Middle of the rainy season. It's a Saturday, and the sun's shining for a change. I don't want to waste this rare opportunity so I stuff my camera into its bag, along with some other supplies, and go outside. The sun beats down mercilessly. The hot air is thick enough with humidity to choke on.
While on the way to do some food shopping last week I noticed some weeds growing on some rusty construction girders stacked by the side of the road, and wanted to try getting a photo of them. I set that place as my first objective. My black bike saddle is too hot to sit on, so I ride standing up. After getting a few shots of the weeds, I stop to think about where to go next. A while back I went running at night time and got halfway along the raised path running alongside the river. Maybe there are some interesting sights further along that way, so I head in that direction. Crows rest in the trees along the riverbank.
The last time I was here in the evening I saw a dog-sized shadow rushing through the tall grass to the side of me. Now that I'm here in the daylight I see signs warning of wild boar in the area. One mystery solved. If I ride fast enough, the breeze feels cool. I'm in a good mood, so I sing to myself while riding, and practice letting go of the handlebars with both hands. I used to be good at riding that way as a kid, but it's difficult now. Maybe the weight of the bike is unbalanced with my camera in the front basket. The rice paddies to the left are all a vivid green. The cacophony of chirping bugs acts as a soundtrack to peaceful summer days. A car passes me. One of the houses next to the embankment has a kite flying next to its small vegetable plot. A red bird, connected to a vertical pole stuck into the ground by a rope attached to its head.
The cry of cicadas.
I ride a little further and follow a dirt track winding down towards the river, below an overpass with a train line. I want to take a picture of the overpass from below, but there's a car parked underneath it. The car that passed me a little while earlier. It's parked there with the engine running, but not moving. I wait nearby and take photos of a dragonfly that's flitting around. The car stays for a long time. A single person is inside it. What're they doing? Are they waiting for someone? Nobody else comes. Why are they waiting in a place like this? I accidentally make eye contact with them. We both go back to pretending to be unaware of the other. After around 15 minutes they suddenly drive off. I take the photo I wanted and notice there's a small pile of ashes nearby. It looks like someone has been burning books. Small bugs crawl on the remains.
I ride further. A woman tends to her field. More crows. I try to stop before I get close enough to startle them, so that I can take a photo. The grass is so green. A man on a bike behind me almost crashes into me. I hadn't heard him there. I wonder how long he'd been there without me noticing.
I notice another path heading towards the river, and follow it to see where it goes. It forks into two branches, heading off at opposite directions from each other. One heading north, looking like a regularly used dirt path connecting to the riverside for fishermen. The southwards branching fork is blocked off by a large barrier. Beyond the barrier looks like what used to be a cycle path that has been abandoned for years. Like something from a movie scene, concrete being split by an overgrowth of weeds. I carefully climb around the barrier with my bike, feeling like I'm intruding into an area no longer meant for humans.
I wonder how many years it's been since anyone came down this way.
On my left is a slope leading down towards the river. It's fairly open, with a few trees a little distance away. To my right is a thicket of shrubs and trees. Dragonflies with big black wings flit from leaf to leaf. I lean in, trying to get photos of them, as I make my way deeper down the path. The stranglehold of the plant life around the path tightens more and more. My legs get covered in cuts and scratches from them as I climb further in. More and more dragonflies, butterflies and smaller bugs swarm around. My mind goes back to the sign warning about wild boars, and I try to see if I can see any signs of them living in the thicket to the right of me. There are odd bits of litter lying around, plastic bottles and things, but they look like they've been here for decades. The whole area is in a state of decay.
I hear someone shouting in the distance. Two short yells."Ah! ....... Ah!"
A bug lands on
my hand. I awkwardly try to get a photo of it with my free hand.
There's a bright orange flower growing nearby, so I try to take some
shots of that too. I climb deeper and deeper until I reach a dead end. There's nothing there. I turn back.
I'm satisfied with the photos I've taken already, so I'm paying less attention to the bugs in my proximity on the return journey and looking off into the distance a bit more. As I get back towards where I took most of the dragonfly photos earlier, something standing out against the natural greenery to the side of the path catches my eye.
Is that ... some clothes? Someone's thrown away some clothes out here?
