ENTERING THE BLACK SEA
Isonash "Iso" Harada was used to being invisible. He was, after all, three-quarters Ainu. The Ainu were an ancient people, the aboriginal population of the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, although they may also be found in Mongolia, Siberia and the Russian peninsula of Kamchatka. Unlike the Japanese, the Ainu sported white skin, full beards and roughly Caucasian features. Take off the beard and you might even mistake them for the ancestors of the Amerinds, namely the Siberian and Mongolian wanderers who crossed the Bering land bridge and entered North America well before recorded history.
The Ainu traditionally sat on the floor of their dwellings, had no furniture, and ate bear, ezo deer, salmon, sea eagles. They were bear worshippers and animists, although they had no priests. The Japanese treated as if they were just a smidgen above Yetis. As one wag colorfully put it, the Japanese regarded the Ainu as turds, or as even more lowly creatures such as Americans. Iso's full Ainu name Isonash meant "great hunter," which surely marked him as subhuman in the eyes of most Japanese.
But don't feel bad yet, my undoubtedly miniscule Ainu audience. The Japanese term for outsiders (non-Japanese) is "gaijin", which means "lowlife barbarian bastard pig eaters." and is used to refer to all foreigners including Koreans and chinks, without regard to race or creed. So don't feel bad, roundeyes, the Japanese are equal-opportunity haters. They despise non-Japanese slopes and slants with as much fervor as they do roundeyes. They even look down at Hitler's master race of homicidal Aryan towheads, despite their dalliance with Germany in WWII, the Big One. We all know how that worked out for them.
The nips have largely done away with the Ainu. However, despite their professed obsession with racial purity, this virtual extinction came, not at the point of a samurai's katana, but largely through intermarriage. However, there was still strong resistance to such intermarriage, as Iso found out the hard way when he asked Rei's father for her hand in marriage. Not only was Iso Ainu, but he was also a lowly Level 2-C Salaryman at AmaterasuCorp, one of Japan's largest financial and tech firms. Despite the fact that his coworkers and supervisors said that they were in awe of his mathematical and inventive skills, he was still stuck at the Level 2-C Salaryman pay grade. It was just the Japanese bureaucracy at work, they all told him, sometimes with a gentle pat of consolation on the back. They let him know they sympathized with his plight, but told him in no uncertain terms that their hands were tied.
But Iso knew his earning capacity was the primary factor behind Ohayashi Katsu's refusal to assent to the proposed marriage between his daughter Rei and Iso. The really galling thing was that Iso's superiors were constantly praising him for the tremendous insight they had gained from his mathematical modeling showing for the first time the precise nature of the dependence of the growth rate of furnium on the partial derivatives of mentum flux and plasmagonic flow. This analysis was one of the primary factors behind the doubling of AmaterasuCorp's revenues and the tremendous growth of the Japanese economy over the past five years.
When Iso threatened to quit, they told him that math and computer geeks were a dime a million in Japan. He told them that it might help if they told him what the hell furnium, mentum flux, and plasmagonic flow really were. They shrugged their shoulders and said that this information was provided on a need-to-know basis and that the only way to insure the security of AmaterasuCorp's intellectual property was to make sure that within the organization, the left hand never knows what the right hand is doing. Only in this way could the group mind of the organization attain the the sublime states of shibumi, feng shui, nintendo, sake, teriyaki, and shitake.
Iso's simmering thoughts had led him unwittingly to the entrance to the dark forest that was called Aokigahara, but was more widely known as Suicide Forest or the Back Sea of Trees. Over 100 people make the pilgrimage to Aokigahara each year to commit suicide. And those are just the successful pilgrims, if self-annihilation can be counted among one's successes. Another hundred came up just short of their goal of self-murder each year, through no fault of their own.
Aokigahara has always been dogged with morbid myths and legends. It is said that the Japanese custom of ubasute, where an elderly relative is left to die in a remote location, was widely practiced in the forest before the 20th century. Now, getting an AARP card in the mail doesn't seem like such a bad thing after all, does it?
