Lemon and Salt

by Hayley Igarashi Thomas

I do not want my mother to come for me.

When I imagine her here, hemlock clinging to her hair and soil dusting the rims of her glasses, my mouth waters—a defense mechanism, saliva pooling to wash out acidity. Growing up, my mother and aunties would eat lemon slices sprinkled with salt. I longed for a little sugar. A kindness for the senses. Instead, I’d take bite after bite and ask for more. I’d make myself sick, but smile on my way to the bathroom as I heard an auntie say, “She’s one of us.”

If my mother never finds me in this cabin, I will not be alone. The tourists come, weighed down with cameras and cheap beer. They dare each other to go farther, to go deeper, to go viral. They aren’t here to kill themselves. They’re here for a story.

Because this is Aokigahara. Blue Tree Meadow in my mother tongue. The Sea of Trees. The Suicide Forest.

Aokigahara was not always my home. And even now, I’m not quite sure if home is the right word for what this place is for me.

Aokigahara is where I am. Aokigahara is where I died.

Here is what I remember: A fool’s quest.

Not too long ago, I was the tourist with a camera and a six-pack of Asahi purchased from a gas station outside Ōtsuki. I didn’t have a social media account, no followers to enthrall, but I did have a bag of lemons and Kodansha’s Basic English-Japanese Dictionary. The latter had been a gift from Neal.

“They’ll expect you to know the language,” he had told me on the way to the San Francisco International Airport, “or at least to make an effort.”

“There’s no entry here for ‘fuck off.’”

“Dokka itte kudasai.”

“Fuck off, white boy.”

“I’ll miss you, too, Lara.”

Would he? Would I? I didn’t know. I was fond enough of Neal. He was graying early at 32, but boyishly handsome with bright hazel eyes and a stubborn smattering of acne at his temples. He lost track of time in vinyl record stores, treated sex like a fastidious hobby, and didn’t mind my criminal record. He was sweet. He didn’t make my mouth water.

Neal and I had been together, or as together as I allowed, for seven months when I announced my one-way ticket to Japan.

“It’s okay to come back,” he said during our final hug, his car idling, driver’s side door wide open, while my toes inched toward the curb.

“I’m coming back.”

“Right, sure. But when you’re there, it’s okay to change your mind. To come back.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. The words leave my lips a bit frayed, syllables splitting off at unexpected ends.

Neal sighed. With one more squeeze, he released me.

There are snippets of memories that follow, scattered moments bringing me to Aokigahara’s heart: the flight attendant telling me, “welcome home;” a hotel room with a broken television, a train with black stains on soft cushions, a market with bumpy lemons brighter than the sun.

Then my memory cuts off, broken clean.

The next thing I know I am in a cabin among the trees. I am part of Aokigahara.

My mother left Japan when she was eleven years old. She listened to her parents and scraped off the parts that made her different. After high school, she gave herself a flirty bob haircut and wore prescription glasses with white-lady approved tortoiseshell frames. By twenty-six, she was a nurse in Redwood City, California, married to a man whose family crossed the Atlantic in a different century, and pregnant with an American citizen.

Whenever she and her three sisters reunited, they ate their lemons with their salt and talked about their antidepressants. And how much they hated their husbands and this country and their bodies and sometimes even their children.

She refused to teach me Japanese and screamed when she found me practicing kanji. No matter the shape of my eyes, I was always to be Lara Wilson, my father’s daughter, never Lara Maekawa, my mother’s. I was to read good English books and eat hamburgers and date nice American boys.

But when she disappeared, it was Japan that swallowed my mother up.

“She said not to worry,” my father told me over the phone, after I found out that she was gone, that her Santa Cruz condo was empty and her house plants were dead. She had booked a one-way ticket to Tokyo.

“I thought you two weren’t talking.”

“We don’t. Or we weren’t. It was the first time your mother and I have spoken in months. But she knew you’d be worried.”

“She knew I’d be worried, so she called you, for the first time in months, and said, “Tell our daughter not to worry.”

“That’s it.”

“Are you worried?”

Several seconds ticked by. “Yes,” he finally said, “but I’ve always been worried about your mother.”

I never leave my cabin. It’s hard to explain why.

I am comfortable within these walls. Against the vastness of the woods and world outside, the bounds are reassuring, as if this cabin is holding me in, holding me together. Open a door, and I might unravel or blow away.

Tourists knock, but they usually run away before I can decide how to answer. Perhaps there’s some lore about this small one-room cabin to make it worthy of childish dares, stories of ritual killings done before the hearth. For all I know, the air around me is crowded with ghosts. Yet we can’t see or sense each other. We’re the perfect roommates.