No, there's something else. Not just clothes. It's not moving, and it's kind of a strange colour. It's a mannequin? Someone left a mannequin leaning against the tree? It's wearing black jeans and a black t-shirt with a big white skull on the back.
and there's a rope around its neck, tied to the branch above
around his neck
because he's not leaning against the tree
he's hanging from it
he's not
a mannequin
help me,
help me, help me, help me, help me,
...
the screaming I can hear, is that me? is this my voice? is this what I sound like?
I force myself to look back over at him. My body is shaking, my hairs are all standing on end, my voice trembling. I shout to him, "Can you hear me? Are you ok?"
What am I doing? He's obviously not going to respond. I think about running to him to see if I can still save him, but
I can't.
I'm too scared.
"This might be a crime scene? I shouldn't mess with things. Police evidence, something something." My mind makes excuses. It tries to talk me out of getting closer. "There's nothing I can do. Look at the colour of him."
Coward. I should at least have tried. What if the shouting I heard a while earlier was him? What if those yelps were him, desperately struggling against the rope? What if he'd only been there a few minutes?
I need to call the police... But how do I do this in Japanese? I'll try calling my boss and see if they can help. help. help.
I call three people from my company, but none of them pick up. I go into Google Maps and take a screenshot of my location, and then google "police phone number Japan" to make sure I'm dialling the right number.
because an ambulance isn't going to be able to help here
I don't know how to describe this situation in Japanese. "Um, is there anyone there who can speak English? Oh, I see. Um, I've found a, uh, a person who has died, he's um, attached to a tree by his neck. I don't know. Yes. I'm uh... I don't know where I am. I'm not near anything. To the east is the Omoigawa river, across the river is the golf course. South of me is the outdoor mall. To the west is uhh... there's a shrine, um. Hang on."
I climb back across the barrier and run back to the nearest road while trying to describe my location to them. An old man in a truck is driving by, so I run out in front of him and wave him down.
"I'm sorry. Can you explain to the person I'm talking to on this phone where we are right now? Yes, here, please take my phone. I'm in a phone call with the police. Please talk to them for me. Please tell them where we are."
As he takes my phone and the police fill him in on the situation, he stares at me as he begins to understand what's going on. I pull the brim of my cap down to cover my eyes, and sink to the ground, curling into a ball with my arms around my knees. I listen to him and the police talking for a few minutes before he hands me back my phone. The police and an ambulance are on their way. He gets a folding chair out of the back of his car and sits with me to wait. It's kind of him. His t-shirt is already covered in patches of sweat. He makes some small-talk about the weather to me, but I can't really respond. I start to panic, wondering if I should go back to check on the man. Maybe there was something I could have done. Maybe it wasn't too late.
The police phone back and start asking me questions. How old was the man? How high off the ground was he? What kind of rope and knot had he used?
I don't know... I didn't look that closely. Based on his clothes I guessed he was around 20, but I really had no idea. I hadn't looked at his feet to know how high up he was. I was too scared to look that closely. I hand the phone back to the old man with the truck when the questions got too difficult for me to understand. I hear him saying "I dunno, I didn't see it. It was this girl who found him. What? No way, I'm not gonna look, I don't wanna see it!!"
I hear the ambulance sirens in the distance, so get up to go wave them down. The police are asking me questions through my phone still as I lead the ambulance people to where he is. As the rope comes back into view above the bushes, one says to the other, "Ah, yup. Over there, there he is." I watch them make their way down to him. His feet are only maybe 30cm off the ground. He's so perfectly still. He has light brown hair, yellowish skin, arms hanging at his sides. His toes point downwards like he's levitating. He faces forwards, away from me. His backpack is discarded nearby.
The ambulance men don't seem in any rush. I watch them inspecting the rope, trying to work out what to do to get him down. As they're fiddling with things, he starts rotating.
I can't look away. He's still perfectly still, but now he's very slowly spinning around towards me.
the back of his head, the side of his head, his face slowly coming into view
A policeman appears and asks me to come with him.
There's now a collection of vehicles parked back at the road. Ambulances, police cars, other cars I don't recognise. The policeman leads me to his car and asks me to get in. People are stopping to stare and watch me being escorted to his car. The policeman must feel bad for me, he shouts to tell them that I haven't done anything wrong, they're not there to arrest me. Inside his car he switches on the air conditioning, and then begins questioning me.
