Aokigahara (D.O focus) (1/4)
aokigahara| d.o. focus | r | angst/drama | 16608 words | kyungsoo, a korean writer travels to the sea of trees, at the base of mt.fuji
tw: suicide, depression, gore, mazeophobia (fear of getting lost), character death
“Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore the equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable - perhaps everything.”- C. G Jung
・
He bows his head to say goodbye to the owner of the small inn he stayed at. The inn keeper’s wrinkled face scrunches up in confusion as Kyungsoo hoists his large pack on his back and kicks on his boots.
“Where did you say you were going again?” The inn keeper asks, suspicion creeping into his soft voice.
Kyungsoo stands up straight, smiles at the old man and answers in perfect Japanese. “I’m off to Aokigahara,” he answers. “I wish to write a new story.”
“You did tell me that you were a famous writer from Korea,” the inn keeper strokes his chin, but the heavy lines in his forehead creases even more. “But why are you going there? You must obviously know what that place is full of.”
Kyungsoo catches the apprehensive expression and raises his hands up as if to assure the man that he means well.
“I’m there for research, I don’t mean to-“
“Are you sure?”
“Honest, I am just going there to write. I won’t be long.”
The inn keeper takes notice of Kyungsoo’s backpack. “How long are you going to be there?” He swallows a hard lump in his throat.
“I have enough food to last me a week. I hope I’ll be out before then.”
“Just a week?” the inn keeper clarifies, and Kyungsoo nods eagerly.
“Promise this old man something, will you?”
“Sure, anything you need?”
“Promise me… that when you come out after a week, you come back here to prove that you’re alive? I know you insist that you are there just to write but, I have to make sure.” The sudden softness in the old man’s eyes strikes deep into Kyungsoo, and he nods in agreement.
“I will be sure to stop by when I come back out. I promise you.” Kyungsoo bows low, thanking the man for giving him space for him to sleep and eat for the past few days, and that it was a pleasure staying here. He turns on his heel and slides the front inn door open and walks out.
“What a horrible thing,” the inn keeper mutters. “To make a person go through something like that.”
・
Do Kyungsoo is a young yet very promising and talented novelist. Having a series of poems and essays published in distinguished magazines all over Korea while he was still in college, Kyungsoo’s fame came to fruition when he had a very successful fictional novel published two years after graduating. He even won the Literary Achievement Award for the book, and he was only getting started. Kyungsoo has always loved creating new stories or putting new twists to old ones, weaving tales and entrancing minds with his words. He will dabble in any genre- non-fiction, romance, adventure, historical fiction, horror; because he claims he hasn’t really found his niche genre, the one where he truly favors one over the other. Ever since he was five, he was taught by his parents, one an interpreter and one a high school principal, that a man will have lived one thousand lives of he has read, and he just always found solace in a good book. He’s been set on becoming a writer by the time he was eight, writing short stories and spending his childhood nursing cramps in his hand and writing ideas on every scrap of paper. His love of reading and writing was almost matched by his love of languages, and he spoke and understood English and Japanese fluently. He hopes that maybe his stories will spread throughout the world, and he’ll have the population fall in love with books again.
Kyungsoo was told that he was born incredibly curious, and despite his demure and bookish nature he’s bold and willing to try new things. Nothing was off limits, especially when it came to writing. So it’s no surprise to his colleagues at the publishing firm that he’s venturing off to the doomed forest in Japan to start on his new book.
“Japan?” his editor scoffs. “What on Earth for? We have plenty of beautiful forests here in Korea, and far cleaner and far more beautiful, I’ll tell you that.”
“Oh Sulhee,” Kyungsoo merely shrugs. “Idle curiosity, it’s Japan; I’ve been meaning to go back, and to explore this spot. I don’t know, but, I just have this new idea in my head that tells me I have to go to Aokigahara.”
Sulhee frowns and Kyungsoo thinks she looks like a grouper. “I just, really? Of all places, you choose to go there? Alone?”
“To see if that feeling means anything, and that I should go with my gut.”
“What if you…?”
“I highly doubt I will. Don’t worry, I’ll be fine, I’m just there to research and to write.” Kyungsoo smiles wide to reassure his editor; he feels he’s going to be doing that more often in the future.
Sulhee lets out a heavy breath, and then finally nods in agreement. “Okay,” she says. “How long will you be gone?”
“Not even two weeks.”
“You don’t need anyone to set up a guide for you, or a translator?”
“No, no need. I will manage.”
“I hate for you to go alone.”
“Didn’t you allow that novice researcher go out to Vietnam all by herself? The one who doesn’t speak any Vietnamese?”
“That was different; you’re going to a place I wouldn’t dare to send anybody.”
“Well you know me, I’m not just anyone.” Sulhee’s eyes turn steely behind her glasses, but Kyungsoo doesn’t shy away.
“I expect at least the first five chapters done, along with plenty of notes, and a title done, by the time you get back,” is all she says to him.
・
There are five people and three cars standing in the parking lot at the entrance to Aokigahara. To Kyungsoo, it looks like the entrance to a nature preserve, and he doesn’t seem nervous at all. He passes a small white car that looks like it’s been abandoned for months- the tires are partially deflated, dried, crunched up leaves gather in the space between the cracked windshield and the hood, and dirt collects on the paint. But Kyungsoo merely glances at it and doesn’t think on it. The five people are standing in a circle, shoulders hunched and Kyungsoo can barely see that they are nursing cigarettes. One man, a foreigner, spots him and he stares, his eyes blank and it looks like he’s watching a man walk towards the execution block.
“Are you going in there?” He calls out in English, and Kyungsoo can hear a little fear in his voice.
“Yeah,” he answers. He watches the way the other four smokers turn to face him, and their eyes seem to match the same resigned look as the foreign man. “I’m going to be there.”
“Alone?” It was a Japanese man with perfect yet accented English.
Kyungsoo puts his hands up, like he did with the innkeeper. “I’m not going to-“
“You shouldn’t go alone!”
