Original subtitles

A song repeats endlessly in my head.

A song about a girl who encounters a bear in the forest.

The bear tells her to run away, and she does.

But in the process, she drops something, something important.

For the life of me, I can't recall what it is that she dropped.

That's why the song continues to repeat endlessly in my head.

The forest is full of things that stir my curiosity.

But when I get too absorbed in it, I become disoriented and forget where I am.

Sometimes I even forget that I'm lost in the first place.

This is how it was when I encountered the bear.

I was lost in the forest, singing an endless song.

This is a story about the forest.

The forest has a way of changing its form, reflecting a different image in each set of eyes.

But we all live in a forest that only we can see.

A forest all to oneself, never to be shared.

This is the story of how he encountered the bear in the forest.

The story from a song we've all heard before.

My first rape occurred as a casual coincidence.

I had just started university and all the serious studying I had done for the entrance exams left me in shock and suffering from insomnia.

I was overcome with an unsettling numbness.

After much consideration, I consulted a psychiatrist who prescribed tranquilizers and drugs to help me sleep.

The drug Halcyon would knock me out in 15 minutes and I'd be dead asleep for at least a good three hours.

The drug worked so well, I became curious as to its effect.

I met a girl at a party and offered her a ride home.

I mixed the drug in a can of tea and gave it to her.

Soon after she got in my car, she fell asleep.

I stopped the car, but she remained unconscious.

I put my hand in her skirt.

pulled down her panties and raped her.

For just a moment, I felt released from that numbness.

I felt as if I was about to remember something very important that I'd forgotten for so long.

Just then, the song began ringing in my head.

The song about a girl who encounters a bear in the forest.

The girl invited me in, but I declined.

I already got what I needed from her.

A decent girl would never go with someone she doesn't know well.

She'd make up an excuse like, I'm waiting for my friend or I have to go home and feed my bird and get away as quickly as possible.

A decent girl would never walk alone on a dark street.

If she absolutely had to, she'd talk on her cell phone to dissuade any potential attacker.

She might even pretend to be talking with someone.

The reasoning behind this is that someone is on the other end and they would hear the commotion.

But realistically, even if they heard, they're too far away to help.

If you take her phone away and hang up, they would assume it was just a bad connection.

In other words, in the city, an individual's crisis quickly becomes buried under the massive bulk of information and material possessions,

like products lined up in a rental shop or convenience store.

I've finished university now and am no longer suffering from insomnia.

But the numbness remains.

I am numb to the feelings of others.

I feel surrounded by people who, unlike me, have no deep thoughts or emotions.

To me, they are like trees in a forest and their voices are the rustling of leaves.

I feel alone and scared, left behind in this forest, while the song gets louder and louder in my head,

until I can't hear anything at all.

This is when I feel the need to rape, to regain for a moment some form of stability in my heart.

Now I rape quite regularly.

Every waking hour, I'm thinking about rape.

Rape has many dangers.

I might get injured during the attack or even get caught by the police.

The eye and the penis are man's weakest points.

Yet the act of rape requires the latter to be exposed and defenceless.

I must be extremely careful.

Rape is a crime subject to prosecution only if the victim takes legal action.

According to statistics gathered by the Metropolitan Police Department, the number of rapes that led to lawsuits this past year is 1,500.

Of these, 1,410 led to the arrest of 1,160 suspects.

This puts the arrest rate at 94%.

If you take only these statistics into consideration, the success rate of rape is less than 1 in 10.

However, if you include the number of rapes that go unreported each year, the total is increased by more than 50 times.

In other words, the actual rate of arrest becomes less than 1 out of 50.

From my experience, if you are very careful and act boldly, the possibility of getting caught for rape is as close to zero as you can get.

My life is pretty grounded when I'm thinking about rape.

It's because of rape that I was able to graduate from school and even find a job.

You might find this strange, but I even have a girlfriend.

We go out once a week and have sex once every two weeks.

But I can't get rid of the numbness I feel towards other people.

To make matters worse, it has spread to include even myself.

I no longer have any sensation in my daily life.

When I eat, I can taste the food, but it doesn't fill me.

When I bathe and shave, I feel as if I am bathing and shaving someone else.

And that song about the girl in the forest continues to resonate.

Rape is an act that turns a woman into an object.

It completely disregards her as a living, feeling individual.

