The Future Is Japanese (16 page)

Breaking her gaze from the dead man’s eyes, she crouches to unzip the flap.

“Look comfy?” I ask.

She glances back. Her too-earnest American face has a closed, hard set.

“Looks fine.”

She crawls in. I’m not unimpressed.

Two
AM
. The ghost hour.

The whistling of wind wakes me. The sound comes alone, unaccompanied by breeze.

Then she’s there. My Sayomi. My onryo.

Dead lips on mine. Cold fingers stroking my thighs. Prehensile tendrils of hair circling my waist, teasing my nipples, trailing my spine.

Creep-shudder, gullet to gut. Body does not like being touched by the dead.

But my Sayomi. Body likes being touched by my Sayomi.

Timeless at twenty-one. Smooth-cheeked, willow-bodied, bloodlessly pale. Eyes shining with tears a decade old.

A long skirt flows to her ankles, Western-style but cut from white-flowered silk. Low-cut lace shows the apple-tops of her breasts. Lipstick stains her mouth; she opens to moan; blood-color smears her teeth.

She dressed up to die, my Sayomi.

Ashen tongue in my mouth like a cold lump of meat. Hair busy undoing the zip of my jeans, her obi-style waistband. Night air breathes cold on flesh usually hidden.

She pushes me to the ground, roots sharp in my back. Sayomi on top of me. Her hair parting my lips. Her fingers inside me.

I moan.

She always makes me moan.

The creeping horror of her hair. The unchanging beauty of her face.

My body tightens. That moment, near arriving. Her unfinished business with me nearly resolved.

It takes a great deal of will to shove her away before it comes.

She screams. Her hair ties itself in angry knots. I squirm out from underneath. Her fingernails claw the dirt where I’ve been.

Someday, I won’t get away.

Someday I won’t want to.

I gain my feet. Her hair stretches for my wrists and ankles. Her eyes are wide and guileless even as she tries to drag me down.

It would be so easy to give in.

Clouds shift. Across her moonlit face, a shadow swings.

I look up. The hanged man. Socks on his dangling feet, robbed of their expensive trainers.

The red tent. The American girl. I’d forgotten where I was.

Desire vanishes.

Sayomi pounds her fists on the air. She screams again. This time, the sound dissolves her. It becomes a windless whistle as she blows away.

Back in the silence of the sea of trees, all I can hear is my ragged breath.

I pull up my jeans. The girl’s face peeps through the tent flap. I politely look away, but she won’t give me the courtesy of silence.

She asks, “Was that the onryo?”

I shrug. She knows it was.

“Why is she a pile of bones?”

I sigh. “There’s an old ghost story. A lonely scholar lives in his house, pining away, until one day a beautiful woman visits at night. He lets her in. They make love. In the morning, she leaves, and the scholar gets sick. Every night after that, she comes to him. They make love, she gives him pleasure, and he gets weaker.”

The girl’s watching eyes are bright like Sayomi’s, but tearless.

“One night, the scholar’s worried neighbor looks through the window,” I continue. “He sees the scholar in bed with a skeleton. He tells the scholar what he saw, and that night, when the ghost arrives, the scholar knows what she is. But he doesn’t see a pile of bones. When he looks at her, he sees a woman.”

“What happened to the scholar?”

“He died.”

Silence. Then, “What does your onryo look like?”

I shrug again.

“Did you know her? When she was alive?”

That’s enough. I don’t listen to whatever she asks next.

A girl may love a girl, but eventually both become women.

One goes to university in America. The other studies in Fukuoka. Each misses the other, but one is distracted by learning English and sunbathing by Lake Michigan and eating cafeteria lunches. For the other, Fukuoka is what Fukuoka has always been, but drained of joy. Joy that will never return for girls who’ve grown into women.

Even across the boundary of life and death, flesh may yearn for flesh. But when the dead pleasure the living, they pull them to their side, as the ghost woman pulled her scholar.

