Go Back

I shouldn't have come here. I definitely should not have come here. My hands were shaking as I clutched my DSLR desperately. Two yards onto the path, and already I couldn't hear a thing. Fumio had told me as much, but even he couldn't have prepared me for how enveloping and crushing the forest's silence would be. Only a few minutes ago, I had still been able to discern the chatter of the tourist group behind me; the giggling group of college girls that would go no farther than the visitor's center. Ninety thousand people had warned me that actually venturing into Aokigahara was foolish enough, let alone by myself. I breathed out, short and sharp, and the puff seemed to echo around me for a split second before being utterly absorbed by the trees.

"Shake it off," I told myself loudly. "You've got a goal, here." I flashed back to my conversation with Fumio, when I finally told him I was going.

"You went," I told him. "You made it out." He absently played with my short hair and sighed.

"Barely. You can't imagine it, you can't imagine what it's like." I sat up off his chest and turned to face him. 

"I can't, you're right. And neither can most people. It's this vast mystery, and poignant, and powerful, and I just have to...have to capture it for people, I guess. Besides, those souls deserve to be remembered." 

"You might not come out." His voice was pleading. I cupped my hand against his cheek.

"I have good intentions. I think the forest will know. It won't hurt me." Fumio shook his head and sighed resignedly, then chuckled lightly.

"In three years, I have never been able to stop you from doing anything. Tell me what I can do to help."

I slipped my hand into my pocket quickly, ascertaining that the map he'd made me was still there. Once I'd walked a few more steps, I turned around and snapped my establishing shot. The path's head was just barely visible, surrounded by gnarled bark and drooping, elegant, dark green foliage. 

"Go back," a tiny voice whispered next to my ear. I gasped and jerked away from the source of the noise, whirling toward it. Nothing and no one was there. 

"You shall face many twisted and warped spirits of the dead," the Shinto priest told me. "Many may have been evil while they lived. Keep in mind I do not advise this, at all."

"I understand." He sighed deeply.

"Take these," he told me, pushing a tightly wrapped bundle of bronze arrows across the low wooden table. "If you are faced with any negative energies, and when you reach the dead, place one on the ground. They have been blessed and will invoke the spirit of the divine protector, Hachiman."

"Does it matter which direction they face? Compasses fail once you enter." 

"No. Also, take this, it is a token of Hachiman. Do not, under any circumstances, take it off." He handed me a small silver circle on a chain; on it was a carving of a beautiful but terrifyingly powerful man wielding a sword in a one hand, a dove in the other.

I wasn't sure if whatever spirit had warned me was malevolent; I doubted it strongly, felt no stirrings of fear beyond my initial adrenaline rush, and so left all my arrows wrapped. After continuing along the path for a while, I stopped again and took some three-sixty shots. I didn't pay much attention to how I set them up; trees weren't necessarily what I was after. 

Finally, after roughly an hour of trying to talk myself out of it, I took a deep breath, clutched the token around my neck, and climbed up a small incline off the path. My heart pounded. This was how people died here. I touched the red ribbon tied around the double-trunked tree I knew I would find, and pulled out Fumio's map. The first X was only about ten feet away. I trekked toward it. 

"I'm so sorry," I murmured. The corpse hanging from the tree was old, its visage indiscernible, but its skull, fully perpendicular to its neck shrouded the whole scene in a ghastly sadness. I walked into the woods dubbed "The Suicide Forest" thinking I knew what to expect, but nothing could ready me for the realization that so many people who had walked in here hadn't intended to walk out again. I quickly captured the shot, and worked an arrow away from its companions, laying it under the dead person's feet.

Walking on to the next X, which was farther away, I stopped often to photograph the memories people had left behind. A rotting sneaker. Decaying backpacks. Piles of rope. It was hard not to think about the fact that some of these belonged to people who hadn't been taken by the forest willingly, people like me. At the next marker Fumio had left, I sat down and sobbed. 

I could only stomach looking through viewfinder at the entangled couple. These were not victims of long ago, not at all. I grimly shot from several angles, hoping to catch the desperate, longing expressions on their faces, and wondering why they were there. Their hands were wrapped tightly around each other. I wiped my tears and dropped another arrow on the ground without looking at it. 

The sun had sunk too low to give much light to the forest anymore, and according to the map, the next marker was at least a half hour's walk. I moved out of sight of the dead couple, pulled some sticks and matches out of my pack, and busied myself making a fire. The crackling of the twigs once they were lit finally gave my surroundings some noise, and comforted me. I drank some water, and was munching on my second power bar when I decided to review my pictures. I deleted my duplicates of the foliage itself, but left everything for the ones with actual subjects. I could never tell which ones would be perfect until I edited.

Scrolling through one last time before I would lay a border of Hachiman's arrows and go to sleep, I noticed something in my very first shot. Just barely visible at one edge was a grimy, mutilated, gray shoulder and arm. I flipped to the next one. Nearly half a torso, and one leg, all in the same state of decomposition. A branch snapped in the distance. My breathing stopped.

I clicked onto the third picture. It was a full person, standing to the side, their mouth a swirling black maw and their eyes fathomless caverns.

"I told you to go back," came a whisper behind me. I screamed.