There are widespread stories of demons and yurei (angry spirits) roaming the forest. The more recent nickname of "Suicide Forest" began to dog the region after Fuji-loving hikers began to encounter tastefully composted human bodies lovingly cradled in its vegetation in the 1950s. Since the early 1970s, police, volunteers and journalists regularly scour the area in search of human corpses.
There is also a soon-to-be-released film about Aokigahara called "The Sea of Trees," directed by Gus Van Sant and based on the 1960 novel Kuroi Jukai ("The Black Sea of Trees") by Seicho Matsumoto.
The film stars the ostensibly deep-thinking, Academy Award winner turned Lincoln-Continental-huckster Matthew McConaughey as the obligatory gaijin star of a film about Japan. Thus, McConaughey carries on in the proud tradition of Tom Cruise in "The Last Samurai." McConaughey's obligatory shiksa costar will be none other than Naomi Watts. Cruise's sidekick in "The Last Samurai," Ken Watanabe, scores the token Japanese role in the principal cast. One must only presume that Keanu Reeves, the star of "47 Ronin," was unavailable.
When Iso reached the entrance to Aokigahara he was surrounded by a throng of do-gooders handing out anti-suicide pamphlets and literature and offering counseling services to the self-destructive seekers of nothingness. If a Grim Reaper devotee made it past these good samaritans, he was immediately confronted by a bank of telephone operators standing by and ready to take his call now, with T. J. Lipinski as their benign overlord. T. J. personally asked Iso for the gift of his estate, seeing as how Iso wasn't going to be able to use it after his imminent demise. "If you don't cough it up, you'll never see the poor little doo wop concert again," the PBS solicitor warned. "No more Patti Page, no more Four Aces, no more Pat Boone. They'll all be dead and gone.
"I can throw in this tote bag," the avaricious Lipinski offered, as Iso walked past him into the darkness of the woods.
Iso then ran into a series of kiosks offering to sell the seekers of oblivion the whole spectrum of implements of self-destruction, from high quality pre-noosed hanging ropes to the finest of samarai tantos, which, for you Western barbarians, are swords used in the act of ritual self-disembowelment known as seppuku or hari kiri by those crazy enough to live by the code of bushido in this age of cell phones and Facebook. What a bunch of pussies the Japanese people have become, Iso thought. In the old days before the roundeyes dropped the enlightening gifts of Little Boy and Fat Man on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively, many of those who had committed seppuku would demonstrate the glory of the act by spilling their intestines on the ground, carefully unraveling them into jump rope form, and then doing their best to perform a solitaire game of colonic Double Dutch and trying not to wince as their assistant beheaded them from behind with a razor-sharp katana. Tears are coming to my eyes as I contemplate the pureness and beauty of this sacred act.
Evidently many of the contestants entering Suicide Forest were not inclined to such acts of ritual disembowelment. For these dishonorable worms, the kiosks also offered a wide assortment of automatic pistols. They even operated a small pharmacy, offering pills to those too cowardly to submit to the prick of a needle or to the biting cold steel of a finely-crafted Honzo tonto slicing its way through their transverse colon.
When Iso was almost past the assembly of hawkers of life and death, he heard a gruff voice behind him.
"Ainu dog, you sure you don't want any of these fine weapons? Or don't you have the kintama to stick yourself like the dirty pig you are."
"Maybe next time," Iso told the make-believe samurai. "Tell you what. I'll pick up a katana of cold steel to send you on your own voyage the next time I pass through these gates. And it won't be long."
"You dare threaten me, Ainu dog? You ain't nothing but a samurai wannabe mazakon, a mother's boy."
"Yeah, with your mama, hot shot."
"You're nothing more than a mushi, a lowly worm."
The best retort Iso could manage was the great Flip Wilson's classic rejoinder: "You another one."
The darkness of the woods before him unnerved him. With his heart still beating fast from this encounter, he turned his back on the nip cretin and began walking into the interior of Aokigahara, better known as Suicide Forest.
The purveyor of implements of personal destruction called after Iso one last time. "Come on, give me a break. I'm trying to make a living here, you baka ka, you asshole. You guys stop killing yourself in Aokigahara, then the tourism stops and we're all up shit's creek, you stupid meshugana worm."
