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Sea of Trees, by Robert James Russell
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Swirling mystery permeates Sea of Trees as Bill, an American college student, and his Japanese girlfriend Junko traverse the Aokigahara Forest in Japan--infamous as one of the world's top suicide destinations--in search of evidence of Junko's sister Izumi who disappeared there a year previous. As the two follow clues and journey deeper into the woods amid the eerily quiet and hauntingly beautiful landscape--bypassing tokens and remains of the departed, suicide notes tacked to trees and shrines put up by forlorn loved ones--they'll depend on one another in ways they never had to before, testing the very fabric of their relationship. And, as daylight quickly escapes them and they find themselves lost in the dark veil of night, Bill discovers a truth Junko has hidden deep within her-a truth that will change them both forever.
- Sales Rank: #317304 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Winter Goose Publishing
- Published on: 2012-05-21
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.02" h x .22" w x 5.98" l, .34 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 106 pages
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
"What holds this delicate structural balancing act together is Russell's assured command of language." --Ian Chung, Sabotage Reviews
"A hundred and five pages of pure brilliance." --Zoe Harrington, Zoe's Corner
"My intellectual breath was taken away by the spell that Russell created in his debut novel. He has a beautiful literary mind." --Katrina Mendolera, Cellar Door Lit Rants & Reviews
"At a slick, swift 105 pages, this story is no longer than it needs to be but it casts it spell, putting its cold fingers around your wrist and leading you into the forest where evermore macabre sights await." --Cee Martinez
"Russell's writing is raw, real, and stunningly palpable. A book that will grip your soul, Sea of Trees will envelope you and hold you until the very end." --L.M. Stull
From the Back Cover
"Darkly beautiful, replete with intriguing bends, Russell's novella unfolds much like one of the tree-shrouded paths comprising its protagonists' somber, captivating journey, the characters' psyches as perilous as the forest in which they find themselves lost, the book's stunning vignettes like narrative shrines to those who have chosen to make their end in Aokigahara." --Charles McLeod, author of National Treasures and American Weather
"What is it about trees that terrify us so--there's a frightening and twisted stillness to them, but yet they are like us: vertical, yet reaching. Perhaps we think of Dante--the trees in the Inferno are actually people who have taken their own lives and forced to suffer in their frozen bodies. The image of the couple in Sea of Trees traversing through a dense forest searching for answers concerning the suicide of Junko's sister is haunting and suffocating at times--the shadows hiding bodies of those who suffered the same fate. As they walk, the trees seem to whisper their stories of where they have been, what they have seen." --Brian Oliu, author of Level End
"Joseph Campbell says that in life we must enter the 'forest at the darkest point, where there is no path,' that to follow another's path is to fail to truly live. In Robert James Russell's Sea of Trees, a young couple follows a sister's suicidal trail into the fabled Aokigahara Forest, where they must try to pass through the grief that's come between them--and where Russell's subtle structure puts us readers in danger too, left to recognize ourselves in all the other ghosts hung from those trees, hung lonely together." --Matt Bell, author of Cataclysm Baby
About the Author
Robert James Russell is a Pushcart Prize nominated author and the co-founding editor of the literary journal Midwestern Gothic, which aims to catalog the very best fiction of the Midwestern United States. His work has appeared in Pithead Chapel, Crime Factory, WhiskeyPaper, Joyland, The Collagist, Gris-Gris, and Thunderclap! Magazine, among others. His first novel, Sea of Trees, is available from Winter Goose Publishing. Find him online at robertjamesrussell.com.
Most helpful customer reviews
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
Nothing short of a masterpiece . . .
By Lisa M. Gott
Deep inside each of us lives a darkness. A darkness that not even those closest to us can understand, and often, are unaware that it even exists. In Russell's debut, he does what he does best - thrusts his readers into the stream of consciousness of not just any character's mind, but a mind all of us can relate to. An everyday kind of mind.
