Autopsy of an Eldritch City: Ten Tales of Strange and Unproductive Thinking (18 page)

The following excerpt is taken from Prof. Howard Kingfisher’s The New Kwaidan: Modern-Day Ghost Stories and Urban Myths from the Land of the Rising Sun (Fludd University, 2014). This is chapter 4 of that work, the chapter in question being entitled “The Case of the Absent Twin.”

In the Yamanashi Prefecture of Japan, there is situated, at the northwest base of Mt. Fuji, a forest known as Aokigahara, which is Japanese for “Sea of Trees.” Spread out over 14 square miles and being home to over 200 icy caverns, over the years this notorious forest has acquired a large measure of infamy on account of the fact that not only is it a popular site for suicides (the second most popular site in the world, with the first being the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco), but also due to legends which state that the forest is haunted by angry spirits known as the
Yū
rei. During the famine years of the 19
th
century, poor Japanese families would sometimes take their elderly relatives or even their very young and infirm children out into the depths of Aokigahara and abandon them there, an act known as Ubasute, and perhaps it is the spirits of those who were left behind to die in such a cruel way that now haunt the forest.

Three villages border Aokigahara: Narusawa, Ashidawa, and Kamikuishiki. However, within the forest itself and near Shoji Lake there is a tiny village named Shoji. Home to less than 1,000 residents, aside from the homes of its inhabitants the only other notable buildings include a school, an inn, a Shinto shrine, and a few other municipal buildings. So in these most peculiar woods there was this most peculiar village, and residing in this peculiar village were two most peculiar twins, known simply as the Yotsuba Twins. These twins, whose first names were Yoshi and Shitai, had been living in Shoji for many years now, since 1970 at least, and much idle gossip and wild speculation swirled around their name. This was primarily because, in the 40+ years that the twins had been living there, no one in Shoji outside of Yoshi had ever seen Shitai. Whenever the question of his twin brother was raised, Yoshi would simply state that his brother suffered from a rare genetic illness and thus could not set foot outdoors, and this was all that he would say on the subject. Of course, he wasn’t deaf to all the crazy rumors that the townsfolk of Shoji spoke concerning Shitai, but he tried his best to just ignore such banter. I know of this because
I
am Yoshi Yotsuba. But I’m uncomfortable writing of myself in the first person, so I have chosen to attempt “…writing this in the third person to gain much-needed objectivity,” to quote Philip K. Dick’s
Valis
and his assumption of the mantle Horselover Fat.

Yoshi himself was seen as something of an odd duck, actually. His appearance could be described as eccentric, at best. First off, he was a very old man, being 91 years of age, yet in spite of this he was extremely spry and seemed to be in robust health, his mind still quite sharp. Most of the younger people who lived at Shoji (and most of the people who lived in Shoji were young) were amazed that Yoshi had never retired, and was still working at the same job he had been doing since he had first moved to the village over forty years ago. His hair was shockingly white and extremely unkempt, making him resemble an Oriental version of post-World War II-era Austin Osman Spare, while his eyes were of a dazzling malachite hue, as green as the color of Frank Gorshin’s Riddler outfit from that old
Batman
TV show of the 1960’s. His clothes were shabby, outdated and covered in cat hair (even though he owned no cats), and he almost always had a tattered umbrella on his personage, even on days when there was nary a cloud to be seen in the sky.