I read a lot about ghosts in prison. I guess I felt like one, an unhappy spirit trapped in a purgatory of my own making. By the time I was convicted of felony theft, most of my friends and family had finished reaching out. There’s not much to say after the initial shock and fanfare. I hadn’t killed anyone. But I was embarrassing to know and support. Sad little middle-class girl got caught stealing credit cards she didn’t even need. I was neither reviled nor martyred, simply pitied and then forgotten about.

I gravitated to the ghosts of my mother’s homeland—like reikon, noble souls who only depart the blessed afterlife to make yearly visits to their families, and yūrei, restless spirits bound to the physical world by their own miserable life and death. Yūrei can’t enter the afterlife. They’re stuck on earth with the rest of us.

If my mother is truly gone, I wonder if she is reikon or yūrei.

I know what I am. I’m here, after all.

My aunties told me to go to Aokigahara.

I had brought them lemons and salt and apologies. I was sorry for going to prison, for bringing dishonor to the family, for never calling, for wanting everything and nothing, for not being one of them.

But my mother was gone. And I didn’t know where. So I pleaded. I stared into their matching tortoiseshell glasses and wished any one of them had disappeared instead of my mother. Let one of my cousins bring the lemons and salt. Let one of them beg.

In the end, Auntie Esther caved. She was always my favorite, or I was always hers. We both liked people who liked us.

“Lara, she just couldn’t be here anymore,” Auntie Esther said, by way of explanation.

I didn’t know if “here” meant this continent or this life. And I couldn’t bring myself to ask. The question might be a betrayal—of either my mother or myself.

I have not touched the lemons. They sit on a table in the middle of my cabin. I cannot look at them.

Footsteps patter outside my door. I’m almost used to them by now, these trespassers. Lovers on holiday, college kids on a bender, true-crime fans following directions from a forum. Aokigahara is world-famous, Japan’s leading site for suicide. So these tourists insist on stumbling by, sometimes to my doorstep, making it miles from the nearest parking lot, through dense thickets of hemlock and cypress, around towering boulders, past a trickling creek that sounds more like coins dropping through a metal grate than water.

I wait for the knock.

The sound that eventually comes is more bang than tentative rap. I don’t think a fist could make it. Maybe a body shoved.

I do not move. I’m sitting at the table, back straight and fingers gripping the sides of my chair.

What do I have to fear here in Aokigahara? Hasn’t the worst already happened to me? I am what waits in the shadows. I am the movement others crave and dread. I am a yūrei left to haunt what I cannot leave.

Black sheep. Ex-con. Ghost.

And somehow still small. Still unwanted and uncertain. Still alone.

I do not open the door because I am brave. I open the door because I cannot bear the waiting. Something or someone may be there, right on the other side of the cabin wall, and my insides will writhe and wither the longer I put off the inevitable.

I fling the door aside. No one is there.

But at my feet, right where a welcome mat would be, are a pair of tortoiseshell glasses. The frames are intact, but the left lens is shattered and the right has a crack.

I scan the trees, unsure of what I hope to see or not see. When I go back inside, I bolt the door behind me and put the broken glasses on the table, next to the lemons. I stare at the fruit before I realize what I am doing.

The lemons are still bright as the sun, as fresh as when I bought them. How long have I been in this cabin?

Perhaps the lemons and I are the same, unhappy spirits trapped, preserved, unchanging.

The next time a bang shakes my cabin’s walls, I am ready. I whip the door open, but am again too late to catch the visitor.

Instead, I find a small cylindrical container with an unmarked blue paper label sitting on the ground. My fingernail pops open a metal tab, and I pour a few white particles into my palm.

Part of me longs for sweetness. Part of me longs for a bit more bite.

That night, I line up the tortoiseshell glasses next to the lemons next to the salt. And wait.

My father has a new family now. That brings me some comfort in the gloom of Aokigahara at dusk. He has a minivan’s worth of stepchildren, and enough years have passed that I doubt friends or colleagues even ask about my mother and I anymore. We’re from an older edition of his life, an out-of-print relic with chapters no one wants to read anymore.

That should make things easier.

When I think of Aokigahara’s other name, the Sea of Trees, I remember a lifeguard I dated in college—he told me most drownings are silent. The yelling and splashing in movies is for drama. The real thing is often undetectable from the surface. Watchful eyes might catch a hand before it slips below the waves, but they won’t hear or see the panic, the strain, the release.

This Sea of Trees has swallowed me up. It has swallowed my mother up.

I do not know if she cried out as she began to sink, to drown, in its depths—or if I did. No one was around to see. No lifeguards monitor these shores. We disappeared in silence.

At dawn, my mouth waters. The body knows before the mind.

