CHAPTER 4: I DON’T BELIEVE IN RAW FISH

Flying wasn’t my favorite activity. Not by a longshot.

First of all, there were the people - crowds and crowds of people: Families, with crying toddlers in tow. High-powered businesspeople, who all generally carried too much and had too many clothes to ever get through the security checks effortlessly. Teenagers on their first solo trips, who spoke too loudly and didn’t believe in the concepts of capitalism or using headphones for their music.

Then there was the anticipation. I found the airline lounge, which overlooked the tarmac, a nice little enclave of luxury amidst the human swarms. It was tastefully decorated, a reward for the many miles I had claimed on business trips for Decor but had not spent personally. I walked up to the lounge counter and ordered a glass of red, before finding a seat, a perfect view of a plane revving up, steering its nose toward the start of the runway. It picked up speed, and soon its front wheels lifted up off the tarmac and the whole craft ascended into air, a magical tool of transportation someone in the 1600s would have condemned as witchcraft.

Suddenly my mind flashed to the first Final Destination movie, which I had watched as a teenage girl, with Kelly as an unwilling companion. The plane was barely a hundred feet in the air before it exploded into a fiery mass of doom and death. I took a large swig of the wine. This plane ascended easily, and within a few minutes was out of sight. No loud bang and fiery crash.

Then there was also the waiting.

I arrived at my seat, 7C, exactly when my boarding ticket said. I was the first in the aisle, with all the freedom to move and shift and make myself comfortable.

"Do you need assistance?" one air stewardess asked. I looked at her, smiling, her hair nearly tied up in a ponytail.

"I’m good," I said, and hoisted my single carry-on above my head and into the storage compartment.

"We’ll be taking off shortly, so do make yourself comfortable," she said.

Half an hour later, people were still straggling in. I had taken the seat closest to the aisle, with lots of leg room, but that also meant people had to squeeze past me to get to their seats. It was a couple, a sunny blonde woman in a straw hat with a skinny, tall man in a Hawaiian shirt.

Oh, my God, I thought to myself. This is something out of a bad Adam Sandler movie.

As I got up to let them enter their seats, the woman turned to the man.

"Do you want the window seat?" She asked.

"No, babe, you can take it," the man replied.

"No, you take it!" She insisted.

No, no this is not happening.

"I’m OK with the middle, really," the man said, and he leaned in and gave her a kiss on the cheek.

"Oh, but you won’t get to see the clouds!" she enthused.

"It’s OK - I get to see you and that’s enough!" he said, and he gave her another kiss on the cheek.

"All right then!" the woman said. She turned to me, and said, as if it was an explanation, "It’s our honeymoon. You only get one, right?"

Deep breaths, I told myself.

Finally, there was the flying. As the plane now started to rev up, and the engines made a guttural growl, a mechanical monster waking up from its slumber, I motioned for the same air stewardess who had tried to help me earlier.

"Can I get a glass of wine?" I asked.

"Not when we’re taking off, I’m sorry," she said.

"Okay," I said. She smiled and continued on her way.

"Fuck," I muttered under my breath.

"Are you OK?" the newlywed husband asked.

"Yes," I said. "I don’t like flying, that’s all. I should have drunk more wine at the lounge."

"Well," he said, and he reached into his pocket. He pulled out a little clear plastic box, and shook it. The pills inside rattled. "I hate flying too. This can ease it, if you want."

"No," I said. "I’m good."

"You sure? It really helps," he said, and opened the box. He took out one pill and waved it.

"It really helps," his newlywed wife chimed in.

"I drank earlier," I said. "I’m good."

"Suit yourself," he said. "You’re not supposed to take this with alcohol anyway."

Uh-huh, I thought, and he saw the look on my face. He turned back to his wife to kiss her once more.

"Where are you staying?" the wife pulled out of the kiss and leaned in closer to me, which made me instinctively lean away from her, further toward the aisle. "In Tokyo, I mean."

"Umm... just a small hotel," I said vaguely.

"I wanted to book like an expensive hotel for her," the husband said. "With a huge spa and all. But she didn’t want me to."