Yoshi Yotsuba made a living as a forest worker. Every week, Monday through Friday, he traveled through Aokigahara, keeping an eye out for suicide victims. As far as jobs went, that of an Aokigahara forest worker wasn’t in high demand. Many people found the forest to be eerie, for the above cited reasons, and those who entered the forest with romantic notions that Japanese forests were nothing but miles upon miles of scenic cherry blossom trees were in for a rude awakening when it came to Aokigahara: the forest was primarily made up of white cedar, pine and boxwood trees, and because most of the forest’s floor was volcanic ash, many of the roots of these trees were aboveground like giant ligneous worms, thus creating a most uneven and treacherous forest floor. The forest was also extremely quiet, with little to no birdsong, the only real sound being that of the wind, and the only fauna being snakes, foxes, and wild dogs. Scattered throughout the forest were black signs with white Japanese characters inscribed on them, these characters spelling out inspirational messages such as “Your life is a precious gift from your parents” and “Please consult with the police before you decide to die.” On the days when Yoshi did stumble upon a suicide victim, he would need to bring the body to the police station of one of the towns that bordered Aokigahara (usually it was Narusawa), where he and the other forest workers would then play a game of Janken (known in the West as “Rock-Paper-Scissors”) to see who would have to sleep in the same room as the corpse that night. Aokigahara was the sort of forest that could drive mad those with overactive imaginations: it seemed like the type of locale that could have come straight from the pages of some lost Lafcadio Hearn collection, an outtake of
Kwaidan
. Walking through this forest of suicides, one could easily picture oneself encountering the man-eating goblins known as the Jikininki, the demon-fires of the dead known as the Oni-bi, or monstrous-sized versions of the Heikegani crabs.

If Yoshi was intimidated by the forest, he didn’t show it, and after 40+ years of traveling through it almost every day like some modern-day version of Ahasverus, the Wandering Jew, this nonagenarian nemophilist knew the place better than anyone, to the point where he could probably have navigated it with a blindfold on. He didn’t mind his work, and sometimes he even enjoyed it: in some ways, it was an escape from his problems at home. Of course, it was no fun when he would come across a body, but over the years he had seen so many corpses by this point that they all just started to blur together in his mind. As it were, even before he had moved to Shoji, he had become used to the sight of corpses, thanks to his stint with the Imperial Army during World War II. There were even some parts of the forest he quite liked to visit, the main one being a small grove that he thought of as his own personal locus amoenus, a place that, when he visited it, made him think of works of art like Thomas Cole’s
The Garden of Eden
or the left panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s
The Garden of Earthly Delights
. In the center of this grove there were two trees. These two trees, which were spaced no more than five feet apart from each other, were very tall, and their upper branches were conjoined, thus linking the two of them together (the scientific name for this phenomenon was inosculation). According to local legends, many years ago a cult had worshipped these trees, believing that they were symbolic of the souls of the dead: supposedly the leader of the cult had even married himself to the trees, and when he had died, some of his followers had sprinkled his blood on the bark of the two trees. While Yoshi found the trees quite beautiful to look at, at the same time they also reminded him of his situation with his twin, for even though he and his brother weren’t conjoined physically, in a spiritual or psychic sense, they were. 

To say that Yoshi was a creature of habit was a massive understatement. Every day he would leave his home at nine o’clock in the morning and head out to Aokigahara. He would then return to the village at five o’clock in the evening. Every evening after getting out of work Yoshi would first visit the local tavern where he would have one glass of sake. Then he would pass under the town’s torii gate and enter the local Shinto shrine, where he would put some yen in the monetary box, ring the bell once, bow twice, clap his hands twice in prayer while making his wish, then ring the bell once more. What exactly it was that Yoshi prayed about and wished for, the people of Shoji had no idea, though they assumed it had something to do with the health and well-being of his sickly twin. They couldn’t have been more wrong in this assumption, however.

Once his business at the shrine was done, he would head home. The house of the Yotsuba Twins was located at the very edge of Shoji, and was thus the closest to the forest. It was a small house of only one story, quite banal and most unimpressive to look at, architecturally speaking. However, a sickly reddish light was always seeping out from under the crack at the bottom of the front door, which suggested that behind that door lay not a modern-day Japanese home but instead some sort of transdimensional gateway that led one to a galactic slaughterhouse, one that specialized in the slaughter of Suns, or the haruspicy of heavenly bodies. The truth, of course, was much more banal. On the other side of the door was the living room, and it was within this living room that one could find Shitai Yotsuba.