Name. Nationality. Date of birth. Address. Workplace. What time did I leave my house? What did I take with me? Where did I go first? What did I go there for? Where did I go next? Then what?
Why was I there?
How long did I wait after finding the body before calling the police?
Why did I call someone else first?
The questions continue for a few hours. People stop to stare for a while before moving on. The ambulances and other vehicles drive away. They must have recovered him. One of the other policemen knocks on the car window, and tells us that it looks like it's going to rain. He'll take my bike back to the police station near where I live, and they'll drive me back there once they're done questioning me.
While they're writing their notes, my mind starts to stir. Like an animal coming out of hibernation, I regain some agency. I've been on autopilot until now. I look around the police car. I notice the world has lost its colour. I think about the man I found. He chose to wear that skull t-shirt because he knew he was going to kill himself today. I wonder if he did it to be funny. If I hadn't found him by chance on the same day, there's no way anyone else would have found him for a very long time. That dead-end path was completely deserted and pointless. Nobody else would go down there. I'm glad it wasn't a kid who found him while out searching for bugs to catch. I'm glad it wasn't one of my students. I'm glad it wasn't Mai. At least I was able to protect someone else from.. this. But I couldn't protect him. I couldn't do anything for him.
I wonder what his name was.
Rain starts pouring, huge heavy drops battering the car enough to shake it. Lightning strikes nearby. They drive me back towards the police station that my bike is being kept at. On the way back, the policeman tells me that I shouldn't be out in places like this by myself. It's not safe for a woman on her own. I want to say "I don't care", but I keep it to myself. At the police station I give my fingerprints and signature a few times. They decide the thunderstorm is too bad to let me ride my bike home, so they keep my bike and drive me home in their car. They tell me I can come collect the bike tomorrow. I ask them if they know what his name was, but they say they're not allowed to tell me.
When I get home, I phone my mom. Then, I go to buy alcohol. Lots of it. A man tries talking to me in the shop when he sees me putting so much in my basket. I don't care. Leave me alone. I'm not in the mood to talk. I tell him what just happened to get him to leave me alone. He doesn't know what to say. I get home and drink until I fall asleep.
In my dream, I'm a child lying in a huge bed. Clean white sheets in a clean white room. The only things in the room are me, and that man, hanging above me. He's slowly rotating, like when the ambulance men were inspecting him. So slowly. I watch him rotate towards me again. His face turns closer, closer, closer,
and my screaming wakes me up. I throw up.
The next day, Sunday. Emotions start to return. I spend the day pacing back and forth around my apartment, crying, drinking and throwing up. I can't eat anything. I can't get the sight of him out of my mind. I can't stop thinking about how I was too scared to do anything. I couldn't do anything for him. I couldn't save him, I couldn't even get close to him. The ambulance men had told me that he'd been there for at least a few hours, so the shouting I heard couldn't have been him... Unless they just guessed that, or said it to make me feel better. I don't know. What if it had been him, and if I'd gone back then I'd have been in time to try and help him? What if that's why I hadn't noticed him the first time I walked by that way, since he hadn't been there yet? Did I really spend so much time there photographing bugs to the right of me while never looking around and spotting him just to my left? I look through the photos I took and notice that the tree he was hanging from is in a few of them. Thankfully I can't see anything of him.
Monday. I go into work. I know I won't be able to do anything, but I don't want to be alone in my apartment any more. I sit at my desk and wait for the Monday morning meeting to start. The world doesn't feel real. I'm dizzy, and feel like I'm watching things happen from a long way away. Like I'm lying on the bottom of a deep swimming pool, watching things happening up on the surface. I feel empty until another teacher gets concerned and asks if I'm alright, and then I start crying uncontrollably. I rush out of the meeting to go hide in a storage cupboard. The feelings of panic wash back over me. A pendulum inside me starts moving. I spend the rest of the day alternating between crying and panic, or feeling like I'm not there at all, I'm completely hollow, I'm moving on autopilot while watching something on an old black and white TV. Lots of my coworkers seem worried about me and ask if I'm alright. I get a call from my company telling me that I don't have to work today, I can go home if I want. But I don't want to be by myself. Everyone there is so kind to me. Their kindness makes me cry more. I feel like I don't deserve it. I go to a mental clinic after work to ask if I can speak to someone, but they have no appointment spaces until the following week. I go home and drink.
