SAMURAI STREAMER & THE SUICIDE FOREST

Back at the  ‘サンボウル Will could see his reflection in his bowl of oily looking ramen and remembered that it had been almost exactly a year since Anna departed on her flight back to England. He'd put her down as "Princess Anna" in his contacts list ever since they went to see Roman Holiday that time at Cinema Vera in the Shibuya district. Of all the memories shared together that was probably his favourite, along with the magical evening spent at the Sensoji temple. Remembering that time of global stress due to the insidious COVID19 virus, there was a sense of heightened appreciation of simple things like being with a girl and watching a movie as well as holding hands by the beautiful Koi fish ponds at the illuminated temple.

In the end he had come to see Anna as being symbolic of some residual homesickness which he hadn't quite yet shaken off.

The global pandemic also seemed to have left a residual sense of sickness since last summer, breaking a lot of things societally and economically in its wake. It hadn't broken Will's indefatigable British spirit though. Aside from losing the girl, he generally actually felt pretty optimistic about his life in Tokyo as an "English alien" who had now become reasonably successful as a content creator, securing his niche as a musician/DJ, shit poster and general culture war commentator.

"Thanks for the donation AirWolf2000," Will said as he live streamed to his chat whilst eating his lunch.

"Why do I look sad AirWolf2000? Do you really think I look sad? I think I always look like this when I'm eating food. Just focused."

But although Will had dated a tonne of girls since Anna left, he still couldn't quite shake her out of his mind, like a ghost in the attic. They had messaged each other sporadically and he had stalked her social media pages under the guise of a fake account but it had only depressed him when he saw she was with some goofy looking hipster guy who he'd initially mistakenly assumed was her brother but turned out to be her fiancé.

Sighing loudly and feeling somewhat fatigued from the constant streaming of his daily life, Will often found himself unable to switch off for fear of having to get a proper job. He kept going with his "live" and drained a tall glass of water before placing it loudly back on the wooden counter next to his bowl.

"Where should I go next, chat? Whoever donates the most amount in the next five minutes determines where I go next."

"According to Wiki, Aokigahara, also known as the Sea of Trees, is a forest on the northwestern flank of Mount Fuji on the island of Honshu in Japan, thriving on 30 square kilometres of hardened lava laid down by the last major eruption of Mount Fuji in 864 CE."

Having received an unexpectedly large donation from AirWolf2000 Will found himself at Aokighara (about an hour and a half from Toky0) and more famously known as the "Suicide Forest" where it had been alleged that up to 100 people a year kill themselves.

"I went from Sun Bowl to Honshu and all because AirWolf2000 thought I looked sad. If I didn't know any better I might think you were trying to encourage me to kill myself by paying for me to come out here. But hopefully you just thought it would be cool. Suicide Watch is gonna be the low key name for this stream now. AirWolf2000 also given me some co-ordinates so I don't get too lost. Let's see how we go. You better not be trolling me, AirWolf!"

As he walked round the eerily still and airless forest, Will decided to amplify his chat comments through his portable speaker to diminish the ghostly atmosphere that was simply undeniable.

Blasting out the sound of a woman orgasming and dialogue clips from Japanese horror movies, as well as various anime soundtrack anthems in Aokigahara, seemed somewhat incongrous with the mystery of the location but Will wasn't in the mood to get too reflective in such a place. He had been prone to depression in the past and could understand only too well why people might come here to end it all.

"This is definitely creepy, guys. It's like being vaccum sealed in space. Haven't seen any bodies yet but I'm not too bothered if I don't, to be honest."

Will turned his chat comments off speaker and walked deeper into the sinister woods where the tight knotted grape vines under his feet looked like bondage ropes.

"I wonder if you'd feel better about killing yourself if you knew you were live streaming it? Don't worry. I'm not gonna do it. Just thinking aloud."  

Being alone in Aokiahara with a couple of thousand viewers seemed like a contradiction somehow but he went with it and further explored the terrain he'd been paid to visit.

It had been a few hours before Will saw another person in the woods and ironically it was when he was struggling with a signal for his phone and had finally closed in on the half way point on the co-ordinates sent to him by AirWolf2000.

"I'm sorry guys, it's very laggy right now," he said apologetically to his viewers as he was forced to pause his live stream.

It was probably only out of sheer frustration that Will happened to look up from his phone and find a man swinging from a rope on the branch of a cyprus tree as the distant sound of creaking echoed through the forest.

He didn't even think as he raced toward the ghostly looking tree, running on pure instinct in a bid to help the man from losing his life. Clambering up to reach the branch from which the rope was tied, Will eventually pulled out a retro swiss army knife his father had given him as a leaving present when he left England and began to saw away at the thick rope.

"Come on!"

Beads of his sweat fell onto the thick rope as it slowly began to loosen from all of Will's frantic hacking away.

The eventual thud of the body hitting the uneven ground made Will wince but there was nothing he could do about it.

Back on his feet, he went to see if the man was dead or not.

Turning the body over so he could see the face, Will knew in an instant that the young Japanese man was no longer alive.

"Fuck! Please no!"

Numb with the shock of seeing his first corpse, Will felt as if the blood had drained from him. For the live streamer this was all very much like being in a waking nightmare and suddenly he felt the most alone he'd ever felt in his entire life.

Minutes went by as he tried to recompose himself but instead he just kept getting hit with wave after wave of anxiety.

Searching to find some kind of identifcation on the man, he reached into the Japanese man's shirt pocket and pulled out a small folded up note.

Inside the crumpled paper he read the message written in a nervous scrawl.

"I bet you look sad now. AirWolf2000."