The Aokigahara Forest is a
lonely place to die. So dense is the vegetation at the foot of Japan's
Mount Fuji, it is all too easy to disappear among the evergreens and
never be seen again. Each year the authorities remove as many as 100
bodies found hanging at the country's suicide hotspot - but others can
lie undiscovered for years. After the novel Kuroi Jukai was published,
in which a young lover commits suicide in the forest, people started
taking their own lives there at a rate of 50 to 100 deaths a year. The
site holds so many bodies that the Yakuza pays homeless people to sneak
into the forest and rob the corpses. The authorities sweep for bodies
only on an annual basis, as the forest sits at the base of Mt. Fuji and
is too dense to patrol more frequently.
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