“I’ll be fine; I’m just going to be writing,” Kyungsoo states. The Japanese man comes up to him, the most solemn expression on his face.
“Are you sure?” He switches to Japanese, voice faint and eyes hollow.
“I promise you,” Kyungsoo has the beginnings of a nervous smile on his face, but it doesn’t reach his eyes and it’s not convincing the stranger. “I’m not going to-“
“I just want to make sure, because of course we don’t know each other, but your life is precious, you know?” Kyungsoo just nods.
“Maybe you intend to die there, maybe you’re just thinking about it.” The man puts his half-burnt cigarette back into his mouth and Kyungsoo watches the way the smoke wafts upward in wispy tendrils. The stranger pulls out a crumpled receipt and a pen out of his pocket, and hastily scrawls something on the back.
“I’m going to give you my number,” he holds up his hand as if to halt Kyungsoo’s protest. “If you ever feel like- well, just call me.”
“Okay.”
“I’m Ryohei. If you ever feel like… just call.”Ryohei hands the piece of paper and Kyungsoo takes it in both hands, bows his head in thanks, and watches Ryohei walk back to his circle of friends. The group looks at Kyungsoo long and hard for a moment, and then they begin to head out into the entrance of the forest. Kyungsoo pockets Ryohei’s number and turns to face the thick expanse of the sea of green. He quickly turns back and all five of the hikers are gone, no traces of them even entering the forest, like the trees and foliage has swallowed every fiber of their existence.
・
Kyungsoo is on a well-kept trail and rays of sunlight pierces through the spaces between the leaves. He inhales and enjoys the feeling of his lungs take in the cool, damp air. The weather is perfect; the air hints that it could rain soon and Kyungsoo doesn’t remember if he packed an umbrella.
The forest is beautiful, is what Kyungsoo thinks, even when he passes a metal sign with white Kanji characters painted on the surface, and he pauses to read it. “PLEASE RECONSIDER,” it proclaims. “Your life is a precious gift from your parents. Please think about your parents, siblings and children. Don’t keep it to yourself. Talk about your troubles (‘please get help, don’t go through this alone)!” A number is on the bottom in bold. Kyungsoo absorbs the information, eyes unblinking, as if he needed to commit this message to heart. Then something in him tells him to move his legs, tells him to keep going, and he eventually does move his legs and plods away. He keeps the warning with himself, mumbling the line Your life is a precious gift from your parents until his tongue is tired of clicking against the roof of his mouth as he talks.
Kyungsoo must have walked not even a mile when he notices a bright blue cord wrapped around a trunk of a tree. He stops in front of it and looks beyond into the thick of the forest. He can barely see it, but the cord stretches down into the woods, the stripe of blue threading through endless tree trunks in a haphazard line.
Kyungsoo knows why the cord is there. People who come here, who are sure of spending their last moments in this forest, but are afraid of doing the act, tie a rope around a tree and use it as a guide to get back to the trail in case they chicken out and lose their way. Kyungsoo reaches out to touch the cord, feels how faded yet durable the twine feels under his fingers. Maybe the weather was a factor, but it felt so old and Kyungsoo doesn’t know if the person who left the cord has already left or is still-
He decides to follow the cord, ignoring how branches whip at his face and try to trip him. He climbs over a rock and misjudges how far he has to step and almost falls flat on his face into a pile of dead leaves, but he trudges on, grabbing onto the cord as if it were a lifeline. His pack is heavy on his shoulders, but he doesn’t stop to adjust the straps digging into his collar. The blue cord eventually stops, perhaps the owner ran out, only to fish out a new roll of twine-this time yellow-and keep going. Kyungsoo follows the yellow cord for a mile, until it runs out and there is a green cord wrapped around a different tree that banks left and then upward. He climbs uphill, and then the terrain becomes flat. The green cord has stopped and has led Kyungsoo into a small clearing. There are a couple of empty cans of beer and some crumpled cigarette cartons, but otherwise the place seems void of anything else, let alone any other people. Kyungsoo has no idea where he is or how far he has traveled into the forest, but he figures this is a good place to set up his tent.
・
The last time Kyungsoo has gone camping was when he was about to start middle school. He and his father camped near Hallasan, hiking near the base and living off of ramyun and sausages and staying up late reading epics and poems for four days. It was so open and beautiful, near the sea so every morning Kyungsoo would wake up to the sight of the waves crashing into the rocks. He and his father talked about every book Kyungsoo has read-Kyungsoo proudly telling his father he read Gong Jiyoung’s Go Alone Like the Rhinoceros’ Horn just last week, only to have his father chuckle and say, “that was a good story, wasn’t it? It’s sad that Hye-Wan lost her child and that the three became scapegoated.”- Only for Kyungsoo’s father to have read the same book. Kyungsoo really admired how much his father read, and how he retained so much information from all the books his eyes laid upon. It was nice to discuss stories with his father, but Kyungsoo really wanted to tell his father about a story his father never read, has never even heard of. He doesn’t know why he wants to, maybe to see a spark of surprise in his father’s eyes, or to have his father ask him questions about the protagonist or what the plot twist of the story would be, or if the two characters fall in love.
“Do they fall in love?” Kyungsoo imagines his father’s voice asking him softly. “Does the woman pursue the man, or the woman pursues another woman? Does he or she spend chapters and chapters hinting yet denying their love, or are they straightforward and embrace their love throughout the whole story?”
“You should read it sometime,” Kyungsoo would smile to his father, and then he would see the glint of happiness and wonder in the older man’s eyes, as if he were saying, “you finally found a book I’ve never read.”
Kyungsoo twists the rods of the tent’s skeleton, remembering how his father showed him how to set up a tent. To put a tarp under the tent so that moisture doesn’t come up from the bottom of the tent, and to tie the top of the tent to the tree so there’s always support. Kyungsoo does all of this, carefully and with a small smile on his face as he remembers watching his father do the same thing. After a few moments, the tent is up, and Kyungsoo steps back to marvel at his handiwork. It looks sturdy enough, he thinks, and he opens the flap and sits inside. He unpacks his bag and makes sure everything is there- a spare change of clothes, a couple of small blankets and a pillow, a flashlight, enough water to last several days, toiletries, a small pot and an electric burner, ramyun, bread, and dry cereal (because there’s no such thing as luxury while on this trip), and his brand new notepad, just waiting to be filled with a new story. There is no umbrella. Kyungsoo situates the pillow so he lies on his stomach, and takes out a pencil and starts writing.