As a ghost, Sayomi doesn’t talk, but just before she died, she sent an email. I didn’t receive it until after she was gone. Sometimes it feels as if it were written by her ghost.

Come to Aokigahara
, she wrote.
We’ll finish things there
.

I wake before the girl does.

Three yurei gather around the hanged man. Clawed hands emerge from hair-veils to peck at the corpse. Spectral fingers leave no marks, but the man’s body swings back and forth despite the lack of wind. Slowly at first and then faster and faster. The branch creaks as if caught in a hurricane. The yurei make noises I’ve never heard. Part shriek and part scratch, simultaneously the sounds of predators and of terrified things.

I pull the girl out of the tent. Gesturing for silence, I point to the ravenlike yurei. The girl’s not stupid; she follows my lead, packing without a word. We back away, careful not to make noise with our feet.

When we’re a distance removed, she asks, “What was that?”

I feign nonchalance. “Don’t know.”

Hope she’ll think I’m saying
Don’t know and it doesn’t matter
instead of
Don’t know and I thought I knew everything about yurei.

Not sure she buys my dismissive shrug. She keeps her own counsel for once.

When she does talk again, it’s about something else. She pulls a photo from her pack. “This is my father.”

I expect a generic, smiling face, but the photo shows a corpse. Dried flesh on bones. A tidy button-down drapes over shoulders that look like a coat hanger. Hair clumps on remnants of scalp. Part of the nose and cheek remain, but not enough to make a face.

She points to the background. “See those rocks? I thought maybe you’d recognize them.”

Tourists.

“It’s a big forest,” I answer.

“Not that big.”

“Big enough.”

She should know what I mean without my having to tell her: with all the ghosts here, the sea of trees is as big as it wants to be.

The girl looks like she wants to stomp her feet. “Then how are you going to find him!”

“Wander. Watch the trees.” She still looks pissed. I add, “If we keep going deeper, he’ll find you.”

If he wants to find her.

If someone else doesn’t find us first.

She bites her lips. Gazes abstractly at distant trees. “Do you think he’ll talk to me?”

“Yurei like to talk.”

I shouldn’t say more since her optimism is what’s paying me, but I can’t stop myself.

I add, “No telling what he’ll say.”

We’re still in familiar forest. I can navigate. Would be better to follow tape trails, but I don’t want the strange yurei to find us too easily.

Once we’re moving steadily, the girl starts talking.

“My mother met my father while she was backpacking the summer after college. He was older than she was. They didn’t stay in touch, but she had his name. Last year when I turned sixteen, she said I was old enough to figure out for myself what to do with it. So I tracked down his family. They told me he’d died, but they wouldn’t say anything else.”

“He committed suicide,” I assume.

“The suicide watch found him here.” Melon’s voice is thick. She tugs the strap of her backpack so she has an excuse to hesitate. “They sent me photos.”

“What makes you think he became a yurei?”

“I read online that the first night after they bring the bodies back, someone from the suicide watch sleeps next to them. In the morgue or wherever they take them. To make sure their souls can rest.”

“No one slept next to him?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask. But in the photo of him, of his body … you can see that he’s been … that’s he’s already …”

“Rotted.”

She stiffens. Doesn’t protest. “No one slept with him then. On the real first night.”

Quiet, there, in the sea of trees. Just me and her. Me and her and her sadness.

I ask, “Did he know about you?”

“Mom told him. Before I was born.” Her tone changes. Last night’s hard look returns to her face. “I know what you’re asking. No. He never tried to get in touch with me. It doesn’t matter. I care even if he didn’t. I have to know where I came from.”

I don’t think much of Melon’s reasons, but I like her conviction. I also like the fact that even though I can see she’s tired and sore, she hasn’t complained.

“Why do you speak English?” she asks.

“I went to college in America.”

“Where?”

“Northwestern.”

“Oh!” she says. Then, quietly, “I’ve read a lot about Chicago.”

Something mournful there. Something unsaid. Maybe something to do with why she’s seventeen and hiking alone half a world from where she grew up, searching for a father she never knew.