Into the Suicide Forest

Aokigahara, and what drew people there

It’s strange to see you without your team.

You were in the gift shop at the foot of the mountain, standing in line behind a tour bus party for a paper map of the cave loop. There was a time when you would have made one telephone call and had the survey brought to your room.

I watched from across the car park and did not come in.

***

Aokigahara covers a lava flow. Fuji erupted in 864, burying a lake, and trees grew up out of the rock afterward. The ground here is not soil. Roots snake over porous stone that takes the sound out of the air.

People come here to die. Every year dozens wander in and never come out, especially in March, the close of the fiscal year. In 2019 thirty-seven were found here, only three of them local. The count used to be published and no longer is.

There are more black bears in this district than in any other in the country, so I carried a bell.

***

I felt the pull, a strong one, before I reached the trailhead. Alipore confirmed it was kin. The trail was wide and well-maintained, with plenty of visitors walking it.

I left the path after twenty minutes. The bell sounded smaller than it had in the car park, my own steps barely audible despite the leaf litter.

The canopy there is dark and the mossy ground uneven. Roots run over the rock finding gaps to cling to, and cold air comes up out of them. You cannot walk in a straight line for more than nine paces, and it feels more like a climb than a stroll.

There is tape everywhere. Red plastic tape and twine, tied off at the trunks and running away into the trees, presumably left by people who wanted to know the way back. There is a surprising amount of litter for a country that is so tidy. Food wrappers, mostly. Sometimes a hat or sweater.

I saw the first bear an hour in, low and dark and going away from me. I glimpsed more at the edges of my vision, five perhaps.

Alipore grew warm, then cold, then warm again in the same direction. I followed the warm.

At some point a voice started up in the trees. It was a murmur at first, then soft words in Japanese I didn’t understand. I saw no one.

***

I found the piece a little after four, in a clearing.

The bear lay on top of it, dead and half rotted, curled around it. There was gray on its muzzle so maybe it died of age. Around it, in a ring six yards across, lay the gnawed bones of other animals, and one that was not an animal. Bear shit everywhere, both old and fresher, so it had been living there a long while, eating whatever arrived.

I stood there and felt the pull, but no desire to end my life or anything. The bear would not have wanted to die either.

The pull stopped when I picked it up.

As I was putting it in my bag, you arrived.

You came into the clearing from the north, trailing a guide string, while I had come from the east, unmarked. You looked surprised.

“Don’t,” you said, stepping forward and reaching toward me. There was no propriety to stay your hand this time.

No, what stayed you was the knife I drew. A quality one I picked up in Sakai, just south of Osaka, and honed this morning. I had warned you the opportunity would not come twice.

You wisely stayed where you were.

I circled around to where you’d entered, keeping you at more than arm’s length. Your string was a convenient path out, so I cut it and took it with me, winding as I went so you would not follow.

***

I assume you made it out anyway, now that the lure is in my possession. Think how many lives I have saved, taking it from that wood. What would your people have done with it? Moved it somewhere else, so that the same thing could happen among different scenery?

It’s quiet now, with its kin.

— N.

Jordy Meow, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Two towns at the foot of Mount Fuji, Narusawa and Fujikawaguchiko, pay people to walk in the forest and talk to strangers. They are trained to pick a person out by their clothing, their belongings and their manner, then to approach and begin a conversation. Local shops telephone in anyone who strikes them wrong. Between 2012 and 2019 they spoke to 2,350 people and stopped 525 of them. Since 2024 the prefecture has also flown drones in pairs. The first carries a thermal camera and finds a warm body among the trees. The second carries a loudspeaker and goes to it, beginning below the level of hearing and growing louder as it comes.