He writes about a shy entry-level businessman who couldn’t hold a relationship because he barely spoke and was in danger of losing his job because he had no interpersonal skills. In a way, Kyungsoo feels like he’s writing about himself, the way his personality seem to compliment the character’s traits. He spends a few hours free writing, writing every idea, his tongue sticking out as he concentrates, and going through several pages as he erases and circles words, wondering if it will all fit when he’s through editing his rough draft. By the time he gets halfway through the second chapter, he’s gone through thirty four pages and he almost can’t read his scrawl, but when Kyungsoo sits back and carefully rereads all he has written, it makes sense to him. He’s not sure if he wants to write it in the character’s point of view or as third person, but all that can be decided when he gets back to Korea. He circles a few words because he’s not sure if those should be there, and he’s been at this for a few hours. The sun has sunk low into the sky, and the only way Kyungsoo could know was that the pink sky was peeking through the dense forest. His stomach grumbles, and he remembers he hasn’t eaten since breakfast. It takes him a few minutes to get the electric burner going outside of the tent and a pot of water boiling before he drops the ramyun noodles into the water, and he watches the sky go from pink to magenta to navy to black, and Kyungsoo has to scramble back into his tent to fish out the flashlight. He doesn’t know Japan’s laws on small campfires in the forest, and refrains from taking a leaf and pressing it against the burner so it catches fire and he can make a small bonfire.
The beam of the flashlight doesn’t cast far; it hits the mossy bark of a tree on the other side of clearing and that’s it. Kyungsoo isn’t afraid, the darkness is natural and as far as he knows, no one is here. But there is an uneasy feeling that creeps from his stomach and up to his throat, and something tastes bitter in his mouth. Uncomfortable, is what he feels, and he takes the pot of ramyun off the burner, hurriedly eating the noodles and trying to endure the searing heat on his tongue so he can quickly clean up and head back in the tent.
・
The morning comes slow, and the sunlight filters through the heavy leaves. Kyungsoo slept awkwardly- there is a kink in his neck from being curled up into a ball. The nights in Aokigahara are colder than he anticipated. The early morning dew weighs on each blade of grass, and it drips down from the leaves onto the roof of the tent, creating this constant pat pat pat sound. Kyungsoo yawns widely and recoils because he can smell his breath. He doesn’t expect to run into anyone so personal hygiene can be forgotten on this trip, but Kyungsoo goes about the routine of stumbling outside and furiously brushing his teeth, washing his mouth out with a bottle of water and hurrying back inside the tent. With his breath fresh, Kyungsoo feels invigorated and he opens up a box of cereal and pours a handful of granola in his palm. Eating the cereal, he looks over his writing a few times, occasionally crossing out some more words and scrawling extra notes. The buildup for the character deciding to meet another person to go and end their lives is where he left off so Kyungsoo lays back and brings his pencil to paper.
--
The young woman is a demure waitress at this small and unassuming gyoza shop in Insadong. The character meets her after she serves him an order of lukewarm and soggy dumplings. The beer is flat and the filling in the dumplings is over-minced and the plate isn’t thoroughly cleaned, but the presence of the waitress makes the character feel like he’s in small, yet cosy room eating a homemade dinner. The woman smells of melon body spray and rain, and her smiles reach to her eyes, but she still looks sad. The character finds himself leaning towards the girl to inhale her scent when her arm reaches down to place the plate of gyoza in front of him. She jerks back, almost looking ashamed, but smiles at him and the character feels so warm and apologetic at the same time. They both whisper sorry and the woman runs off.
That is their first exchange of words, sorry. It is the start of many nights holding hands and worrying if they are squeezing their fingers too hard, awkward kisses that taste of kimchi and apricots, and quiet talks, ones that are never really happy, but they find out they are so alike in their feelings, that it doesn’t really matter.
--
Kyungsoo stops writing and puts his writing pad in his backpack. Putting on his coat and shoes, he goes off to explore. He wonders if he should have packed up his tent and brought it with him, in case someone would steal it, but he assures himself no one really steals tents. Still, to be safe, Kyungsoo takes his valuables with him.
The air is thick with moisture and morning dew collected in his boots. Kyungsoo has to pause several times into his walk to get situated with the water seeping into his socks. Maybe he should’ve left his boots inside the tent. Kyungsoo takes in the endless expanse of trees, how the moss desperately clings to the peeling bark, the branches twisting and poking through the brush. There’s a white ribbon, aged just like the cord he followed yesterday, haphazardly tied around the trunk of a tree.
One of the best things about being a writer is writing about the scenery of nature, and getting to travel to places to take every detail. He can almost see the character in his novel stumble over a rock, and miraculously getting pebbles in his shoes. The woman smiles with her sad eyes and holds his hand to keep his balance. Kyungsoo gets so lost in the detail that he nearly walked right into a tree. He stops himself in time, turns left, and treks for a quarter of a mile. His thighs and calves ache from overstepping stones and sinking mud patches, and trying to evade entwining vines and heavy leaves, but Kyungsoo presses on, because he has to find the place to write about, the place that would make this story so raw and real and poignant.
Kyungsoo stops to catch his breath. He doesn’t look where he sits; all that matters is that he rests his legs for a moment. He gulps hard and looks straight ahead. It is nothing but pits of moss and earth, old decaying trees nearly tipped over because their roots can barely hang on to the ground. Sunlight pours out from the sky, and compared to the clearing last night, it seems brighter. Kyungsoo mentally kicks himself for not bringing his camera, because this spot was beautiful. He takes it all in, the mix of greens and browns, how the pale sunlight reflects off the leaves and on some pebbles. Nature is beautiful, is what he thinks.