And although it is somewhat similar to prostitution, it completely lacks any sort of communication.

That's right, communication.

Since being stricken with the numbness, I have found myself unable to carry out the common human function of communication.

New information enters my eyes, surpasses my brain and goes directly to the organs causing them to react.

Old information stored in my brain helps me to act out a normal life.

Sex with my girlfriend is like solving an algebra equation.

I ejaculate only after my brain has fully calculated the process leading up to ejaculation.

When I see a girl, my eyes send the information to my penis.

It is then that my brain finally realizes what is happening and starts to prepare for the act.

When my brain is busy preparing for rape, I am temporarily released from the numbness.

Thinking about committing the perfect rape, reviewing past mistakes, considering ways to add more adventure to the act.

This is the only time I feel whole and secure.

Let me tell you about my typical rape procedure.

First, I go to a convenience store in the evening and look for a girl who lives alone.

You can tell by what's in her shopping basket.

They tend to buy their dinners at about this time.

A bento box, salad, yogurt.

Buying large amounts of food or a men's magazine is a good way to avoid becoming a target for rape.

Once I've marked my prey, I follow her home.

The light that turns on indicates where she lives.

I then check to see how easily the apartment can be broken into.

The ideal location is on the third or fourth floor.

Residents on these levels tend to leave their veranda door unlocked, feeling a false sense of security from being up high.

Any room higher than this is too dangerous to climb up to.

I find a girl who meets these criteria about once a month.

And when I do, I am filled with an unsurpassable sense of satisfaction.

My mission begins at around 3 a.m., sneaking in after the girl has gone to bed.

I make sure that she is fast asleep before closing the veranda door behind me to avoid awakening her abruptly and causing a commotion.

I whisper softly in her ear.

The trick here is to do this from behind.

Not being able to see the attacker increases the fear factor, thus disabling her senses and keeping her from screaming.

While continuing to shower her with threatening words, I make her lay face down.

Expecting to be attacked face up, she becomes confused.

Not being able to see what's going on terrifies her, but at the same time, she is almost glad not to see the face of the dreaded attacker.

With the girl frozen from fear, I take out my Wenger army knife, which I carry with me on my keychain.

I don't even need to open it.

Just the feel of the cold metal against her neck and the sound of the keys clanging together is enough to hurl her fear to a climax.

Lying down close to her, I pull back the covers and rip off her pants and panties in a single movement.

Knowing she will no longer resist, I put away the knife.

My penis is hard and erect, like a completely separate living thing.

I lubricate swiftly as I position myself above her and rub the tip of my penis against her anus.

The girl, thinking she'll be violated vaginally, becomes even more confused, causing her to react by tensing her muscles.

This is when I say to her from behind, if I force myself into your tight and dainess,

it'll tear your muscles and you'll have a loose ass for the rest of your life.

It's bullshit, but it works.

She's too scared to think straight.

She gives in and relaxes her body.

I deliberately enter her slowly, just enough to bury the head of my penis.

The girl lies still, shocked at being penetrated anally.

I never hinder the act with a condom.

While my penis reacts obediently to the stimulus it receives, my brain becomes filled with the satisfaction that I'm about to achieve release.

I take in the smell of her hair as I ejaculate into her rectum.

When I'm finished, I pull the cover up over the girl's head.

I carefully check my escape route and withdraw from the scene the same way I made my entrance.

The girl never sees my face, and the shame of being raped anally will keep her from ever talking about it.

during rape is the only vivid sensation I have.

For that short moment, I'm released from the plaguing numbness and I'm filled with a sense of tranquility like no other.

I was on my way home after a typical rape when it happened.

I was suddenly attacked by three men.

At first, I thought it was a robbery.

I didn't have much money on me, so that wasn't to worry.

I was slightly afraid that they might hurt or even kill me.

But their true intention was something I least expected.

I have always been extremely careful with my acts of rape.

But I never imagined that I could ever be the victim of rape.

The three took turns ejaculating into my anus and my mouth.

I was so full of fear.

It was all I could do to submit to their demands.

I was raped over and over and over again.

My mind went completely blank.

I lost all sense of time.

It was already light when I came to.

I went home, filled the bathtub with hot water and soaked my aching body.

The song about the forest blared louder and louder in my head.

The hot water stung my anus.

I dressed and headed for the proctologist's office.

People die.

It's a fact of life.