"I wouldn’t enjoy it," she said.

"But you’ve always wanted to go Japan," he looked at her. "Only the best for a dream come true."

You should try a bucket list, I thought.

"I don’t like spending money all that much," she said. "I’m very frugal." The way she said it, it came out as frooo-gale. "So we ended up booking just like a normal hotel. Like yours!" She looked at her husband fondly.

"I see," I said politely.

"Do you have like an itinerary planned out?" he asked me. "There’s so much to see and do in Japan!"

"Yes, I do," I said simply. He got the hint. He nodded, and turned back once again to kiss his wife, before looking straight ahead at his little seat screen.

The engines were roaring now, and the plane started to pick up speed. Then suddenly, the immediate sensation that we had left the ground, followed by my ears clogging up in a second. I swallowed, easing the pressure, and closed my eyes.

It would just be absolutely fitting, I thought to myself. If the plane crashed.

***

The plane didn’t crash.

It was a smooth, relatively uneventful start to the journey, except the newlywed husband kept turning to me every time his wife looked away or closed her eyes.

At one point, he even stared intently at me for fifteen seconds, until I glared pointedly at him, following which he finally turned away. He didn’t stare or look my way for a few hours, which gave me some peace of mind to watch a movie.

Fun fact: Finding Nemo 2 isn’t as good as the first one. Then again, sequels rarely are.

After the movie, I fell asleep.

And the dreams came back.

This time, I was in a plane. A plane that looked, of course, just like this one. But it was dark, pitch black, completely devoid of any light or signs of electricity - except the occasional flash of lightning by the window.

This plane was travelling through a storm cloud.

As the lightning cracked around me, and the heavy, dark clouds converged around the plane, I felt a growing sense of suffocation and pressure.

What’s going on? I hate flying. I have to get out of here.

I looked around me, in the seats left and right. There was no one. I was completely alone. All by myself. In an empty, dead shell of metal.

I stood up, but a sudden wave of turbulence rocked the plane and I lost my balance. I fell to my left, and my arm brushed against something solid. Something rough. Warm. Alive.

A crack of lightning lit up the air and filled my nostrils with ozone. The figure I had touched came into view: A gross, grinning humanoid, his head blackened, burned to a crisp, sizzled down to the skull - but his eyeballs, still functioning and fresh, were still in place, still moving, rotating in their sockets like magic eight balls. Where his mouth should have been, a thin, cracked slit, with black gums that held stubs of bone for teeth. His arms, dangling loosely around either armrest, were smoking and rotten, burned strips of human jerky that somehow ended in fully-formed, long, pink flesh fingers.

The eyeballs stopped rotating and locked in position. The pupils dilated and then they came to life. The eyes recognized me. The slit of a mouth widened. And the stubby bone-teeth crunched together in a loud CRACK.

And he reached forward, and he bit into my ear with his bone-teeth. I felt a hole open in my lobe and blood gushed out, streaming onto the burned and dry seat.

The lightning cracked again, and the humanoid’s hands raised up in a gesture of triumph.

"We’re here!" it screamed, shrilly.

"We’re here! We’re here!" it screamed and screamed.

It kept going, like a broken recording of an inane phrase.

"We’re here! We’re here! We’re here!"

***

I yelped with a start, and I almost smashed my head into his face.

"What the hell?" I cried out.

It was the newlywed husband, whose hand was on my arm and his face was tilted towards me very suggestively.

"We’re here," he repeated. "Konichiwa."

We bounced gently as the plane’s front wheels hit the ground again.

"Konichiwa!" The air stewardess overheard him as she passed and responded.

"Yes, yes," I mumbled, shaking my head to clear the fog of sleep. "Please, don’t do that ever again."

He winked. "Sure thing."

I felt a burning feeling rise within my chest, but I quelled it as much as I could. You’re in another country now, I told myself. I peered past him, and the wife was staring excitedly out the window, taking in the scenery of the Narita airport at night. She was completely oblivious.

The plane rolled to a complete stop, and there was a sudden burst of chatter and activity as people rose out of their seats, almost all at once.