Then he looks down and realizes where he was sitting. Kyungsoo spent too much time admiring what was in the distance to notice the small amounts of garbage near his feet. Kyungsoo paid no mind to garbage in the forest; people litter all the time, and it was hard-pressed to find a place with no garbage at all. But instead of the usual bits of nylon cord, or beer cans, or food wrappers, it’s dirty bits of fabric, a pair of scissors, a pen, and a half carton of cigarettes. Like everything else, the stuff has been nearly trampled over by years of unsuspecting hikers or park rangers, and dirt collected on it so it’s hard to tell how long the items have been there. Kyungsoo reaches down to pick up the scissors, because despite the rain and rust and dirt, they still look like they could be used. His fingers are centimeters from the scissors when he notices something to the right of him, beneath a tree that finally gave in years ago. Kyungsoo knows that he was bound to, sooner or later, to run into something like this but one can never really prepare himself, can they? He stops and slowly retracts his hand away from the scissors, stares at it for a few moments, then wordlessly gets up and heads back to the clearing.
It was someone’s hand.
・
Kyungsoo overcooks his ramyun and he doesn’t realize it until it’s a spicy, lukewarm mush, but he eats it anyway. He finishes off two water bottles and goes to relieve himself in the far corner of the clearing. Cleaning his hands with hand sanitizer, he makes a move to go write what he saw in his pad, but he just sits there hunched over, rubbing his hands and staring off into space.
Kyungsoo has seen several dead bodies, ones of close colleagues from university and some family members, but he’s never seen human remains. He’s no expert on the science of human decomposition, but he’s confident the skeletal remains were at least a few years old. A chill runs courses through his spine and he closes his eyes for a moment, breathing deeply and mutters to himself, “You’re here to write. You know what’s in this forest. Don’t be scared.” Kyungsoo opens his eyes and scoffs. Scared? He’s not scared. What he feels is sorrow.
He forces himself to reach into his backpack to bring out his writing pad, to quickly detail the scene in the forest. He’ll have his characters catch their breath, deciding that they will go further into the forest for their final spot. He rushes through the writing, almost not noticing how he writes about the man sitting in the exact same spot as he did earlier. Does he want his character to notice the hand? His own hand shakes as he writes about the skeletal hand, his Hangul a hideous scrawl because his nerves won’t settle down, and when the character finds the hand, Kyungsoo writes his reactions and his hand is shaking so hard he tries to stop it but instead his hand pushes into the pencil and creates an angry black streak of graphite across the words. Kyungsoo growls in frustration and throws his pencil and pad down, rubbing his eyes with his palms. He takes a couple of deep breaths and looks up at the trees, sighing as the sunlight pierces through and stings his eyes. After a few moments, Kyungsoo thinks he’s calmed down enough, and picks up his pencil and pad. He can still read past the heavy pencil line he’s just made, so he doesn’t bother erasing it. But instead of picking up where he left off, he quietly talks to himself.
“What makes it so scary is that it’s not me, it’s not my hand, and it’s not the hand of anyone that I know, but it’s a glimpse of what happens to people when they die. It was once a hand of flesh but now it’s just bone. That’ll be me when I die. I’ll be all bone.” He writes this all down, careful and deliberate. “The Earth will swallow my body, will swallow everything except for the bones, like a cat eats a fish.” When he stops speaking, he looks down at his writing pad, sees what he’s said in writing, and breaks out into laughter.
“I’m going insane!” He laughs. He flips to a fresh page and continues the story where he left off, and he doesn’t stop until the sun hangs low and his wrist is burning in pain and stiff.
・
Kyungsoo sleeps late into the next day, and the sun is hidden behind the thick grey clouds. Kyungsoo decides to pack up his tent and move to a different location. It looks like it’s going to rain, so Kyungsoo hurries through brushing his teeth and taking down the tent. folding up the tarp and packing it away with the skeleton of the tent. No time to dig out the cereal, Kyungsoo leaves the clearing and heads north into the forest, where the trees are getting closer, and the air is cloyingly heavy with the smell of pine and white cedar. There is little to no garbage, so Kyungsoo just assumes that people don’t come this far to camp out here. Who would camp in this area? The ground is littered with slippery stones, heavy, stringy moss, and poison hemlock that exudes a foul odor when stepped on. Kyungsoo trudges on, and nearly falls down into a bundle of vines, but he keeps on. Despite sweat pouring down his face, his thighs quivering from soreness, and the humidity increasing, Kyungsoo feels incredibly fine, even when he stops to take a swig of water and he chances to look up into the boughs of one towering tree-and sees the limp white cord, leftover from someone’s noose, with half of it sawn off from someone else- and Kyungsoo doesn’t even flinch. He continues onward, avoids more hemlock and heads west this time. The dry grass crunches under his feet, and the rocks are becoming sparse in number. It doesn’t take long until Kyungsoo reaches another clearing, this one littered with pine needles instead of cans and chip bags. Kyungsoo sets down his pack, sighs heavily, and squats down to rest his legs. He hears a distant boom, almost like a rumble, and Kyungsoo groans because he doesn’t want to deal with a thunderstorm. He feels a phantom drop and scurries to set up his tent, almost forgetting the tarp. By the time he’s finished, the rain comes slow in heavy cold drops that are refreshing, but Kyungsoo can’t set up the electric burner for his ramyun. He hurries into the tent and takes off his boots, putting them in the corner. Bits of mud and leaves have found their way into the safe haven of the tent, but it’s better that than water. Kyungsoo props his head against his backpack, listening to the increasing tempo of the patter of raindrops, and how his stomach gurgles in a cry for food. Kyungsoo reaches into his backpack to pull out cereal, scarfing down handfuls until there’s only half of it left. The rain only seems to pick up even more, so Kyungsoo thinks that this is enough for today; by walking through one of the densest part of the wood, he was able to get more imagery for his writing. He pulls out his writing pad and pencil, and proofreads his writing he did last night. After changing the wording in a few sentences, he picks up where he left off.
