Sea of Trees

by James Russell, Robert

  SEA of

  TREES

  A Novella by

  Robert James Russell

  This publication is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. This work is protected in full by all applicable copyright laws, as well as by misappropriation, trade secret, unfair competition, and other applicable laws. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any manner without written permission from Winter Goose Publishing, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. All rights reserved.

  Winter Goose Publishing

  2701 Del Paso Road, 130-92

  Sacramento, CA 95835

  www.wintergoosepublishing.com

  Contact Information: info@wintergoosepublishing.com

  Sea of Trees

  ISBN: 978-0-9851548-5-1

  COPYRIGHT © 2012 by Robert James Russell

  First Edition, May 2012

  Cover Art by Winter Goose Publishing

  Typeset by Victoriakumar Yallamelli

  Published in the United States of America

  For Patty

  Hope

  She touches the bark of a tree, traces it with her fingers like she’s familiar with it, seen it before. I see her only barely through the endless green, slivers of her that pop into view for a moment. I stop and take a drink of water, hot and tired, but force a smile, pretending as if I’m enjoying this as much as she seems to be, just in case she’s looking.

  “There is something carved in it,” she says, waving at me. “Come look.”

  I make my way up the narrow path to where Junko is, navigating the lava rock formations that jut out in severe patterns, dodging the ankle-shattering holes and fissures that dot most of the trail, and finally force my way through a few feet of thick brush. When I find her she’s standing between two trees, looking beautiful, her hair pulled back into a tight ponytail, some sweat on her forehead and cheeks that she doesn’t pay any attention to, pointing at the bark, smiling.

  “Do you see?”

  “What is it?”

  “Someone must have put it here a long time ago.”

  I move in closer, put my hand on the small of her back. I feel her relax into my grip, and look at the symbols carved into the bark. “What does it say?”

  “I’m not sure,” she says furrowing her brow and leaning closer to the tree, tracing her fingers across the marks. “It is worn out. I wonder if it was someone who . . .”

  She stops suddenly, looks back at me and then back into the woods surrounding us.

  “It could’ve been some children or something. Teenagers, maybe,” I say, trying to comfort her.

  “Mmm,” she says still not looking at me. I try to pull her close again, to feel her against me, but she resists, says, “I think we should keep going.”

  “Sure.”

  Junko puts on her backpack and starts back toward the path, her slim legs poking out of those khaki shorts I love so much, the bulky hiking boots she just had to buy looking rather clownish on her. I look at my watch: ten-thirty am. We walk in silence for the next thirty minutes, stopping only occasionally to drink water and search in our immediate vicinity for any sort of evidence that Izumi had been there. At one point I ask her what she hopes to find, but she doesn’t look at me, meticulously checking a fallen tree trunk, determined like I’ve never seen her before.

  Sometime later we emerge from a particularly covered area of the woods at a crossroads and see two brightly painted signs. We squint as we approach, the forest opening up here a bit, allowing us to see unfiltered daylight for the first time since we started the hike. The first sign, a map of the woods, tells you exactly where you are with a painted red arrow, and where each direction will take you, the length of the loops, and areas that are off limits to visitors. Junko and I study it, the sheer size of Aokigahara, and it makes me laugh.

  She’s looking at me for the first time in what seems like an eternity. “What is so funny?” she asks and I’m thrown off by this, by her beautiful eyes as if it’s the first time I’ve seen them again.

  “Nothing. It’s just, this place is so big.” I gesture to the expanse of trees surrounding us.

  “That is why so many Japanese come here,” she says quietly, with some disdain. “No one will find their bodies that way, or stop them before they go through with it.”

  I stop, move closer to her and spin her around so she’s facing me. I touch her shoulders, close to her neck, and feel the sweat, her skin smooth, inviting. “I wasn’t making fun of you.”

  “I know,” she says. “I just really need to do this. To be here.”

  “And you really think we’ll find something?”

  She looks up at me, smiles, and presses her head against my chest. “I . . . am not sure.”

  “Well, we’ll try our best, right?”

  “Right,” she says looking up at me. I study her face, the tiny mole on her left cheek, her lips, and lean in to kiss her. She acts surprised at first but gives in, kissing me hard, fast, until she finally peels herself away, wiping her lips clean. She steps back and smiles, looks embarrassed.

  I point to a smaller sign tacked to a nearby tree written in nothing but Japanese characters. “What does this one say?”

  Junko approaches and reads through it a few times, nodding her head, taking it all in, then: “It says, ‘Your life is a precious gift from your parents. Think about them.’”

  I stand back and look around the path. The forest is quiet, no animal noises, no insects buzzing, no gusts of wind causing trees to knock together and no children playing unsupervised nearby or family picnics and happy memories being made. Just nothing. The sky is gray, has been all morning, and I set my pack down for a moment, stretching my back. Junko sees me and does the same.

  “Want me to carry your bag a bit?” I ask.

  “What? No,” she says, concerned.

  “Are you sure? It looks heavy.”