I sit up in my bed, a narrow cot pushed up against the cabin’s north wall, and give my eyes a few seconds to adjust to the early morning light. The simple furniture is bathed in shades of blue, deepest in the recesses of the room, lightest upon the table, where a weak beam of sunshine hits the lemons like a spotlight.

My mother, seated at the table, casts a shadow that stretches across the cabin floor until it nearly touches my toes. She is wearing the broken tortoiseshell glasses. I can’t see her left eye through the shattered lens.

“I’m nearly blind without them,” she says, as if she can read my thoughts, as if this is what is between us.

“I didn’t want you to find me.”

My mother shrugs. “I figured as much. You always hated failure. But you were here. You brought me lemons.”

“I brought lemons. They weren’t necessarily for you.”

“Oh, you have other people to visit in Aokigahara? Making the rounds?”

I come to the table so I can sit next to her, or so she can see me better with her useless glasses. I want her far away; I want her closer.

“You look okay,” my mother says, “from what I can see of you.” This is high, begrudging praise.

“You don’t look as tired as you used to.”

“Well, I think I’m dead.”

My mother makes a dismissive gesture with her hand, as if she’s swatting away a fly. “You still seeing that white boy?”

“Neal?”

“You think I remember his name?”

“I left Neal in California.”

She nods. “He wouldn’t do well here.”

“In the afterlife?”

“No, in Japan. In a region with real winters. That boy never had enough body fat on him. And he was always wearing denim jackets instead of real coats.”

“I’m surprised you remember all that about my white boy.”

“I remember what I can.” My mother pulls out a dull knife from a pocket of her overcoat and starts cutting into the lemons. She makes each slice thick and leaves them sitting in their own juices on the table. “You still stealing?”

I shake my head. “I’m a law-abiding citizen now.”

My mother doesn’t respond. She finishes cutting up the lemons and shakes a bit of salt over every slice. We each take one, and I close my eyes as my taste buds ignite.

“You tried sneaking sugar onto your slices once. I think you were five or six.”

“I remember,” I say. “You threw those lemons into the sink.”

“Do you know why?”

“I assumed I was insulting you in some way. Not being a good daughter.”

“You were being obvious, that’s what you were being. You should’ve asked me before becoming a thief. I would’ve told you you would get caught. You’re no good at deception.”

I was good at it for years, for tens of thousands of dollars. But I know what she means. And she’s right.

“Would you have given me sugar if I had asked?”

“Of course not.” She bites into a second slice. “There’s a reason your aunties and I eat salt with our lemons.”

“Because you’ve obliterated your taste buds?”

“Maybe. Probably. But life doesn’t offer sides of sugar. So neither do we. You take the good with the bad, the sour with the salt. You don’t become soft, complacent, sweet. You devour what’s handed to you. You lick the plate. You ask for more.”

I am here, with my mother in Aokigahara, and I am also a child, begging for more and then vomiting down the hall.

“And when it all becomes too much?”

She stands abruptly and moves around the table. Her arms are up. Her right eye is wet through the cracked lens. She embraces me and doesn’t let go.

“Oh, my daughter,” she whispers into my hair, “why are you here?”

I know what “here” means. It is not Japan. It is not even Aokigahara.

“To find you,” I say, so low I barely hear it myself.

She holds me closer to her body.

“Do you remember what happened?” She pushes away, just enough to study my face. “Do you remember anything once you entered these woods?”

I try again. I grasp at those flickering memories.

“No,” I say eventually. “But I know I was sad.”

My mother’s lips press into a thin line. She pulls me back into her. “I was sad, too.”

“Are we dead?”

I didn’t mean to ask the question, or at least so bluntly, but it floated from my lips before I could stop it.

“I think we are something…different.”

I reach for two more slices and offer one to my mother. We take a bite together. The salt stings.

“And you found me.”

“I found you.” She readjusts her glasses on the bridge of her nose. “Not without some cost. I really liked these glasses. But knowing you were here and reaching you took some trial and error.”

“You scared me,” I say.

“Everything scares you.”

“That’s not true.”

My mother holds out a hand. When I take it, our palms, coated in lemon juice, stick together.

“Then prove it. Come with me.”

“Where?”

She uses her free hand to gesture upward and outward. “Anywhere. Everywhere.”

“Is that allowed?”

“The criminal is asking about the rules?”

“Reformed criminal.”

She squeezes my hand. “Come with me,” she says again.

An ocean away, Neal is likely in a vinyl record store. “It’s okay to change your mind,” he had told me at the airport. The memory is sweet—just a little sour. So much left unsaid and unknown in the days behind. So much left unknown and unexplored in the days ahead. But maybe you take the good with the bad. Maybe you can ask for more.

I step outside of the cabin, my mother by my side and the taste of salt and lemon on my tongue, and for the first time in a long time, I think, “It’s okay.”