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  SUICIDE FOREST

  WORLD’S SCARIEST PLACES: BOOK ONE

  JEREMY BATES

  Copyright © 2014 by Jeremy Bates

  First Edition

  The right of Jeremy Bates to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-0-9937646-3-9

  For a limited time, visit www.jeremybatesbooks.com to receive a free copy of The Taste of Fear.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  All the novels in the World’s Scariest Places series are set in real locations. The following is an excerpt from the Wikipedia “Suicide Forest” entry:

  Aokigahara (青木ヶ原), also known as the Suicide Forest or Sea of Trees (樹海 Jukai), is a 35-square-kilometre (14 sq mi) forest that lies at the northwest base of Mount Fuji in Japan. The forest contains a number of rocky, icy caverns, a few of which are popular tourist destinations. Due to the wind-blocking density of the trees and an absence of nearly all wildlife, the forest is known for being exceptionally quiet.

  The forest has a historic association with demons in Japanese mythology and is a popular place for suicides (57 in 2010) despite numerous signs, in Japanese and English, urging people to reconsider their actions.

  2004

  PROLOGUE

  Suicide Forest is real. The Japanese call it Aokigahara Jukai (Ah-oh-kee-gah-hah-rah Ju-kii), which means “Sea of Trees.” Each year local authorities remove from it more than one hundred bodies, most found hanging from tree branches and in various states of decay. Abandoned tents, moldy sleeping bags, dirty daypacks, and miles of ribbon litter the forest floor. It is said the area is haunted by the ghosts of the suicides, and locals often report hearing unexplained screams during the night. Signs warn visitors not to leave the hiking trails. These are routinely ignored by thrill seekers hoping to catch a glimpse of the macabre. Most find their way out again. Some never do.

  1

  We took two cars from Tokyo to Yamanashi Prefecture, where Fujisan, better known in the West as Mt. Fuji, was located. The first car was directly in front of ours. It was a Toyota minivan, smaller and boxier than the ones you see back in the States. It belonged to a salary man named Honda. I guess you could make a joke about Honda driving a Toyota, but that was his name: Katsuichi Honda. Also in his car was Neil Rodgers, a fifty-five-year-old English teacher from New Zealand, and a guy named John Scott. I didn’t know anything about John Scott except that he was an American soldier stationed in Okinawa, and he knew my girlfriend Melinda Clement because they went to high school together.

  Driving our car was Tomo Ishiwara, a twenty-two-year-old university student studying psychiatry, which was a rare major in Japan. Generally speaking, people over here didn’t speak about their problems; they drank them away. One of the first expressions I learned fresh off the plane four and a half years ago was nomehodai, which basically means all-you-can-drink shōchū, sake, and beer. For some people in over-stressed Tokyo, this was a nightly occurrence, and in many cases it was better therapy than weekly sessions with a shrink.

  I sat shotgun. Mel was curled up on the backseat in a fetal position. We went to a bar the night before for a friend’s birthday party. She got silly drunk. It wasn’t the smartest thing to do on the eve before you climbed a mountain, and I hoped she was going to be okay on the way up. Nevertheless, a potentially more serious concern than her hangover was the weather. When we left Tokyo this morning at ten o’clock, the sky was a dismal felt gray. That was typical, and it hardly meant it was going to rain. But it should have lightened when we got out of the sprawling metropolis. Instead it darkened, the light grays becoming thunderhead grays. In fact, the entire sky had seemed to swell, pressing fatter and lower over the landscape of rice fields and woodlands. For the last two hours I’d been waiting in vain for the clouds to blow away, for a crack to form, filled with blue and sunshine, because I didn’t think you could climb Fuji in the rain. The flanks of the mountain were covered in volcanic rubble, which would be slick and treacherous. Your jacket and clothes would get wet, which would freeze when the sun went down and the temperature plummeted. Not to mention at some point you’d be walking through the clouds. What if lightning decided to strike? I had no idea what it would be like to be inside a cloud where lightning was birthed, but it didn’t sound very safe at all.

  Staring out the windshield now, at the iconic Mt. Fuji towering in the distance, I shook my head, an almost imperceptible gesture. I’d planned for everything—everything except the fucking weather.

  We continued west along the Chuo Expressway for another ten minutes before entering Kawaguchiko, a touristy town around the eponymous lake at the base of Mt. Fuji. The town seemed dead, nobody out and about, perhaps because of the foul weather. I thought I heard music and wound down the window. I was right. Playing over loudspeakers lining the street was some nostalgic eight-bit Nintendo music. It reminded me of the cheesy stuff that played when your videogame character enters a new town in Pokémon or Final Fantasy.

  Only in Japan, I mused. And it was true. Japan was a different world for me, completely foreign but seductive, and I rarely went a day without marveling over some aspect of the country’s culture or technology.

  Mel and I—and Neil, for that matter—all worked together at the same private English teaching company called HTE, aka Happy Time English. It was by far the largest company of this type in Japan, with some four thousand schools across the country. Although it was a notorious teacher-farm, it was a good choice to go with if you’d never been to Japan before because they did everything for you, from sponsoring your visa to getting you a fully furnished apartment. They even gave you an advance on your salary, if you needed it. Most did because the majority of teachers they shipped over were broke college graduates with no savings, and Japan could get pricey.