--
・
part two
tw: suicide, depression, gore, mazeophobia (fear of getting lost), character death
“Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore the equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable - perhaps everything.”- C. G Jung
・
He bows his head to say goodbye to the owner of the small inn he stayed at. The inn keeper’s wrinkled face scrunches up in confusion as Kyungsoo hoists his large pack on his back and kicks on his boots.
“Where did you say you were going again?” The inn keeper asks, suspicion creeping into his soft voice.
Kyungsoo stands up straight, smiles at the old man and answers in perfect Japanese. “I’m off to Aokigahara,” he answers. “I wish to write a new story.”
“You did tell me that you were a famous writer from Korea,” the inn keeper strokes his chin, but the heavy lines in his forehead creases even more. “But why are you going there? You must obviously know what that place is full of.”
Kyungsoo catches the apprehensive expression and raises his hands up as if to assure the man that he means well.
“I’m there for research, I don’t mean to-“
“Are you sure?”
“Honest, I am just going there to write. I won’t be long.”
The inn keeper takes notice of Kyungsoo’s backpack. “How long are you going to be there?” He swallows a hard lump in his throat.
“I have enough food to last me a week. I hope I’ll be out before then.”
“Just a week?” the inn keeper clarifies, and Kyungsoo nods eagerly.
“Promise this old man something, will you?”
“Sure, anything you need?”
“Promise me… that when you come out after a week, you come back here to prove that you’re alive? I know you insist that you are there just to write but, I have to make sure.” The sudden softness in the old man’s eyes strikes deep into Kyungsoo, and he nods in agreement.
“I will be sure to stop by when I come back out. I promise you.” Kyungsoo bows low, thanking the man for giving him space for him to sleep and eat for the past few days, and that it was a pleasure staying here. He turns on his heel and slides the front inn door open and walks out.
“What a horrible thing,” the inn keeper mutters. “To make a person go through something like that.”
・
Do Kyungsoo is a young yet very promising and talented novelist. Having a series of poems and essays published in distinguished magazines all over Korea while he was still in college, Kyungsoo’s fame came to fruition when he had a very successful fictional novel published two years after graduating. He even won the Literary Achievement Award for the book, and he was only getting started. Kyungsoo has always loved creating new stories or putting new twists to old ones, weaving tales and entrancing minds with his words. He will dabble in any genre- non-fiction, romance, adventure, historical fiction, horror; because he claims he hasn’t really found his niche genre, the one where he truly favors one over the other. Ever since he was five, he was taught by his parents, one an interpreter and one a high school principal, that a man will have lived one thousand lives of he has read, and he just always found solace in a good book. He’s been set on becoming a writer by the time he was eight, writing short stories and spending his childhood nursing cramps in his hand and writing ideas on every scrap of paper. His love of reading and writing was almost matched by his love of languages, and he spoke and understood English and Japanese fluently. He hopes that maybe his stories will spread throughout the world, and he’ll have the population fall in love with books again.
Kyungsoo was told that he was born incredibly curious, and despite his demure and bookish nature he’s bold and willing to try new things. Nothing was off limits, especially when it came to writing. So it’s no surprise to his colleagues at the publishing firm that he’s venturing off to the doomed forest in Japan to start on his new book.
“Japan?” his editor scoffs. “What on Earth for? We have plenty of beautiful forests here in Korea, and far cleaner and far more beautiful, I’ll tell you that.”
“Oh Sulhee,” Kyungsoo merely shrugs. “Idle curiosity, it’s Japan; I’ve been meaning to go back, and to explore this spot. I don’t know, but, I just have this new idea in my head that tells me I have to go to Aokigahara.”
Sulhee frowns and Kyungsoo thinks she looks like a grouper. “I just, really? Of all places, you choose to go there? Alone?”
“To see if that feeling means anything, and that I should go with my gut.”
“What if you…?”
“I highly doubt I will. Don’t worry, I’ll be fine, I’m just there to research and to write.” Kyungsoo smiles wide to reassure his editor; he feels he’s going to be doing that more often in the future.
Sulhee lets out a heavy breath, and then finally nods in agreement. “Okay,” she says. “How long will you be gone?”
“Not even two weeks.”
“You don’t need anyone to set up a guide for you, or a translator?”
“No, no need. I will manage.”
“I hate for you to go alone.”
“Didn’t you allow that novice researcher go out to Vietnam all by herself? The one who doesn’t speak any Vietnamese?”
“That was different; you’re going to a place I wouldn’t dare to send anybody.”
“Well you know me, I’m not just anyone.” Sulhee’s eyes turn steely behind her glasses, but Kyungsoo doesn’t shy away.
“I expect at least the first five chapters done, along with plenty of notes, and a title done, by the time you get back,” is all she says to him.
・
There are five people and three cars standing in the parking lot at the entrance to Aokigahara. To Kyungsoo, it looks like the entrance to a nature preserve, and he doesn’t seem nervous at all. He passes a small white car that looks like it’s been abandoned for months- the tires are partially deflated, dried, crunched up leaves gather in the space between the cracked windshield and the hood, and dirt collects on the paint. But Kyungsoo merely glances at it and doesn’t think on it. The five people are standing in a circle, shoulders hunched and Kyungsoo can barely see that they are nursing cigarettes. One man, a foreigner, spots him and he stares, his eyes blank and it looks like he’s watching a man walk towards the execution block.
“Are you going in there?” He calls out in English, and Kyungsoo can hear a little fear in his voice.
“Yeah,” he answers. He watches the way the other four smokers turn to face him, and their eyes seem to match the same resigned look as the foreign man. “I’m going to be there.”
“Alone?” It was a Japanese man with perfect yet accented English.
Kyungsoo puts his hands up, like he did with the innkeeper. “I’m not going to-“
“You shouldn’t go alone!”
“I’ll be fine; I’m just going to be writing,” Kyungsoo states. The Japanese man comes up to him, the most solemn expression on his face.