But it's not every day that you see someone die.

It's even rarer to see someone die right in front of your eyes.

Or to almost die yourself.

But we all know, one day, we all die.

People die every day.

The world is full of death.

922,139 The number of people who died in Japan one year at the end of the century.

15,147 The number of people who died in traffic accidents.

5,911 The number of people who fell to their deaths.

5,588 people drowned and 3,846 people died from food-related accidents.

30,000 accidental deaths.

In one year at the end of the century, 255 people were stabbed to death, 170 were strangled,

6 received the death penalty, and nearly 500 were murdered in other ways.

922,139 dead people, almost 1 in 2,000 murdered.

There is a one in 150,000 chance that a living person will be killed in one year.

And it all depends on luck.

He is a killer.

He kills constantly.

But he never gets caught.

I don't know why.

That's just how it goes.

When he kills, he does it randomly, and he doesn't hide the bodies.

Because when a person dies, that person no longer exists in this world.

The body is irrelevant.

Eventually the person is found to be missing, then to be dead.

The problem is not the body, but the relation to the body.

As long as the connection between him and the body is unknown, there is no problem.

That's why he doesn't do anything unnecessary.

That's why he only kills strangers and doesn't hide the body.

He just kills.

He keeps a connection simple.

The person that kills and the person that gets killed.

They spend just a few short moments together.

This is important.

This is how he thinks.

He is the king of the forest.

In the forest his power is absolute.

His primitive instincts lead him away from danger.

That's why he doesn't get caught.

He is invisible to the law.

This is how he kills.

How he uses his army knife.

He grabs the person's face and slams the back of their head into the ground.

The victim goes into shock and cannot move.

He takes out his wenger army knife and slowly inserts it behind the ear, right into their brain.

The person bleeds to death in a state of half-consciousness.

The average human being dies when they lose one third of their blood.

He doesn't enjoy killing.

He doesn't kill as a religious sacrifice.

He doesn't take their money.

So why does he kill?

Does he have a regular job?

I'll never know.

But there is one thing I know for certain.

He is the one who painted the path of bright red blood which guides my lost soul through the thick,

green forest.

One day, all of a sudden, I saw him.

He's killing someone.

I don't move.

He knows I'm watching, but he continues in silence.

After he finishes the kill, he slowly starts toward me.

My natural reaction is panic.

He's going to kill me.

My body refuses to obey my mind.

I'm frozen.

He undresses me and begins caressing me.

I don't resist.

His penis enters me.

There's no pain.

No pleasure.

No sensation.

My mind feels nothing.

My body feels nothing.

I don't even know if this is really happening.

Only one thing floated vaguely in my mind.

The concept of death.

Even before I met him, I was possessed by death.

I thought about death until everything else around me disappeared, and I found myself lost in the forest.

This was when I met him.

I watched him kill and realized something.

Death is not a concept.

Death exists right here in reality.

Now every time he kills, he calls me.

When he finishes, we have sexual intercourse.

This is how I began to photograph dead bodies.

I've changed ever since I began taking pictures of bodies.

I exercise more now.

Every day I jog for two hours and swim for one.

When my body runs low on oxygen and my breathing becomes distressed, when my muscles produce lactic acid and begin to ache and tire,

this is when I become conscious of my physical body.

After exercising, I can hear distinctly the sound of my lungs breathing, my heart beating,

a faint ringing in my ears.

These sounds confirm to me that my body is here and alive, and I wonder whether these sounds were gone forever.

My mind goes blank.

I concentrate on my physical body.

Oxygen enters the capillaries via the bronchial tubes and alveoli.

The heart pumps this blood out to the body.

The digestive system absorbs nutrients from food which is turned into energy.

Yes, my body is really here.

I am moving and reacting.

The more I observe my own body, the more I understand the dead bodies.

A dead body is no longer a person.

It is undoubtedly and overwhelmingly dead.

The existence of death transforms the air around the body.

When life disappears from within a body, it creates a void that sucks in the air around it.

The current created by this movement is intensely cold to the touch, but this sensation cannot be recorded with a camera.

When a person becomes a thing, an object, that is when death can finally be captured as a photograph.

But this is not the true form of death.

When a body loses its life and the void is filled with air, the body becomes an object,

a lifeless entity.

As soon as the body ceases to be a living being, it begins to function as something else.

Decomposition begins in the digestive system.