  “You are already carrying your pack. I do not need you to carry mine.”

  “Relax. I’m just trying to help.”

  She stops, composes herself. “Sorry. I am just anxious. Do you understand?”

  “Yeah, I do. What did you put in there, anyway? I thought we were only packing some food and water.”

  “Just some of Izumi’s things.”

  “Can I see?”

  “Not now.” She forces a smile.

  “Sure. Fine.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Eleven-fifteen.”

  “I would like to keep moving,” she says picking her pack up. I watch as she puts it on, then pulls her hair free from her ponytail. She runs her hands through it a few times, and ties it back tight, checking quick to make sure it’s in place. She sees me watching her and smiles, blushes a bit.

  “Well, which way?” I look quick in both directions, seeing nothing but the same: a worn path of dark earth disappearing in two directions, an army of trees straddling them on both sides, and darkness under the canopies.

  “This way,” she says moving left. East.

  “Are you sure?”

  “It feels right,” she says and starts moving, not waiting for me. I watch her for a moment before I start following, watch her disappear into the shadows of the woods again, watchful as she passes by every whorled and knotty tree, reading into the patterns of the bark as if they’d give us some clue to Izumi’s last days, what path she chose in this labyrinth, the only sound in this entire place her feet as they march on, beating hard against the ground.

  On her sixteenth birthday, Yui Sato had had enough, locked herself in the toilet, and attempted to kill herself by mixing detergent and bath salts—her mother’s—
a method she had researched on the internet. She sat on the cold tile floor as the mixture turned into a thick white gas and quickly filled the room, breathing in the pungent fumes for nearly five minutes before her father, Haruki, managed to force his way in and rushed to open the window. Haruki and the rest of the family—her mother, Mako, and younger brother, Koji—were in the den watching television and the moment she saw her father’s eyes she wished she hadn’t acted so quickly and waited until she was alone—it had been the rotten egg smell that had given her away.

  Months later the incident was nearly forgotten, Haruki buried in his work, Mako withdrawn and tending almost exclusively to Koji during his impeding adolescence. Yui was forced to talk to a counselor about her actions, and out of those sessions she developed a desire to have a better future, being told that, among other things, she deserved one—that the light would most certainly present itself to her. So Yui came to renounce the selfish act, and as similar deaths were reported on the news, all successful in her method—a twelve-year-old girl in Nakano City, a forty-year-old man in Kita, among others—she laughed at what she had almost accomplished, the desperate acts of a young girl starving for attention.

  But on her seventeenth birthday, something changed in Yui again—the dreams she had been cultivating in the previous year, all of the wishful thinking and daydreams, came up short, or not at all. So she became withdrawn again, skipped school, stopped seeing her friends entirely and, when at home, holed herself up in her room, on her computer. She became fascinated with the rising number of Japanese who commit suicide, trying hard to understand the phenomena among her people. This lead, naturally, to her thoughts settling on the more philosophical ramifications of death, concluding finally that this world had nothing left for her, and that the next—even one she would be propelled into by her own hands—would have to be better.

  So Yui set about planning—this time down to every meticulous detail—the different ways in which she could kill herself without interference, deciding the further from home she could go the better for all it would be. She knew how she would do it—quick and to the point, but not where, and then, suddenly, it appeared to her: Aokigahara. She had heard stories all her life of those woods, of the folklore and how people went there to do the unthinkable, to die in peace amongst the trees, and when she saw a news report about the unprecedented number of bodies found there by the Suicide Patrols—dancing images of the lush landscape caked with lava rock and various leafy trees, a far cry from her life in Tokyo—she decided almost immediately to trade one endless abyss for another, preferring, she thought, the endless green to the endless neon.

  A week later her plans were set: She would eat breakfast with her family, kiss Koji on his head, hug her parents, and leave for school—only this time, she would take the train to Shinjyuku Station, the Chuo Expressway bus to Kawaguchiko Station, and finally, ninety minutes later, a local bus to Aokigahara. When the day came, she was surprised at how she felt: no remorse, no fear. She enacted her pre-set motions like a skilled actress, all of them performed many times in her head leading up to it, no one suspicious that she would not be returning. She tucked a small note in her favorite book left on her bed, a simple letter telling her family that she loved them, because she did, and began her journey.

  No one spoke to Yui that morning, not at the stations or the crowded trains nor the conductor of the buses she took. When she emerged from the final bus at the entrance to Aokigahara, a sparsely-occupied parking lot where day hikers would come—a trailhead—she felt relieved. And when she first felt the dark soil beneath her feet, a confidence washed over her. She passed few hikers, many of whom paid no attention to her, just a girl out for a hike, and trekked deeper into the silent woods, the woods with the towering trees blocking out the grey sky. After she had been hiking for two hours, significantly out of the way of watchful and concerned eyes, determined to find the perfect spot, emerging finally into a small clearing surrounded on all sides by dark trees with knotted bark that wisped up crooked toward the sky. She smiled: this was it.