The wife got up as well; with that, the slimy husband quickly reverted to his loving facade, holding on to her arm and supporting her up.

I got up and let the newlyweds pass to gather their bags. I did not look at the man at all, nor did I want to give him the pleasure of knowing he had gotten to me or affected me in any way. Once they had joined the line waiting to exit, I sat back down and waited. When the herd thinned a little, I grabbed my carry-on from the compartment and became a straggler at the back.

"Welcome to Tokyo," the air stewardess said cheerfully by the hatch as I passed her. "Enjoy your stay!"

I smiled politely, and it was then that the little tingle of fear I had felt in the days before, at night, in the dreams, and alone in the waking dark, finally faded... just a little.

***

Japan – a lesson in efficiency – got me out of the airplane and out of the airport in fifteen minutes, into the city of Tokyo: a sprawling, overwhelming sight to behold.

There were lights densely cluttered all over the place - atop billboards, large and erect in the distance, every three steps on the sidewalks, in tight grey apartment blocks. As my taxi entered the busy city district, I gaped at the throngs of people, moving effortlessly yet purposefully.

It was like New York City, if New York City had electronics stores and shopping malls and overhead power lines everywhere you looked. It also didn’t quite have the dirt and grimey feel of New York City - no, this city felt more like a well-oiled machine, the people and vehicles cogs that moved and spun and chugged in sync, with a certain mechanical routine that was visible to see in the group of men stumbling out of a sake bar cheering, the mother stepping out of a grocery store with bags and a daughter in hand, and a gaggle of teenage girl students by a convenience store drinking Slurpees.

At the airport, I had asked an attendant how I would go to Aokigahara, and she had given me a strange look, before telling me, in heavily-accented English, "to rent a car and drive."

My research had been accurate then - I was to rent a car and drive the 60 miles down south to the Mt Fuji area. But I wouldn’t be doing that until tomorrow, the day of the expedition itself, so for now, I quickly hailed a taxi.

(That too, was a surprisingly easy process - unlike JFK or LAX, the taxis flowed in and out of the airport as if on a rote schedule, in and out, within minutes, smooth and comfortable.)

My taxi turned out of the city district, and the lights started becoming less bright, more scattered, friendlier to the night. The sounds of traffic, both human and mechanical, started fading away.

I had lied to the newlywed couple on the plane: my actual residence was an AirBnb that had cost me half of any hotel I had scoured for on the Internet, and it was located far from the main Tokyo city, away from the popular tourist spots of Shibuya, Minato and Kawasaki.

The taxi continued driving, and the streets steadily emptied out, into silence and loneliness. Soon, it stopped before a little road that sharply intersected the one we were on. The driver pointed out the window. I followed his finger - it was aimed towards a dimly-lit narrow lane that veered off even further from this road that we had stopped in front of. This smaller side-lane, which looked more like a path suited for bicycles than one suited for taxis, was lined with little one-storey houses, which were backed up by woods.

"Here?" I asked.

The driver nodded. "Walk," he said simply.

I got out of the car, and he helped me unload my suitcase and bag from the trunk. I paid him, and he drove off, down the road, leaving me alone in the quiet stillness of Japanese suburbia.

I took a deep breath, and crossed the road, to enter the little lane.

It wasn’t a long walk; barely five minutes in and I arrived at my stay, a one-storey little mustard yellow concrete block that sat peacefully in the middle of the row of other houses. It was facing another suburban dwelling, a two-storey larger construction with what looked like Japanese elves standing guard on either end of its gate.

The trees behind each row of houses blocked out a lot of the light from the outside road, causing the lane to be shrouded in blanket shadows and heavy darkness.

I stepped up to the house and studied it carefully. Its profile photo on AirBnB, like those on dating sites, definitely oversold the product. For one, it was much older. Wrinkled cracks crawled down its brick roof and external walls. There were three windows on the front of the house: a little square one on each end and one bigger one right next to the door. Adorning the bigger window was a small balcony, on which sat three small potted bonsai. The facade of the house was so unimpressive that it was completely swallowed by its neighbors in terms of size, appearance, and especially so in the night.