When alive, the stomach and intestines work to digest food.

After death, they begin to digest themselves.

Eventually, bacteria are produced, accelerating the decay.

Blue, red, black, white.

The gases released contain hydrogen sulfides, which combine with haemoglobin in the blood.

The abdominal region turns blue and then spreads to the rest of the body.

The body swells and decomposes further.

It gradually turns a reddish brown colour.

It continues to swell, looking like a grotesque balloon.

When it can swell no more, the skin splits and begins to rot away.

The body emits a strong stench.

Next, it turns black as decay juices are secreted.

Eventually, the bones become exposed.

This usually takes three months.

With the help of maggots to eat away the flesh and muscle, it can be sped up to as short as 10 days.

The bodies are constantly changing.

I photograph the changes.

I scan the photos into the computer.

Digitised image of dead bodies.

Death expressed in numerical patterns.

I rearrange the numbers.

These are the digital effects.

Death with rearranged shapes.

Reversed colours.

Enlarged or reduced.

flipped upside down, doodled on, death with whirlpools, ripples, parts copied and pasted,

partially erased, cracked, with holes divided into parts, out of focus painted over with noise,

stronger or weaker contrast, twisted, elongated, smeared, To me, a computer is deeply connected to death.

A year ago, my friend was raped.

A stranger entered her room in the middle of the night and raped her anally.

She came to me for support.

I could feel her pain and wanted to help.

We became very close.

One day, she confessed her feelings for me.

We became lovers.

It felt strangely natural.

Aside from the fact that we were both women, we were a typical couple.

We had similar interests.

I enjoyed being with her more than anything in the world.

I cared for her deeply.

I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her.

And I thought she felt the same way about me too.

One day, we went out to buy her a computer.

We loaded the hard drive, monitor, scanner and printer into the backseat of my car.

After some tea, we headed home.

We stopped at a railroad crossing.

The red warning lights were flashing.

Suddenly, she opened her door.

She looked at me and said something.

I couldn't hear her voice over the warning bells.

She had a smile on her face.

It sounded like she said, Give my regards to the bear.

Or it might have been, give Margaret some air.

With a vague smile on my face, I asked, what?

But she just stepped out of the car and walked onto the railroad tracks.

A moment later, she was run over by an eight-car express train.

One year at the end of the century, 19,875 people committed suicide.

That's an average of 54 per day.

According to one statistic, suicides occur most often on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and least often on Sundays.

That day was a Saturday.

That was my first actual experience with death.

And I was left with a computer and an obsession with death.

That was when I lost all sensation.

Life went on as usual.

My health was good and I had a good appetite.

My menstrual periods were regular.

But the healthier my body was, the more lost my mind became.

I can move, but I can't feel.

I can't taste my food.

There's no pain.

I don't speak much anymore.

I bought a mirror as a last resort.

confirm my own existence.

I stand in front of the mirror and look closely at the image reflected in the glass.

I also bought a camera.

I photograph my image in the mirror to confirm that it's real.

I take pictures of things I see to make sure that I'm really seeing them.

I was desperate.

If I don't do something to prove my existence, I might disappear altogether.

I was desperately trying to keep myself in one piece.

That was when I met him.

He who kills over and over again.

And I began to capture the death he left behind.

Decomposing bodies.

I use digital effects to make the details more prominent.

Various colors, various shapes.

I create something unimaginable from the original images.

How pretty.

Freshly dead bodies.

They look still alive.

I use the effects to twist the contours of the eyes, nose, mouth.

How grotesque.

What is beautiful?

What is ugly?

Values become more and more ambiguous.

Beauty and ugliness.

Joy and sorrow.

Pain and pleasure.

Dynamic and static.

Treasure and trash.

White and black.

common and uncommon, day and night, signals and noise, fluid and stagnant, spirit and body,

red and green, good and evil, favourable and unfavourable, front and back, inorganic and organic,

expansion and contraction, beginning and end, man and woman, Him and me.

Life and death.

I use the effects to wander the ambiguous ravine between life and death.

I continue to photograph the bodies and rearrange them with digital effects.

I continue to exercise and have sex with him after he kills.

Yet, I am still sensationless.

Even when his penis enters me, I can barely feel him inside me.

But this day, it was different.

This day, he was different.

He didn't use his knife.

He strangled the person to death.

The sex was different too.