  Yui lay on the ground at the center of the small clearing and waited thirty minutes like that, still and silent, listening to the woods speak to her. She was desperately hungry, but it didn’t matter anymore—nothing did. She tried to shush images of her family grieving, finding the note and trying to determine its meaning, and, unsuccessful, decided it was time, lest she ponder on such things longer and lose her nerve. She pulled from her pack a shaving razor—her father’s—and removed the blade from it. She held it up, glinting in the bits of sun that filtered down from the canopy, and with no grand speech, no last words of any kind, ran it across both wrists lengthwise, slicing her arms open, blood pouring onto her lap and staining the ground beneath her dark. She smiled sweetly: there was no pain, just a warmth, and she lay back again, looking at the trees and leaves and sky, finding, for the first time in her life, her place in this world among them.

  Respect

  There was a car in the parking lot of the main trailhead leading into the forest—an eggshell-colored Isuzu four-door dimpled with rust and dents—that had been abandoned for three months, we had been told by a sad-looking woman before she drove off. The owner, whoever it was, had walked into the woods and never come out, presumed dead. Like the rest of them. Junko and I looked through the dirty windows as if we were shopping, finding nothing of notice inside except a used chemistry textbook and a Tokyo Yakult Swallows baseball hat.

  I don’t know why, but now, having been hiking for almost three hours, I start thinking about it again, about what happened to the owner.

  “Remember that car in the parking lot?” I ask.

  Junko stops, still a few paces ahead of me, and wipes her forehead clean. “Which car?”

  “That white one. With the textbook on the front seat.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Why do you think he came here?”

  “What makes you think it was a man?”

  “Well, good point. Whoever it was, what do you think their story is?”

  “I do not know,” she says. “And I do not think it is right for us to decide.”

  “I don’t want to decide, but it’s quiet here, and I think it would help if we talked.”

  “It is not right to speak of the dead,” she says stopping and looking back at me, scolding.

  “But we don’t know if they are dead.”

  I wait for a moment and take a drink of water. Junko walks over to me, smiles, and grabs the bottle, taking a drink herself. “Maybe he hanged himself.”

  “You think?”

  “Many of the bodies they find here . . . they chose that method,” she says handing the water back and looking back toward the path, away from me. “That is what I heard, anyway.”

  “I hope not. That’s a horrible way to go.”

  “Let’s get going,” she says. “We still have much more to go.”

  “To be fair, we still have the whole forest, and we really don’t know where to go. I mean, we’re just prancing along here, hoping we’ll find something, right?”

  “As opposed to what?” she says staring at me, scowling. “Just going home? Giving up?”

  “No, but the chances we’ll find something on a trail like this, on one of the main trails, is . . . probably not very good. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “There are some smaller trails up ahead, some that go closer to Saiko Lake. I would like to go in that direction. Izumi . . . she loved the water.”

  I look around again at the trees, at the path we’re on, and force a smile. “As long as we’re back to the car by sunset, we can go wherever we need to.”

  “Thank you, Bill,” she says touching my hand. “It means so much that you would come with me.”

  “Of course,” I say, not sure if I really mean it or not. “I’m going to go to the bathroom quick, before we go, okay?”

  She nods and her smile fades. I head away from the path and up a small incline through a particularly thic
k group of trees, looking back every few steps to keep an eye on Junko, her eyes searching the woods, constantly looking for something. I navigate through the trees, the bark smooth to the touch as I pass by, when suddenly I see it: a pile of knickknacks near a large, especially knotty tree, personal artifacts left behind, the first real glimpse of someone else having been here. I move closer, nervous, but I’m not sure why, and kneel, taking stock of what I see: a pink hairbrush with strands of long dark hair still twisted around the head, a pair of torn black leather gloves, a half-empty can of hairspray, a compact wedged open (the mirror inside cracked in half), letters written in Kanji, and a pair of large-framed glasses, lenses still intact. I kneel next to the pile and wonder why it got dumped here, of all places. If the owner got fed up trudging through the forest and decided this was the best place to get rid of all their earthly possessions.

  “Hey,” I shout back toward the path at Junko. “Come and look.”

  I can hear her approach on the thick layer of dried leaves and sticks along the ground and she lets out an audible gasp when she sees the items. I turn to look at her and she looks scared, nervous, and I hadn’t thought that these could belong to Izumi. I stand and face her.

  “What . . . is this?” she asks, still at a distance.

  “I just found some stuff is all. I don’t know . . . if it’s hers.”

  She peeks around me, afraid to come any closer, and meets my gaze again. “Is there a stuffed bear?”

  “Stuffed bear? No.”

  “I had given one to her when we were younger. She took it with her everywhere.”

  “Well, maybe these things aren’t hers, then. Do you . . .” I stop, rub my head, and watch her for a moment. Then: “Do you want to check it out and see? Just to be sure?”

  She nods and takes a few steps forward, testing the ground as if it may fall out from under her, and mentally sifts through everything, still standing. “What is that paper?”

  “Looks like a letter. Do you want to see it?”