It reminded me, rather horrifically, of the haunted Japanese house in The Grudge, and I couldn’t help but think of myself as Sarah Michelle Gellar walking into a nightmare she could never have fathomed.

The interior of the house was slightly better, though not by much. The walls were equally drab and lined with cracks. The open hallway from the door led into a sparse living room, which consisted of one large old-fashioned TV sitting in front of a ratty cotton two-seater. My mind, despite itself, flashed to the scene in The Ring where the girl crawls out of the screen and into the room.

A smile crept across my face.

I explored the rest of the house. The kitchen was a small set-up in the same space as the dining table, featuring one metal stovetop, and two cabinets that had precisely one salt shaker and a half-empty ketchup bottle in them. The bedroom was much larger than the living room and kitchen/dining space, with a queen-sized bed taking up most of the space. The pink bedsheets with a flower on it (Sakura? Probably) were matched by a pink closet and pink dresser. The mirror on the dresser was probably cracked, with a line of black tape stretched across its left corner.

The bathroom was my favorite: right next to the bedroom, it was exactly as you’d imagine a Japanese bathroom to be. The walls looked newer, gleaming tiles of freshness that sharply contrasted the rest of the house, with a metal-framed mirror, metal toilet bowl and metal bathtub that completed a strange modern implant in an otherwise-traditional residence. The toilet bowl, in particular, featured a series of odd buttons and symbols that I promised to myself that I had to explore in the next two days.

I took a quick shower - the water was neither too warm nor too cold, "just right", as Goldilocks would have said, and there never had been a better way to use that phrase.

As I lay on my bed looking at the slowly-rotating ceiling fan, I heard Kelly’s voice in my ear.

"Girl," she hissed. "You did not fly thousands of miles to a totally different country to go to bed at ten p.m.!"

And she had a point.

I was about to die. Go into the earth, where I would lay for the rest of eternity, while worms, insects, various creatures, had their way with me, devouring me, ravaging me and plundering me, breaking me down into nothing.

And here I was, already immobile on my comfortable Japanese bed, as though I was waiting for them to just come over and get the job done already!

I sat up immediately.

***

Half an hour later, I found myself in the center of Tokyo, in the Ginza district, which was a popular nightspot in the city, at least according to the Internet.

The most well-known bar in the area was one called Mimitsuka, a quaint bar on the dark corner of a busy street, where the crowds tapered out and died down, preferring instead to go to somewhere brighter and noisier. For me, however, it was perfect. Dimly-lit, with a handful of guests and a well-dressed bartender in a vest and pressed pants expertly tossing a cocktail shaker around in the air, it was a great place for me to have a night out in a strange town without being overwhelmed.

As I entered the bar and headed for a seat by the counter, I found myself unnaturally self-conscious. The four other people in the bar - including the bartender - all looked up as I walked, and I couldn’t help but think, just for a moment, that I had some big sign on my forehead that advertised my status as a tourist.

In particular, one man at the far end of the bar, also by the counter, studied me carefully as I moved, his eyes following rather tightly.

I set myself down on a barstool, and the bartender gave me a brief, if strangely-polite once-over. He opened his mouth.

"Konichiwa - " he began.

"Sorry, I’m American," I said. "English only. And a smattering of Mandarin, if you’re inclined to that."

The bartender didn’t flinch; he just nodded resolutely, which made me think he didn’t fully understand my admission and that ignited in me a slight twinge of embarrassment.

"Dry martini, please," I said, and pointed to a bottle of Gordon’s behind the man. He simply nodded again, turned around and pulled down the bottle, before proceeding to grandly and flamboyantly mix my drink. I was mesmerized by his deft hands, adeptly flipping the metal shaker cup back and forth, up and down, weaving figures of eight in the air.

So mesmerized was I that when a hand landed firmly on my shoulder, I jumped. I turned, and it was the man from the far end of the bar. He had a five o’clock shadow, sparkling grey eyes, tousled hair, and dimples that punctuated either side of a wide grin. He looked young, probably in his late twenties at most.