SEA OF TREES follows Bill, an American college student, who accompanies his girlfriend, Junko, on a journey to come to peace with the disappearance of her dear sister. They traverse Japan's Aokigahara Forest. A forest whose history is also filled with much darkness. With each step they take, Bill finds they are not only further inside this strangely beautiful and tragic forest, but that he is further and further away from answers about... everything. Confusion and fear and stress builds between Bill and his beloved girlfriend, and he struggles to understand not only the truth behind this trip, but also what plagues his Junko. What her inner thoughts are. Because he sees that with each passing moment, Junko seemingly becomes more and more detached from him. And from life.
Hold on tight, readers, because the road to answers and the truth is a bumpy one. Russell's writing is raw, real, and stunningly palpable. A book that will grip your soul, SEA OF TREES, will envelope you and hold you until the very end. This book. It is nothing short of a masterpiece. And will surely place Russell on bookshelves across the world for readers to enjoy. Forever.
Robert James Russell, you have a fan for life in me.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Romantic Nihilism
By Peter Mathews
There is a short documentary on YouTube, about twenty minutes long, about the Aokigahara Forest (also known as Jaiku) in Japan. The documentary follows Azusa Hayano, a geologist who frequents the forest, as he explores the undergrowth, looking for signs of people who might have committed suicide there. The forest, after all, is famous as one of the most popular sites in the world for people to commit suicide, a tradition that stretches back even before modern times – in times of famine, the locals used to leave the elderly, unwanted babies, the sick, and other people that society sought to exclude for the sake of survival, leading to a longstanding association of the place with death and, not surprisingly, the ghosts of those who died there.
The forest, with its rugged density and lack of wildlife, enveloping the place in an eerie blanket of silence, seems particularly conducive to this kind of mythologizing. In 1960, Seichi Matsumoto captured the Japanese imagination with the publication of his (as yet untranslated) novel Kuroi Jukai (Black Sea of Trees), a romantic story of two doomed lovers. Robert James Russell’s novella seems to have been inspired by a conjunction of these sources.
The narrative is simple enough. Divided into chapters with headings like “Sacrifice” and “Enlightenment,” the main story follows two characters, Junko, a beautiful young Japanese woman, and Bill, an American, the two having met and fallen in love while they were students. The purpose of their journey is to discover some sign of Izumi, Junko’s older sister, who had disappeared in the forest, presumably having committed suicide. Each chapter concludes with a self-contained, italicized story about an unrelated character (or characters) who died in the forest due to various motives: shame, guilt, murder, and even a simple fascination with death.
I had a number of problems with Sea of Trees. For a start, so many of the elements from the aforementioned documentary seemed to have been incorporated into the basic details of the story: the abandoned car in the parking lot, the deserted campsite, the forlorn body of a deceased person, the doll nailed to a tree with a suicide note nailed next to it. Often it felt as though the novella I was reading was a transposition of the documentary into written form, with only minor modifications.
As we get into the second half of the book, the personalities of the two main characters start to emerge, revealing a major weakness of Russell’s abilities as a writer. Both Bill and Junko are disappointingly flat characters – Bill simply switches back and forth between lusting after Junko and meekly allowing her to walk all over him, while Junko is so unrealistically obsessed with finding her sister that she abandons all logic and, particularly in the final pages, believability. She reveals secrets about Izumi that make sense of her sister’s suicide, but her own behavior is so over the top that she made no inherent sense to me at all – her actions seemed a rather artificial device on Russell’s part to push the plot to its culmination rather than any explicable, organic development in her character.
The element of Sea of Trees that I was least able to stomach, though, was its uncritical romanticism. Let’s not forget that the world’s first romantic novel – Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) – also deals with the issue of suicide. While I can sympathize with the seductive power that Aokigahara, with its legends of demons and death, wields over the human imagination (it was what sparked my interest in Russell’s novella in the first place) what I found both lazy and problematic about the book was its wholesale acceptance of this tradition. The reader is not only led to empathize repeatedly with the suicide victims in the book, but also to accept the mystical power that is associated with the place. Bill does make some feeble attempts to give voice to reason, but they are quickly lost in the emotional deluge of Junko’s mania.