“Are you sure?” He switches to Japanese, voice faint and eyes hollow.
“I promise you,” Kyungsoo has the beginnings of a nervous smile on his face, but it doesn’t reach his eyes and it’s not convincing the stranger. “I’m not going to-“
“I just want to make sure, because of course we don’t know each other, but your life is precious, you know?” Kyungsoo just nods.
“Maybe you intend to die there, maybe you’re just thinking about it.” The man puts his half-burnt cigarette back into his mouth and Kyungsoo watches the way the smoke wafts upward in wispy tendrils. The stranger pulls out a crumpled receipt and a pen out of his pocket, and hastily scrawls something on the back.
“I’m going to give you my number,” he holds up his hand as if to halt Kyungsoo’s protest. “If you ever feel like- well, just call me.”
“Okay.”
“I’m Ryohei. If you ever feel like… just call.”Ryohei hands the piece of paper and Kyungsoo takes it in both hands, bows his head in thanks, and watches Ryohei walk back to his circle of friends. The group looks at Kyungsoo long and hard for a moment, and then they begin to head out into the entrance of the forest. Kyungsoo pockets Ryohei’s number and turns to face the thick expanse of the sea of green. He quickly turns back and all five of the hikers are gone, no traces of them even entering the forest, like the trees and foliage has swallowed every fiber of their existence.
・
Kyungsoo is on a well-kept trail and rays of sunlight pierces through the spaces between the leaves. He inhales and enjoys the feeling of his lungs take in the cool, damp air. The weather is perfect; the air hints that it could rain soon and Kyungsoo doesn’t remember if he packed an umbrella.
The forest is beautiful, is what Kyungsoo thinks, even when he passes a metal sign with white Kanji characters painted on the surface, and he pauses to read it. “PLEASE RECONSIDER,” it proclaims. “Your life is a precious gift from your parents. Please think about your parents, siblings and children. Don’t keep it to yourself. Talk about your troubles (‘please get help, don’t go through this alone)!” A number is on the bottom in bold. Kyungsoo absorbs the information, eyes unblinking, as if he needed to commit this message to heart. Then something in him tells him to move his legs, tells him to keep going, and he eventually does move his legs and plods away. He keeps the warning with himself, mumbling the line Your life is a precious gift from your parents until his tongue is tired of clicking against the roof of his mouth as he talks.
Kyungsoo must have walked not even a mile when he notices a bright blue cord wrapped around a trunk of a tree. He stops in front of it and looks beyond into the thick of the forest. He can barely see it, but the cord stretches down into the woods, the stripe of blue threading through endless tree trunks in a haphazard line.
Kyungsoo knows why the cord is there. People who come here, who are sure of spending their last moments in this forest, but are afraid of doing the act, tie a rope around a tree and use it as a guide to get back to the trail in case they chicken out and lose their way. Kyungsoo reaches out to touch the cord, feels how faded yet durable the twine feels under his fingers. Maybe the weather was a factor, but it felt so old and Kyungsoo doesn’t know if the person who left the cord has already left or is still-
He decides to follow the cord, ignoring how branches whip at his face and try to trip him. He climbs over a rock and misjudges how far he has to step and almost falls flat on his face into a pile of dead leaves, but he trudges on, grabbing onto the cord as if it were a lifeline. His pack is heavy on his shoulders, but he doesn’t stop to adjust the straps digging into his collar. The blue cord eventually stops, perhaps the owner ran out, only to fish out a new roll of twine-this time yellow-and keep going. Kyungsoo follows the yellow cord for a mile, until it runs out and there is a green cord wrapped around a different tree that banks left and then upward. He climbs uphill, and then the terrain becomes flat. The green cord has stopped and has led Kyungsoo into a small clearing. There are a couple of empty cans of beer and some crumpled cigarette cartons, but otherwise the place seems void of anything else, let alone any other people. Kyungsoo has no idea where he is or how far he has traveled into the forest, but he figures this is a good place to set up his tent.
・
The last time Kyungsoo has gone camping was when he was about to start middle school. He and his father camped near Hallasan, hiking near the base and living off of ramyun and sausages and staying up late reading epics and poems for four days. It was so open and beautiful, near the sea so every morning Kyungsoo would wake up to the sight of the waves crashing into the rocks. He and his father talked about every book Kyungsoo has read-Kyungsoo proudly telling his father he read Gong Jiyoung’s Go Alone Like the Rhinoceros’ Horn just last week, only to have his father chuckle and say, “that was a good story, wasn’t it? It’s sad that Hye-Wan lost her child and that the three became scapegoated.”- Only for Kyungsoo’s father to have read the same book. Kyungsoo really admired how much his father read, and how he retained so much information from all the books his eyes laid upon. It was nice to discuss stories with his father, but Kyungsoo really wanted to tell his father about a story his father never read, has never even heard of. He doesn’t know why he wants to, maybe to see a spark of surprise in his father’s eyes, or to have his father ask him questions about the protagonist or what the plot twist of the story would be, or if the two characters fall in love.
“Do they fall in love?” Kyungsoo imagines his father’s voice asking him softly. “Does the woman pursue the man, or the woman pursues another woman? Does he or she spend chapters and chapters hinting yet denying their love, or are they straightforward and embrace their love throughout the whole story?”
“You should read it sometime,” Kyungsoo would smile to his father, and then he would see the glint of happiness and wonder in the older man’s eyes, as if he were saying, “you finally found a book I’ve never read.”
Kyungsoo twists the rods of the tent’s skeleton, remembering how his father showed him how to set up a tent. To put a tarp under the tent so that moisture doesn’t come up from the bottom of the tent, and to tie the top of the tent to the tree so there’s always support. Kyungsoo does all of this, carefully and with a small smile on his face as he remembers watching his father do the same thing. After a few moments, the tent is up, and Kyungsoo steps back to marvel at his handiwork. It looks sturdy enough, he thinks, and he opens the flap and sits inside. He unpacks his bag and makes sure everything is there- a spare change of clothes, a couple of small blankets and a pillow, a flashlight, enough water to last several days, toiletries, a small pot and an electric burner, ramyun, bread, and dry cereal (because there’s no such thing as luxury while on this trip), and his brand new notepad, just waiting to be filled with a new story. There is no umbrella. Kyungsoo situates the pillow so he lies on his stomach, and takes out a pencil and starts writing.