"Hey," he said.

"Hello," I replied.

"Um," he turned to his left briefly, before his eyes found me again. "I... I heard you speak," he said, quite awkwardly. "Are you American?"

"No, I’m Canadian," I said.

"Oh!" His face fell noticeably. "Sorry, then."

He turned to go, and his crestfallen face looked so completely pitiful that I couldn’t help but smile.

"Nah, I’m kidding," I said. "I’m American."

His face brightened up, reminding me of a little kid’s when given a nice Christmas gift. "I knew it!"

"What gave it away?" I asked. "That brassy, self-confident sass?"

"A feeling," he said.

"You’re psychic," I said jokingly.

And he said, completely unjokingly - "Well, yeah. I guess I am, just a little."

I did a little double-take. "You’re psychic."

I could see him backpedalling quickly in his head. "That’s what my mom used to say, anyway."

"OK," I said, trying to smooth it over nonchalantly. "You’re a tourist too?"

"No, not at all," he said. "I’m studying grad school in Japan. Waseda University."

He pulled a white access pass from his front shirt pocket, which had the photo of a geeky boy that looked nothing like him staring out at me stoically.

The name on it was: AARON WASSERMAN.

"What subject do you study, Aaron?" I asked.

"Social anthropology," he said. "Waseda has the best social anthropology course in the world."

"Right," I said, returning his card to him. I turned back to face the bar counter as the bartender set a sparkling drink in a crystalline cocktail glass before me. "And do you like it here?"

"I love it," he said. "Japan is such a fun place. There’s so much good stuff here. The tech, the toys, the people... it’s really incredible."

"The food too, I presume?" I asked.

"Well, not so much the food. I mean I like ramen and all, but sushi..." He shudders. "I don’t believe in raw fish."

I laughed. "There’s nothing to believe. Sushi is delicious."

"I fancy salmon, but I don’t fancy salmonella."

I rolled my eyes. "Original."

"Thank you."

I took a sip of the martini. It was wonderfully crafted, smooth and tasty, lighting up my stomach immediately.

"This is fantastic," I said.

"It’s one of the best bars in the city," Aaron said. "I come here a lot. The bartender knows my name and order. Don’t you, Keido?"

"Yes, I do, Aaron," Keido said, and his English was crisp and well-enunciated - not what I was expecting.

"Ah," was all I could say.

"I didn’t get your name," Aaron said.

"I’m Jenny Song," I said, trying desperately to change the subject. "From San Francisco. I’m an editor at a magazine called Décor, if you’ve heard of it."

"Wow," Aaron murmured. "My mum loves Décor! I’m from Pennsylvania and like, Décor is big there."

"Yep," I said and took another sip of my martini self-consciously and now I could feel as though the whole bar was watching my every single embarrassing move.

"But you’re not Japanese," he said.

"No," I said. "Chinese."

"And you’re in town... alone?" he ventured.

I knew where this was going, but I didn’t feel up to the task. "Work trip," I lied.

"For Décor?" he asked.

"Yes," I lied again, and I was blatantly sure Keido could see through my ruse. "Researching about some Japanese design standards."

"Oh, cool," he said. "Well, you really should do some sightseeing while you’re at it. There’s loads of stuff to see in Japan. Temples, shows..."

"Cool," I said, a little more flatly than I would have liked.

"Let me know if you need some help bringing you around," he said, and he reached into his front shirt pocket again, pulling out another card. This one was a namecard with some Japanese characters under his English name, accompanied with a number and email. I accepted the namecard, and while I was studying it, he turned to go.

Then an idea struck me.

"Hey," I called out. "How much do you know about this place called Aokigahara?"

He stopped. Turned back. Stared at me for a moment. "I’ve... heard of it. Why?"

"I... want to go," I said, and this time I spoke with a bit too much more enthusiasm than I liked.

Aaron Wasserman didn’t reply for a few seconds, just staring at me oddly. "You know what that place is?" he finally asked.

Yep, I thought. Living life dangerously.

Next Chapter: This is the Quietest Forest