By Tuesday I'm crying a little less often, but there's still no colour, reality still feels dreamlike. I still haven't been able to eat anything without immediately vomiting it back up. I'm afraid to sleep in case I see him in my dreams again, so my body and mind are both hurting. I speak to the school counsellor about everything and she tells me "Thank you. For his sake, I'm grateful to you. His family must be, too. You found him, and you told the police about him. Because of you, they didn't have to wait and worry." I hadn't thought about it that way. I suppose if they were going to get him back after he'd died, it's better to get him back soon after he went missing rather than waiting and worrying for a long time. And I found him the same day he'd died. If I'd taken longer he'd have gotten back to them in a much worse state, and it'd have been much more traumatic for them to have to identify him. Especially with the heat and humidity and the amount of bugs around there.
I still feel guilty for being scared though, and for not being able to face him properly. I'm already starting to forget what he looked like, or maybe my brain is just refusing to remember any more. I feel guilty about that too. Is it disrespectful to forget? Is it rude of me to just carry on living like nothing happened? What sort of response should I be having? Am I making a pointlessly big deal out of things, or should I be more shaken than I am? I don't know what I should do. I haven't heard anything from the police since Saturday, so it all starts to feel like an unresolved bad dream. I want some kind of closure, at least. I start to feel like I want to go back to the place I found him to confirm whether or not it really even happened. I'm too scared to do so, and people tell me I shouldn't go back, but I feel like a magnet is pulling me. I go home and drink.
On Wednesday, while talking to a friend about how I feel bad for having been unable to do anything for him, she tells me "If you want to do something for his sake, just wish for his happiness in heaven." I think back to the times I also tried to die in the past and how terrible I felt when thinking about the people who would inevitably find me and realised that he wouldn't want me to feel sad or guilty. He'd want me to move on with my life and not think much about him, because that's how I thought about the people who might someday find me. Even if I had timed things better and bumped into him before he killed himself, he'd have just delayed it until I wasn't around. I wasn't too late. My timing didn't matter at all. I decide for his sake to stop feeling sad for him and to instead think "Congratulations on graduating from this painful life. I hope things are easier for you now."
Colour starts to come back into the world, little by little.
On Thursday some of my coworkers give me gifts and letters that they'd written in English for me after seeing me earlier in the week and worrying about me. I want to cry from how kind everyone is. I manage to eat something without throwing up, and I later manage to go to the toilet. I still want to go to visit his tree. I think about writing a letter to him to put my thoughts and feelings into words and pass them on to him, but I don't yet know what I'd say.
I suppose I'd tell you congratulations on graduating. I hope things are ok now. I didn't know your name, or anything about you, but I've thought about you a lot. You seem like you had a dark sense of humour, based on what you chose to wear that day. You knew someone would find you eventually, and that's what you'd be wearing. A skeleton wearing a skeleton. Nice. I'm sure your family is sad right now, but I know that you must have been suffering even more up until this point. I'm sorry I never had a chance to talk to you. I know how alone you must've felt. I'm sorry for being scared when I found you. I know you didn't want to frighten or upset me or anyone else. It's tough to think about anyone else when you're in that kind of state, and when you do start to consider those kinds of effects you just feel even worse about yourself. So, you don't have to worry about me. I'll be just fine. I'm still alive, so things will always keep on changing for me. And I'm closer to my friends and coworkers than before, thanks to you. I wonder if I'd have been able to be friends with you. I should think up a name to call you in my head, since I know I'll be carrying you with me from now on. How does Dokuro sound? You like dark jokes like that, right? The next time you visit me in a dream, I'll try not to scream so much. I'd never seen a dead body before, let alone one from an obvious suicide, so I wasn't very mentally prepared for any of that. But, if it ever happens again, next time I'll do better. Get a good rest. You've worked hard up until this point. I know you did your best.
Today I went shopping with a friend. Mannequins scare the shit out of me now. I laughed.
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