He writes about a shy entry-level businessman who couldn’t hold a relationship because he barely spoke and was in danger of losing his job because he had no interpersonal skills. In a way, Kyungsoo feels like he’s writing about himself, the way his personality seem to compliment the character’s traits. He spends a few hours free writing, writing every idea, his tongue sticking out as he concentrates, and going through several pages as he erases and circles words, wondering if it will all fit when he’s through editing his rough draft. By the time he gets halfway through the second chapter, he’s gone through thirty four pages and he almost can’t read his scrawl, but when Kyungsoo sits back and carefully rereads all he has written, it makes sense to him. He’s not sure if he wants to write it in the character’s point of view or as third person, but all that can be decided when he gets back to Korea. He circles a few words because he’s not sure if those should be there, and he’s been at this for a few hours. The sun has sunk low into the sky, and the only way Kyungsoo could know was that the pink sky was peeking through the dense forest. His stomach grumbles, and he remembers he hasn’t eaten since breakfast. It takes him a few minutes to get the electric burner going outside of the tent and a pot of water boiling before he drops the ramyun noodles into the water, and he watches the sky go from pink to magenta to navy to black, and Kyungsoo has to scramble back into his tent to fish out the flashlight. He doesn’t know Japan’s laws on small campfires in the forest, and refrains from taking a leaf and pressing it against the burner so it catches fire and he can make a small bonfire.
The beam of the flashlight doesn’t cast far; it hits the mossy bark of a tree on the other side of clearing and that’s it. Kyungsoo isn’t afraid, the darkness is natural and as far as he knows, no one is here. But there is an uneasy feeling that creeps from his stomach and up to his throat, and something tastes bitter in his mouth. Uncomfortable, is what he feels, and he takes the pot of ramyun off the burner, hurriedly eating the noodles and trying to endure the searing heat on his tongue so he can quickly clean up and head back in the tent.
・
The morning comes slow, and the sunlight filters through the heavy leaves. Kyungsoo slept awkwardly- there is a kink in his neck from being curled up into a ball. The nights in Aokigahara are colder than he anticipated. The early morning dew weighs on each blade of grass, and it drips down from the leaves onto the roof of the tent, creating this constant pat pat pat sound. Kyungsoo yawns widely and recoils because he can smell his breath. He doesn’t expect to run into anyone so personal hygiene can be forgotten on this trip, but Kyungsoo goes about the routine of stumbling outside and furiously brushing his teeth, washing his mouth out with a bottle of water and hurrying back inside the tent. With his breath fresh, Kyungsoo feels invigorated and he opens up a box of cereal and pours a handful of granola in his palm. Eating the cereal, he looks over his writing a few times, occasionally crossing out some more words and scrawling extra notes. The buildup for the character deciding to meet another person to go and end their lives is where he left off so Kyungsoo lays back and brings his pencil to paper.
--
The young woman is a demure waitress at this small and unassuming gyoza shop in Insadong. The character meets her after she serves him an order of lukewarm and soggy dumplings. The beer is flat and the filling in the dumplings is over-minced and the plate isn’t thoroughly cleaned, but the presence of the waitress makes the character feel like he’s in small, yet cosy room eating a homemade dinner. The woman smells of melon body spray and rain, and her smiles reach to her eyes, but she still looks sad. The character finds himself leaning towards the girl to inhale her scent when her arm reaches down to place the plate of gyoza in front of him. She jerks back, almost looking ashamed, but smiles at him and the character feels so warm and apologetic at the same time. They both whisper sorry and the woman runs off.
That is their first exchange of words, sorry. It is the start of many nights holding hands and worrying if they are squeezing their fingers too hard, awkward kisses that taste of kimchi and apricots, and quiet talks, ones that are never really happy, but they find out they are so alike in their feelings, that it doesn’t really matter.
--
Kyungsoo stops writing and puts his writing pad in his backpack. Putting on his coat and shoes, he goes off to explore. He wonders if he should have packed up his tent and brought it with him, in case someone would steal it, but he assures himself no one really steals tents. Still, to be safe, Kyungsoo takes his valuables with him.
The air is thick with moisture and morning dew collected in his boots. Kyungsoo has to pause several times into his walk to get situated with the water seeping into his socks. Maybe he should’ve left his boots inside the tent. Kyungsoo takes in the endless expanse of trees, how the moss desperately clings to the peeling bark, the branches twisting and poking through the brush. There’s a white ribbon, aged just like the cord he followed yesterday, haphazardly tied around the trunk of a tree.
One of the best things about being a writer is writing about the scenery of nature, and getting to travel to places to take every detail. He can almost see the character in his novel stumble over a rock, and miraculously getting pebbles in his shoes. The woman smiles with her sad eyes and holds his hand to keep his balance. Kyungsoo gets so lost in the detail that he nearly walked right into a tree. He stops himself in time, turns left, and treks for a quarter of a mile. His thighs and calves ache from overstepping stones and sinking mud patches, and trying to evade entwining vines and heavy leaves, but Kyungsoo presses on, because he has to find the place to write about, the place that would make this story so raw and real and poignant.
Kyungsoo stops to catch his breath. He doesn’t look where he sits; all that matters is that he rests his legs for a moment. He gulps hard and looks straight ahead. It is nothing but pits of moss and earth, old decaying trees nearly tipped over because their roots can barely hang on to the ground. Sunlight pours out from the sky, and compared to the clearing last night, it seems brighter. Kyungsoo mentally kicks himself for not bringing his camera, because this spot was beautiful. He takes it all in, the mix of greens and browns, how the pale sunlight reflects off the leaves and on some pebbles. Nature is beautiful, is what he thinks.
