Sea of Trees Read online

I’m close enough that I could, if I wanted, reach out and touch her. I don’t and I’m not sure why. “Please do not come any closer,” she says.

  “Fine, sorry.” I pause. “We might not be able to find our way back tonight. We will have to sleep here.” I take a few steps back, giving her space. “Is that okay with you? I can help you build the hokura . . . if you want.”

  She looks back at me, over her shoulder again, smiling like she did when we had our first kiss . . . a lifetime ago. “Thank you.”

  “Of course. Anything.”

  We stand there some more in silence, wind whispering on the water of Saiko, the waves dancing back and forth. Then I hear the bird again, at least what I think is the same bird that’s been following us.

  I look up and see dark clouds swirling in the sky and when I look back at Junko she has her hand in the backpack. After a moment she pulls something out: a book. “What is that?” I stumble toward her as she drops the backpack at her feet.

  “These were her last words. I found them, in our hiding place,” she says slowly, setting the backpack at her feet.

  “Her words?”

  “Details of what happened to us. She wants me to show the world,” she says. “She wants them all to know.”

  “Know what?”

  She’s breathing heavy now and turns and looks at me, smiling. “I see her. All around us.”

  “Okay,” I say, pleading as she tiptoes closer to the edge. “Please don’t do anything crazy. You have a full life ahead of you, and Izumi would have wanted—”

  “I love you,” she says trembling, looking back out at the lake, then, in a flash, she throws the book to the ground and leaps straight out.

  I stand there dumbfounded: it’s like everything’s in slow motion as Junko’s body disappears over the lip. My body finally wakes up and I rush to the edge, calling out to her, searching through the darkness. There’s no response and I wait to hear the sound of impact but there isn’t anything . . . there’s nothing. “Junko!” I cry out, and for a moment I think of going after her but can’t move, my body frozen. I finally collapse backwards to the ground, watching the sky again, and in disbelief every small detail of the day races through my head, playing back and haunting me as I try to figure out if I should’ve known this could happen. If there was anything I could’ve done.

  And I lie there like that for a while, holding onto the book now, a journal, repeating Junko’s name over and over and feeling truly afraid for the first time today, looking out at Saiko spread in front of me, then at the woods behind—at Aokigahara—the way home swallowed up by trees and darkness.

  Izumi Hayashi had started a journal when she was ten years old, filling it with dreams she had or things she wanted that she saw on television. But when she turned thirteen the contents of the book became darker, more sinister, the cause of which seemed to point to one night when her Uncle Naoki—her father’s brother—came into her bedroom after a night of heavy drinking. Her father, a very proud man, had pieced together what had happened sometime later—made assumptions, really, based on previous lascivious behaviors—but did nothing about it except to make Izumi, his oldest daughter, feel as if she herself had done something wrong. That night changed everything for them, and Izumi’s younger sister Junko—four years younger and naively unaware that anything at all had happened—was taken under her older sister’s protection to ensure nothing like that would ever happen again to either of them.

  As Izumi grew older she had no outlet but her pink journal, recording in detail everything that happened to her that night, including the frequent vivid dreams since which had caused her to relive it. “A single night,” she couldn’t help think. “A single night changed who we all are completely.” Despite this she became a beautiful young woman, and her parents, either by sheer will or ignorance, seemed not to understand why she had withdrawn from them so. Boys and men alike threw themselves at her, and while she entertained some of them—sneaking off or even bringing them home when she knew she would have the house to herself—nothing could ever make her forget what had happened.

  After university, Izumi got a job at a travel agency where she dreamed of whisking herself somewhere far away, believing that to be the only way she could truly move on from that night. But as she would plan, investigating hostels and hotels and even considering what she could do for work, she was reminded that she had a more immediate purpose—protecting Junko—and she would watch as the planning, however brief, would fall apart. But she harbored no regret for her choice to stay behind, that truly, she was unable to leave Junko alone for fear that something, anything, would happen to her—she figured, after all, at least she could be normal . . . could be happy—and after years of dashed inhibitions and broken promises to herself, she saw it her new mission to get her sister as far away from home as possible.

  So Izumi pushed Junko to study hard and go to school in America—to see the world and leave them all far behind. Junko happily obliged her sister’s fanciful wishes and notions, if nothing else than to distance herself from a cruel mother and a distant father, making Izumi promise that she would visit often. Junko never knew the real reason her sister pushed her to leave, nor could she see what Izumi had hidden behind her flawless façade by the time she had left—an addiction to Valium, a dependence on alcohol to just sleep fully through the night. And Izumi, far away from her younger sister, her only buffer from the horrible memories of her past, sank deeper down into a state of despair she could see no escape from.

  Izumi tried hard those first few months after Junko left to live her life and to try to achieve some sort of normalcy—even taking a boyfriend for a short while, Yuu, a handsome young salaryman. But no matter what she did or how she tried to be normal, she found herself coming to the same inevitable conclusion: with Junko gone, and safe, she had served her purpose in this life. She tried for a time reliving her glamorous runaway plans, going somewhere foreign, far away, letting her past go completely, but the fire that was in her once seemed impossible to rekindle—a lifetime of looking over her shoulder, reliving the past the way she had and assuring it would not happen again had left her empty inside, devoid of luxuries such as daydreams. So Izumi further spiraled into a pit of dependencies—including more frequent experimentation with heroin—writing people off, and deciding, after months of trying, that there no longer was a point to it all. At least, she figured, with Junko now a woman, safe from ever having to suffer the way she had, she had accomplished something.

  She wasn’t quite sure when she had decided to end her life, when the last straw had been placed on her back, but it didn’t matter, really—now that the seed had been planted, it was going to happen—so she planned the best she could for such a thing and decided to wait two days for Junko’s birthday. The day soon came and she managed to get in touch with her beloved sister—the first time they had talked in weeks—but their conversation was short: Junko had met a boy, seemed happy, and was going out to meet him. She had no idea it would be their last conversation, but Izumi much preferred it that way, preferred knowing her sister was happy, and wouldn’t have changed a thing. The next day she thought briefly of calling her mother and father but decided against it since conversations between them, at least in any formal way, hadn’t existed in years. Instead she wrote in her diary one last time, a note for Junko, knowing no one besides her would be bothered to read her entries—would care to understand her—thanking her, telling her not to worry and that, truly, this was the best course of action. She then set out for Aokigahara by bus—her family had taken a trip there a year before the night that changed everything, when they were actually happy, deciding it would be a fitting location, a portal into what could have been only if things had worked out differently. If only that day had been erased altogether.

  As she entered Aokigahara just after sunset, Izumi had no idea that her final words would inspire her sister sometime later to look for her, that what had happened to her so many years before—and the inability
of her parents to do a thing about it—would affect her so profoundly. The bond she and Junko shared ran deeper than she would ever know, and as she disappeared into the woods, her thoughts dwelled on her sister, not of herself, hoping, above all else, that they would be together again someday.

  About the Author

  Robert James Russell lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and has known he wanted to be a writer since he was ten years old. A fan of well-placed stream of consciousness and stories that feature everyday characters and dialogue, Robert has a penchant for stories focusing on relationships in all their many forms. In 2010, he co-founded the literary journal Midwestern Gothic, which aims to catalog the very best fiction of the Midwestern United States—an area he believes is ripe with its own mythologies and tall tales, yet often overlooked.

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