Sea of Trees could have been a powerful and complex examination of what life means in the face of death, especially when humanity is faced with the complex phenomenon of its own self-destruction. Russell draws on the operatic, emotional power of the romantic tradition to give his novel punch, but the problem is that this formula is so worn out that, quite simply, I can’t believe in its nobility anymore. I read Goethe’s Werther, for instance, and I think “Put the pistols away, young man – this Lotte woman is not worth it. Your momentary, youthful despair is far less daring than having the maturity to face life with all its prismatic hardness.” Surely that is what novelists, in the twenty-first century, ought to have learned, too – or at the very least, that romanticism is fine when it arouses us into life, but pushed to its extreme it descends into the very worst kind of nihilism.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
The thin line between hopelessness and peace
By Jessica
Sea of Trees (May 2012, Winter Goose Publishing) is set in the Aokigahara forest at the foot of Mount Fuji. Japan has a high suicide rate (about 25 per 100,000 people, compared to the US's 10.7) and Aokigahara is the most popular spot for suicide in Japan, with anywhere from 50-100 deaths, and many more attempts, per year. The novella (104 pages) is narrated in the first person present by Bill, an American college student who has journeyed to the forest with his Japanese girlfriend Junko, whose sister Izumi killed herself in the forest. Junko wears a backpack containing some of Izumi's things, but her exact purpose in visiting the forest -- whose vast 15 square miles makes the notion of searching for one particular corpse absurd-- is not clear. As experienced by Bill -- and hence the reader -- Junko is mysterious. He has a hard time reading her emotions or understanding her actions, and they experience frequent misunderstandings as a result. He's all American college boy: he's focused on her small, slim beauty, her shiny fall of hair, the alluring nature of her body, and her otherness. He wonders what she plans to do, worries about getting lost in the dark, and hopes very much for more chances to kiss her.
As Junko and Bill make their way through the eerily quiet, incredibly dense forest, with its lava rocks and thick brush, they stumble upon the personal effects - notes, combs, makeshift dwellings -- of the dead, suicide prevention signs posted by authorities, and the occasional fellow seeker. As they travel deeper into the forest, the mystery of Izumi's death, and of Junko's quest, begins to seem less practical and more supernatural...and suspenseful.
Sea of Trees is meticulously organized. Each chapter closes with an italicized vignette relating a different Aokigahara suicide. Russell may have been going for the Japanese aesthetic of evocative simplicity with the one word chapter titles ("Hope", "Respect", "Beauty"), but they seemed a bit too obviously related to the content for my tastes. On the other hand, the vignettes and main narrative were interwoven subtly and effectively.
The tight organization and ordinary language propel the narrative and draw the reader in. Sea of Trees is a page turner, with compelling characters and plotting, but I had the sense that Russell was going for more, thematically, and I can't say he ever got there. I was underwhelmed with the "big reveal" of the circumstances of Izumi's death at the end, which were pretty banal. I also can't speak to the characterization of Junko. I would be interested to hear from Japanese readers on this one. Does Junko and Bill's relationship run afoul of the "Asian Gal with White Boyfriend/ aka Madame Butterfly Trope?" Junko is exoticized and sexualized, but not submissive, and she's fairly complex. How much of her characterization can be defended by the fact that it comes to the reader through the experience of a young American college student who is likely to look at most women this way, at least some of the time? As for other women in the text, we have a beautiful model, a protective mother, and an adulterous wife ... not exactly the wide possible spectrum.
Those concerns aside, Russell does a good job resisting the lure of cultural essentialism. Although Junko points out that "We are a very proud people. Very traditional in many ways. It is very hard for some to live with themselves after they have done something so horrible," the novella as a whole presents suicide as it in fact is: a complex phenomenon with psychological, situational, cultural, and, yes, aesthetic elements.
The sense of quiet despair that permeates both Aokigahara and the vignettes contrasts pleasingly with Bill's confusion and increasing terror. Sea of Trees paints the lines between life and death, hopelessness and peace, honor and pride, as vanishingly thin. I enjoyed Sea of Trees.
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