Then he looks down and realizes where he was sitting. Kyungsoo spent too much time admiring what was in the distance to notice the small amounts of garbage near his feet. Kyungsoo paid no mind to garbage in the forest; people litter all the time, and it was hard-pressed to find a place with no garbage at all. But instead of the usual bits of nylon cord, or beer cans, or food wrappers, it’s dirty bits of fabric, a pair of scissors, a pen, and a half carton of cigarettes. Like everything else, the stuff has been nearly trampled over by years of unsuspecting hikers or park rangers, and dirt collected on it so it’s hard to tell how long the items have been there. Kyungsoo reaches down to pick up the scissors, because despite the rain and rust and dirt, they still look like they could be used. His fingers are centimeters from the scissors when he notices something to the right of him, beneath a tree that finally gave in years ago. Kyungsoo knows that he was bound to, sooner or later, to run into something like this but one can never really prepare himself, can they? He stops and slowly retracts his hand away from the scissors, stares at it for a few moments, then wordlessly gets up and heads back to the clearing.
It was someone’s hand.
・
Kyungsoo overcooks his ramyun and he doesn’t realize it until it’s a spicy, lukewarm mush, but he eats it anyway. He finishes off two water bottles and goes to relieve himself in the far corner of the clearing. Cleaning his hands with hand sanitizer, he makes a move to go write what he saw in his pad, but he just sits there hunched over, rubbing his hands and staring off into space.
Kyungsoo has seen several dead bodies, ones of close colleagues from university and some family members, but he’s never seen human remains. He’s no expert on the science of human decomposition, but he’s confident the skeletal remains were at least a few years old. A chill runs courses through his spine and he closes his eyes for a moment, breathing deeply and mutters to himself, “You’re here to write. You know what’s in this forest. Don’t be scared.” Kyungsoo opens his eyes and scoffs. Scared? He’s not scared. What he feels is sorrow.
He forces himself to reach into his backpack to bring out his writing pad, to quickly detail the scene in the forest. He’ll have his characters catch their breath, deciding that they will go further into the forest for their final spot. He rushes through the writing, almost not noticing how he writes about the man sitting in the exact same spot as he did earlier. Does he want his character to notice the hand? His own hand shakes as he writes about the skeletal hand, his Hangul a hideous scrawl because his nerves won’t settle down, and when the character finds the hand, Kyungsoo writes his reactions and his hand is shaking so hard he tries to stop it but instead his hand pushes into the pencil and creates an angry black streak of graphite across the words. Kyungsoo growls in frustration and throws his pencil and pad down, rubbing his eyes with his palms. He takes a couple of deep breaths and looks up at the trees, sighing as the sunlight pierces through and stings his eyes. After a few moments, Kyungsoo thinks he’s calmed down enough, and picks up his pencil and pad. He can still read past the heavy pencil line he’s just made, so he doesn’t bother erasing it. But instead of picking up where he left off, he quietly talks to himself.
“What makes it so scary is that it’s not me, it’s not my hand, and it’s not the hand of anyone that I know, but it’s a glimpse of what happens to people when they die. It was once a hand of flesh but now it’s just bone. That’ll be me when I die. I’ll be all bone.” He writes this all down, careful and deliberate. “The Earth will swallow my body, will swallow everything except for the bones, like a cat eats a fish.” When he stops speaking, he looks down at his writing pad, sees what he’s said in writing, and breaks out into laughter.
“I’m going insane!” He laughs. He flips to a fresh page and continues the story where he left off, and he doesn’t stop until the sun hangs low and his wrist is burning in pain and stiff.
・
Kyungsoo sleeps late into the next day, and the sun is hidden behind the thick grey clouds. Kyungsoo decides to pack up his tent and move to a different location. It looks like it’s going to rain, so Kyungsoo hurries through brushing his teeth and taking down the tent. folding up the tarp and packing it away with the skeleton of the tent. No time to dig out the cereal, Kyungsoo leaves the clearing and heads north into the forest, where the trees are getting closer, and the air is cloyingly heavy with the smell of pine and white cedar. There is little to no garbage, so Kyungsoo just assumes that people don’t come this far to camp out here. Who would camp in this area? The ground is littered with slippery stones, heavy, stringy moss, and poison hemlock that exudes a foul odor when stepped on. Kyungsoo trudges on, and nearly falls down into a bundle of vines, but he keeps on. Despite sweat pouring down his face, his thighs quivering from soreness, and the humidity increasing, Kyungsoo feels incredibly fine, even when he stops to take a swig of water and he chances to look up into the boughs of one towering tree-and sees the limp white cord, leftover from someone’s noose, with half of it sawn off from someone else- and Kyungsoo doesn’t even flinch. He continues onward, avoids more hemlock and heads west this time. The dry grass crunches under his feet, and the rocks are becoming sparse in number. It doesn’t take long until Kyungsoo reaches another clearing, this one littered with pine needles instead of cans and chip bags. Kyungsoo sets down his pack, sighs heavily, and squats down to rest his legs. He hears a distant boom, almost like a rumble, and Kyungsoo groans because he doesn’t want to deal with a thunderstorm. He feels a phantom drop and scurries to set up his tent, almost forgetting the tarp. By the time he’s finished, the rain comes slow in heavy cold drops that are refreshing, but Kyungsoo can’t set up the electric burner for his ramyun. He hurries into the tent and takes off his boots, putting them in the corner. Bits of mud and leaves have found their way into the safe haven of the tent, but it’s better that than water. Kyungsoo props his head against his backpack, listening to the increasing tempo of the patter of raindrops, and how his stomach gurgles in a cry for food. Kyungsoo reaches into his backpack to pull out cereal, scarfing down handfuls until there’s only half of it left. The rain only seems to pick up even more, so Kyungsoo thinks that this is enough for today; by walking through one of the densest part of the wood, he was able to get more imagery for his writing. He pulls out his writing pad and pencil, and proofreads his writing he did last night. After changing the wording in a few sentences, he picks up where he left off.
--
・
part two