all day, and I believed this was the first time she’d spoken English. She had aristocratic features, with arched eyebrows, an aquiline nose, and a neatly composed mouth. She’d pulled her hair back into a ponytail, and a single strand hung down in front of her face. She caught me looking. Her eyes were large, brown, almost reflective in the poor light, like a cat’s—and there was something else in them.
A mischievousness? A seductiveness? Or was I imagining that?
Ben said, “I wonder what would be the best method for suicide?”
“Slitting your wrists,” Nina replied immediately. “In a hot bath.”
“No way,” John Scott said. “One, it’s pussy. Two, it takes a while to bleed out like that. If you kill yourself, you want it to be instant. You don’t want to sit there waiting for yourself to die. It could take hours. I say sucking on the barrel of a Glock and pulling the trigger.”
I shook my head. “Most people who try that end up permanently maiming themselves and spend the rest of their lives in a wheelchair missing a chunk of their brain.”
John Scott cocked an eye at me. “So what do you say, boss?”
I gestured vaguely around us. “Hanging probably.”
“Yeah, and if you don’t do it right, or the rope breaks, you’re left a paraplegic.”
“I know,” Tomo said. “Jump in front the train. Splat, you dead.”
“That would be fine for you, Tomo,” Neil said. “But then you’re forcing your death on someone else, forcing them to live with the memory of your splattered guts because you couldn’t kill yourself by yourself. Not to mention the train company, in Japan at least, will likely sue your surviving kin for disrupting their service.”
“Well?” I said, wanting to hear Neil’s theory.
“Jumping off a building.”
“That’s so nineties,” John Scott said. “You know why no one does that shit
anymore?”
“Tell me,” Neil said dryly.
“Because it’s been proven that most people change their minds about killing themselves halfway down. Imagine that.”
“How could that possibly be proven?” I said.
“It has, dude. Check it out.”
“What about an overdose?” Mel said. “That’s painless, right?”
“Not reliable,” John Scott said. “You pass out, then vomit all the pills back up. This leaves you alive and in a puddle of your puke, probably next to your suicide note, which, given the fact you’re not dead, looks plain gay.”
The flames of the fire had shrunk to less than a foot tall. I glanced around the circle we had formed but didn’t see any more wood.
“Is that all the firewood?” I said.
“That went fast,” Ben said.
“We need campfire,” Tomo stated.
“Indeed we do,” Neil said. “It’s going to get colder.”
I cursed myself for falling asleep and not scavenging more wood earlier. I grabbed a flashlight and stood. “I’ll go get some.”
“I will join you,” Ben said, pushing himself to his feet.
“Me too,” Nina said.
“Wait, in the dark?” Mel said. “You might get lost.”
I shook my head. “We won’t leave the string.”
I could see her deliberating, weighing the pros and cons. Apparently heat and light won out over potential hazards because she handed a flashlight to Ben.
“Fine, but don’t go far,” she told us. “And watch out for those holes.”
CHAPTER 10
If Aokigahara was unsettling during the daylight, it was ten times worse at night and away from the perceived safety of the fire. The blackness of the forest pressed against us like a physical force. Ben and I fought it with our flashlight beams but succeeded only in revealing patches of the chaos that surrounded us: vines dangling like nooses, craggy trees bent at demonic angles, roots bubbling out of the ground, as if ready to snare unsuspecting prey. And everything remained shrouded in that maddening silence. In contrast, our footsteps crunched and crackled, seemingly loud enough to wake the dead and bring all the yūrei within a mile radius screaming toward us.