  Mel and I have both been with HTE for close to four years now, though this was likely our last year. Mel had her mind set on heading back to the States when our contracts expired in three months’ time. This was the reason I’d organized the trip to Fuji. Living in Japan and not climbing the mountain would be equivalent to living in France and never visiting the Eiffel Tower, or living in Egypt and never exploring the Pyramids.

  Honda put on his blinker and turned off the main street.

  “Where’s Honda going?” I said. Katsuichi Honda preferred to be addressed by his surname, as was common practice among older Japanese.

  “Don’t know,” Tomo replied. “I follow.”

  We tailed Honda’s van through several side streets before ending up at the town’s train station, a stucco and half-timbered building with a brown shingled roof, something that would look more at home in the Swiss Alps rather than in rural Japan. The parking lot was as deserted as the rest of the town. Honda pulled up in front of the main entrance. We stopped behind him.

  “Why do you think he’s stopping here?” I asked.

  Tomo shook his head. “Beat me,” he said. His English was pretty fluent, but he consistently butchered his articles, prepositions, and plural forms.

  I turned in the seat. Mel remained fast asleep.

  “Wait with her,” I told Tomo. “I’ll find out what’s going on.”

  I got out of the car. The air was crisp and smelled of autumn, which was my favorite season. It always evoked childhood memories of trick-or-treating and hoarding candy and m
aking ghosts from tissue paper and cotton, and spiders from fuzzy pipe cleaners.

  I stopped at Honda’s van, where the others were already out and stretching. Honda wore a red jacket and khaki pants with pleats and cuffs. He had a full head of thick black hair, graying at the temples. His wire-rim eyeglasses sat perkily on the flat bridge of his nose. He worked for a Japanese construction company, and he claimed to have met Donald Trump in Trump Plaza during a business trip to New York City. He said Trump’s daughter personally escorted his sales team to Trump’s office. On first sight, before any introductions were made, the chubby Queens native with the bad hair stood up from his desk and announced, “You guys want a picture with me, right? Come on over here.” Stereotyping the flash-happy Asian? Or pure megalomania?

  Neil’s hedgehog hair was light brown, and he disliked shaving, so his jaw was usually covered in stubble, as it was now. Like Honda, he also wore eyeglasses, though his sported trendy black frames. He’s lived in Japan for something like twenty years, teaching English as a second language the entire time. He doesn’t open up much, and we’ve never sat down for a heart-to-heart, but from what I’ve gathered from coworkers, he came here with his first wife, a fellow Kiwi, to save up for a down-deposit on a house in Wellington. This was back during Japan’s “bubble economy” when the yen was ridiculously strong and the New Zealand dollar equally weak. At some point he began to have an affair with a student a dozen years his junior, which would have put her at about twenty-two then. The missus found out, returned to New Zealand, and divorced him, taking all of their savings in the process. He remained here, living from paycheck to paycheck like most overseas teachers regardless of age, and enjoying his life.

  I didn’t know what to make of John Scott, the army guy. He was several inches shorter than me, standing at about five foot ten, and stockier. Beneath short-cropped hair with a ruler-straight hairline he had an everyman face, cornflower blue eyes, and a strong jaw and nose. Maybe it was his leather jacket I couldn’t get past. It was thin, three-quarter length, and more stylish than functional. Who wore a jacket like that while climbing a mountain? Or maybe it was his boorish confidence. When we picked him up out front a Tully’s Coffee, and everyone made introductions, he was backslapping and acting as if he’d known us all for months, not minutes.

  “Ethos!” John Scott greeted. I could only assume he’d forgotten my name, which is Ethan, or this was some sort of buddy-buddy nickname.

  “Why did you pull in here?” I asked Honda.

  “It’s going to storm,” he said, looking up at the sky. I looked up too—a mimicking instinct. Unsurprising, the clouds were as dark and low as they had been when I’d looked up two minutes ago.

  “It might blow over,” I said, turning to Neil. “What do you think?”

  He shook his head. “I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

  “We can wait it out.”

  “For how long? I thought the plan was to start climbing right away?”

  Mt. Fuji was divided into ten stations, with the first station located at the foot of the mountain and the tenth being the summit. Paved roads went as far as the fifth. Our original plan was to drive to Kawaguchiko Fifth Station and begin climbing at approximately 4 p.m. Then, after a three-hour trek, we would stop in one of the mountain huts that dotted the trail to get something to eat and rest before starting off again at midnight, ideally passing through the Shinto gate at the top at around 4 a.m., right before sunrise.

  “We could hang around town until ten or so,” I said. “Start the climb then.”

  “One continuous hike through the night?” Neil said.

  I nodded.

  “What are we going to do all day?” John Scott said. “Sit around and talk?” He made it sound as though talking were a punishment.

  “How about Fuji-Q Highland?” Honda suggested.

  “The amusement park?” I said.

  “I’m not spending the day in an amusement park, thanks,” John Scott said.

  “What do you recommend?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know yet. But let’s think this through.”