Shitai Yotsuba looked identical to Yoshi, but this was no surprise, giving that they were, after all, identical twins. Shitai was better dressed, though, clad as he was in a white burial kimono, while his hair was neatly combed. Shitai was in a permanent vegetative state (PVS) and, as a result, was bedridden: his bed was surrounded by a number of machines that kept him alive, and it was these machines that emitted the reddish glow that seeped under the front door of their home. Every day, before setting out for work, Yoshi would go through the tedious task of adjusting Shitai’s various IVs and catheter tubes and nasal hoses, and, once he made sure everything was in its proper place, he would leave the house. Then at night he would return home after visiting the Shinto shrine and, once he was by Shitai’s bedside, would once again go about the ritual that involved adjusting the machinery that had been keeping his twin brother alive now for practically his entire life. But what he did after that was quite different.

Every night, after Yoshi had completed these necessary rituals, he would then pull up a chair and sit down next to Shitai’s bedside. He would then lean over and place his mouth next to Shitai’s left ear and he would begin to slowly whisper things into his twin’s ear, like a Buddhist monk whispering passages from the
Tibetan Book of the Dead
into the ears of a recently deceased corpse. More often than not, he would simply regale his brother with stories about his day: descriptions of things he had seen in the forest, gossip concerning various citizens of the town, and so on. One thing he would always marvel over was the youth of Shoji’s population: Yoshi could think of almost no other elderly people in the village aside from himself and his twin, and these young people were so healthy and robust…yet they almost all seemed to have harried, almost guilty expressions on their attractive faces, as if they were scared of their own shadows, or were haunted by wraiths that only they could see.

Other times, when Yoshi was in a nostalgic mood (which was often), he would tell his brother stories from his past. He would talk about his childhood, about growing up on the small island o
fŌ
kunoshima, where he had made money for the family by working on one of the island’s fishing ships (usually cleaning up during the month of November, which was the height of Octopus Season). Then there were his occasional adolescent visits to Tokyo, where he would frequent the pinball parlors and milk bars and sushi stalls. That awful night in 1931 when he had visited the Ryogoku Sports Hall (prior to its conversion to a sumo wrestling venue), where he had witnessed the nightmarish spectacle of the Spider Woman’s dead head (poor Mizuki Ranko, the first victim of the Blind Beast). His days with the Imperial Army during World War II, when he had been drafted into the army and stationed at Unit 731, Japan’s secret biological warfare unit in northeast China, where he had worked under the gimlet eye of Dr. Yoshimura Hisao, the head of the frostbite team: Yoshi could still recall the prisoners (known to the Unit’s staff as
maruta
, or “logs”) who had been tied up outdoors in temperatures as cold as -20 degrees Fahrenheit, their body parts sprayed with salt water: how the prisoners would then be taken back indoors and doused in hot water, which often caused their skin and muscles to slough right off, a landslide of flesh. This followed by the horrors he had witnessed when he had been stationed in the Philippine Islands:  the smoldering remains of that Mitsubishi A6M Zero, the dead pilot’s face inside fused to the controls, or the disembodied hand of his friend Jouichirou on the ground, palm upwards, the fingers twitching obscenely, as if it were trying to grasp some invisible breast, or as if it were spelling out the sign language of the damned, these morbid mental images like the 19th century “Bloody Prints” of Yoshitoshi brought to sickening life, or the terrifying dioramas that made up the Ten Courts of Hell in Singapore’s Tiger Balm Gardens theme park. How he had once re-visite
dŌ
kunoshima, better known as “Rabbit island,” after the War with Miho, who had been his girlfriend at the time (she was from Matsue, the capital city of the Shimane Prefecture, and she had had two vaginas, this interesting mullerian anomaly being known as uterus didelphys, a condition that usually occurred in one out of every 3,000 women), and how they had played with the rabbits on that island one hot summer day, the most lovely day of Yoshi’s long life. Then there was the time he had visited the USA in the 1950’s, back when their mother had still been alive and was able to take care of Shitai. He had toured all of the New England area: a long visit to New York City, where he had purchased a number of opera albums, including the recently released
M. Czgowchwz Sings Oltrano
(he had even caught one of the diva’s shows, her legendary performance of
Tristan Und Isolde
). This was followed by a trip to Thundermist, Rhode Island, where he had been rudely jostled by a nautical-looking black man who had reminded him somewhat of the creepy figure seen emerging from the swamp in “Regeneration of the Ethiopian” (plate 8 of Salomon Trismosin’s
Splendor Solis
).