The Future Is Japanese (17 page)

I’m so grateful that she’s keeping something to herself for once that I leave it alone.

We’re past where most suicides go, but we find footprints so I stop. Gives the girl a chance to rest. Gives me a chance to keep my profits up.

Result: a bag half buried between roots. I shake off loose soil. Dig through canned food and hygiene products.

The girl asks, “Why’d they bring all that in?”

“Some people stay a long time before they do anything.”

“Saying goodbye to the world?”

“Or making up their minds.”

At the bottom of the bag, a
mokume-gane
wedding band. Dirty. Sized for a small man or a large woman.

The girl watches the light pick a glint from beneath the grime. “How sad.”

I push the ring into my pocket.

Melon continues, “It makes sense to want to say goodbye to the world before you leave it.”

Mist drifts through motionless leaves. Trees creep slowly, invisibly, toward the masked sun.

“This place is like a graveyard,” she says.

“Whole world is. At least here, it looks like what it is.”

We go on. Evening draws closer. Silent and navy instead of silent and white.

I almost lead the girl toward a cave I know when I feel sudden trepidation. I stop abruptly. “Shh!” I hiss to forestall the girl’s question.

A yurei, crouched between trees. He hovers midair, hair parting over his nose and sweeping down in two dark curtains. His exposed jaw stretches all the way to the ground: a gaping maw the size of a door. Black, open, waiting to swallow us into hungry dark.

I pull the girl backward for several meters before I dare turn. We move swiftly through the trees. Takes a while. Navy turns darker. Still doesn’t feel safe.

The girl gets sick of following. Demands, “Where are we going?”

I look back through the dark, toward where the mouth gapes. Yurei like ravens. Yurei waiting to swallow us down.

I’ve lost my nerve.

“We should get out,” I say.

“Why?”

“Something’s wrong. Something’s bringing out the darkest.”

In the last light, she looks lost and lonely. Her voice is all breath. “Maybe it’s me.”

Melon’s stupid and young and American. Annoying as she is, I can’t imagine what about her would draw darkness from ghosts.

Chill on my nape, though. Says maybe I’m wrong.

Melon asks, “Can you get us out this late?”

It’s almost black. Moonlight casts faint silhouettes across nearby trunks.

We’re far away from electrical tape and signs entreating us not to end our lives.

I could get us out. I think. But I don’t want to be wrong.

“We’ll talk in the morning,” I say.

Moonlight reveals her guileless grin.

Two
AM
.

The sound of wind without wind.

Sayomi.

Me on the ground in my sleeping bag. Crisp, night smells. The girl nearby.

Doesn’t matter who’s watching. Nothing stops Sayomi’s devouring kisses. Hair embraces me. Meat-lump tongue laps at my lips. She wants to pull me out through my mouth. Fill her ribcage with my heart. Fill her bones with my marrow.

I want her too.

Legs scissoring. Pelvises matched. Lips to lips. Pleasure fluttering. Hovering. Rising. I should go with her. I should let her make me come. I should come; I should go; at least then I’d be somewhere.

No. Not now. Not tonight, with the girl watching. There will always be another night to let Sayomi suck me down.

I shove Sayomi away. She screams. Hair lashes my face, leaves stinging marks that will last till morning.

“No.” I shove again.

Hair winds around my throat. Pulls tight. An ethereal glow lights the whiteness of her skin. Her teeth are bared, her weeping eyes bloodshot. She strains as her hair cinches tighter.

Throat hot. Lungs searing. I’m suddenly hyper-aware of air on my face, on my thighs—air I can’t breathe.

Sayomi’s never gone this far before.

Even as her hair strangles me, strands of it separate to move beneath my waist. The burning cinch. The gentle stroke. Each sensation sharpens the other.

My vision sparks. Blue. White. Fading. Can’t even struggle.

A rock streaks past Sayomi’s cheek, clatters on the ground behind her. She can’t be hurt like that anymore, but she recoils with surprise. Her hair withdraws from me, moving reflexively to protect her like a shield. I can just make out Sayomi’s eyes behind the veil. Angry. Betrayed.

Air chokes my throat. I grasp my neck. Pain all the worse now that I have oxygen to feel it.

Hands on my back, checking to see if I’m all right. Melon’s hands. “Nao!” she exclaims.

Sayomi looks down at us and screams again, that hair-to-heel scream that scatters her into the night.

“I tried not to watch,” Melon says.

I clutch my burning throat.

“Her bones are white. I thought you had to be dead a long time for your bones to bleach like that.”

Her voice trembles. Her eyes are afraid. Maybe she’s realizing the danger now. These aren’t American ghosts you can banish with water and chanting. They’re yurei. They take what they want.

I knew Sayomi was dead as soon as I read her email. She was long gone by the time I arrived in Aokigahara.

I’ve spent years reconsidering all the times we’d spent together after I left for school. The phone calls made when one or the other of us should have been sleeping. The emails complaining about classwork. The summer after my second year when I came home and we went hiking but we got too tired to climb and so we laid down near the mountain’s base instead, holding each other’s hands and watching the sky.

I should have heard the plaintive tone in her voice on the train heading back. “You’ll always come back for me, won’t you?” She was staring out the window, not even able to look at me. I hadn’t understood what that meant.

I didn’t give her what she needed then so I give her what I can now. Not much: a few kisses, a nightly embrace.

Until I can muster more.

The girl and I are both awake by dawn.

She’s angry that I still want to go back. “I need to find my father! You deal with ghosts all the time. I thought you were an expert!”

“That’s why I know when to leave.”

“You can’t just stop! I’m paying you!”

I laugh.

Angry surprise lights her face. American girl, used to money buying power. She doesn’t expect
dismissal
.

“This is my only chance! I have to fly back to Nebraska on Tuesday. Who knows if I’ll ever get back? I have to find my father! Please! You owe me. You wouldn’t even be here if I hadn’t rescued you last night!”

I wait for her to run out of shouting.

“I’m heading back,” I say. “Come with me or go alone.”

Her face goes blank, caught between pride and fear.

I throw her a bone.

“Maybe we’ll find your father on the way out.”

When we glimpse sunlight, the trees thicken.

Down past the rocks, the trees thicken.

Along every path, the trees thicken.

Each time, I turn heel and try another way. My heartbeat goes faster. My mouth dries. I tell myself I’m only lost. I’ll find the way.

But I already know. There is no way.

The trees have claimed us.