Suicide Forest

WORLD’S SCARIEST PLACES:
BOOK ONE

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
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.

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.

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.

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
making 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.