  “There are many hot springs here,” Honda said. “We can go to one, then take lunch afterward.”

  “Have lunch,” I corrected him vacantly. I didn’t usually do this outside the classroom, but “take lunch” always irked me, one of those expressions the Japanese favored that just sounded wrong. You teach for long enough, you’ll hear some pretty odd stuff. Once I asked an attractive female student what she had for dinner, and she told me a cock. I asked her where she got the cock, to puzzle out the mispronunciation, and she said the machine at the front of the school. It took me a second before I realized she’d meant “Coke.”

  “Ah, have lunch,” Honda said. “I’m sorry. I always forget.”

  “I don’t think hanging around naked with a couple dudes all afternoon is really my thing,” John Scott said.

  Bluntly stated, but it’s what I was thinking too.

  “We can head up to the fifth level,” Neil said. “Look around.”

  “And do what?” John Scott persisted. “There’s a tourist store where you can buy a hiking stick. That’s about it.”

  “You’ve climbed Mt. Fuji before?” I said, surprised.

  He nodded. “Went with a couple buddies last year.”

  “Why do it again?”

  “Why not?”

  I frowned. Climbing Mt. Fuji was hard, laborious work. I didn’t know anyone who’d done it twice, especially in consecutive years. An old Japanese proverb put it best: “You are wise to climb Fuji once, but a fool to climb it twice.”

  “We can always cut our losses and head back,” John Scott added. “It’s Saturday. Tokyo will be hopping.”

  I looked at him evenly. He didn’t know anyone here except Mel, he was a last minute tag-along, and suddenly he was calling the shots for all of us?

  The main doors of the train station opened, and a young Mediterranean-looking couple emerged. Their hiking boots and backpacks suggested they were here to climb Mt. Fuji, though I would have guessed that even had they been dressed in tennis whites and runners. Why else did foreigners come out this way? They walked past us, heads down, in conversation with one another.

  “Excuse me,” I said to get their attention.

  They stopped and looked at me, then at the rest of our small group. They were quite attractive, both with dark, wavy hair, dark eyes, and smooth, olive-colored skin. The girl was petite, the guy average height and springy in an athletic way. They couldn’t have been any older than me, twenty-five or twenty-six, tops.

  “Yes?” the guy said. He was smiling and seemed like a good-natured sort.

  “Are you two climbing Mt. Fuji?” I asked.

  “That is why we came here. But the woman at the ticket booth told us we cannot climb.” He shrugged. “She said wait until tomorrow.”

  “Did she say the trail’s closed, or it’s just not recommended to climb?”

  “I do not know. Her English was worse than ours, you know.”

  He found this funny and laughed. Based on his gentle accent and cadence, I guessed he was Israeli. While in Thailand by myself the year before during the Christmas break—Mel had gone back to California to visit her mother—I’d met an Israeli named Moshe on the ferry from Ko Samui to Ko Phangan. He was a chatty, friendly guy, and to save cash we agreed to share a room on top of a restaurant which, judging by the mops and buckets in one corner, might have doubled as the janitor’s closet when unoccupied. That same afternoon he invited me to a party to meet his friends, who were already on the island. They were all Israeli, and I quickly became something of a celebrity-oddity. Israelis were notoriously close-knit when traveling together, and an Irish American infiltrating their group was apparently a hoot. I left a couple hours later drunk and stoned and glad to be on my own again.

  “I am Benjamin—call me Ben,” the Israeli added. “This is Nina.”

  I introduced myself and everyone else.

  �
��So what are you two going to do now?” John Scott asked them, though it seemed the question was more directed at Nina.

  “We are going camping.” Ben pointed west. “We were going to climb Fujisan today, then camp in Aokigahara tomorrow. But now we will switch the order. Camp then climb.”

  “Honto?” Honda said, with a rising intonation on the to. His eyebrows shot up above the rims of his glasses. He mumbled something more in Japanese, shaking his head.

  “You’re talking about the suicide forest or whatever it’s called?” John Scott said.

  I saw Neil nodding.

  “Yes, that is right,” Ben said. “Every year many people go there to kill themselves.”

  “Seriously?” I said, surprised I’d never heard of the place before. “Why there? What’s special about it?”

  “There are many stories about Aokigahara,” Honda said. He was frowning, clearly uncomfortable to be talking about the subject. “According to our myths, it was once the site of ubasute. Families would abandon their young or elderly there during periods of famine, so there would be less mouths to feed. Because of this, many Japanese think the forest is now haunted by yūrei, or the souls of the dead.”

  I tried to imagine the psychology behind the decision to doom a loved one to the slow and agonizing death of dehydration, starvation, or exposure. It sounded like the folklore of Hansel and Gretel, only in reverse, with the young abandoning the old. “But what does that have to do with people going there to kill themselves?”

  “It has always been a place known for death,” Honda said simply, “so it attracts death.”

  “And there are those books,” Ben said.

  “What books?” I asked.

  “Many years ago there was a bestselling novel about a couple who kill themselves together in Aokigahara. This made the idea very romantic and popular. Then there was another book called The Complete Manual of Suicide. It described the forest as beautiful and peaceful and the perfect place to die.”