There was no foreplay, just immediate insertion.

This has never happened before.

Then I was suddenly overcome with an indescribable pain in my anus.

It felt as if all of the sensations I hadn't felt over the past few years were coming back to me,

all at once.

I reflexively pull away from him.

I turn and look behind me.

I see him standing there.

The pain makes it difficult to focus my eyes.

There are two penises, covered in blood.

I can't see very clearly.

Both are erect.

I look closer.

The top one.

The one that entered my anus.

It isn't a penis.

It's a steel pipe.

There's someone behind him.

The man he had killed.

The pain is unbearable.

The pain.

I awaken.

The pain is still there.

It's light out.

Probably morning.

I pull on my pants.

What now?

I'm alone.

My anus hurts dreadfully.

I start toward the proctologist.

What do you do to protect your privacy?

Get an answering machine and screen your calls?

Watch over your back to make sure you're not being followed?

There are more practical solutions.

Let me tell you about one of them.

Be careful what you throw away.

Start right now.

Because trash is a storehouse of information.

It can reveal everything about you.

When I wander through the city, I see the streets overflowing with personal information.

In this modern consumer society, old and unwanted things are constantly being thrown away without a second thought.

Most people forget about these things as soon as they're out of sight.

How ridiculous.

If you think about it for a second, it's plain to see that they haven't disappeared from this world.

From the trash can, they get collected in a truck and taken to the incinerator.

Until then, they hold an immeasurable amount of information.

Journals and daily planners, copies of paychecks and credit card bills.

Not many people go as far as to burn these themselves.

So where do they go then?

One day, they're just left, carelessly, on the side of the street.

The city overflows with bits and pieces of people's lives.

They're left exposed and defenseless to the outside world.

I wander the streets at night, looking to peek into people's private lives.

The Wenger army knife and key light are always on my keychain to avoid looking conspicuous.

You might wonder if I'm not embarrassed to be seen rummaging through trash.

But why should I care about what strangers think?

Strangers are like trees in a forest.

The trash are the acorns and the animals.

They don't argue.

They don't lie.

They speak to me quietly and frankly.

The sound of their voices fills me with peace.

Looking at the world through the information I find in trash, I start to feel like I'm living in a deep forest.

Items found in trash can be separated into several categories according to the stories they tell.

One category consists of mangas and magazines.

If I follow a set course regularly, I can end up with a mass of free subscriptions.

Manga and comics, celebrity gossip, news and entertainment, parenting advice, fashion and trend,

teen magazines.

A majority of these I would never read if they weren't in the trash.

In a sense, scavenging has expanded my horizons.

Converted into cash, these subscriptions will be worth over $200 a month.

Sometimes I feel like I've made a profit.

But then again, they're not things I need anyway.

Sometimes I find small change found at the bottom of bags containing used pencils,

pens, staples and other office supplies.

It's not much, but I realise for the first time that there are people who consider pennies and nickels to be trash.

I also often find photographs.

Most are of girls with one eye closed or a bold or embarrassing facial expression.

I get quite excited by these images that are not meant to be seen by anyone else.

I listen to the voices of the photographs and masturbate.

About a year ago, I began to find an especially strange series of photos from the trash of a young woman.

Nude self-portraits taken as reflections in a mirror or on automatic shutter release.

Usually I would masturbate to the voices from the photos.

But these were different.

I couldn't hear any voices.

The voices from the trash are those of the human self-conscious like pride and embarrassment.

And they were completely lacking from these photos.

It's as if she weren't human.

Sometimes while scavenging, I stumble upon the presence of something terrifyingly enigmatic living deep in the forest.

Items created to fulfill sexual desires are often abandoned in taped-up cardboard boxes.

When I open these boxes, the voices jump out of me.

The voices of desire come from primitive animal instincts.

They cling to my body and won't let go.

TVs can be found stealthily discarded at night.

At first glance, most of them look to be functioning.

The more TVs I have in my room, the better.

The light they emit have mysterious powers.

I fill my cramped room with the photosynthetic light which gently kindles and invigorates my heart.

They feel like the sun's rays shining through the trees in the forest.

The forest is here It is where I gather acorns and listen to the voices of the birds and insects This is my life One evening,

about a year into my scavenging, I found some photos on the ground near a trash collection area.

Photos of a couple, typical snapshots from a trip somewhere.

They appeared to have fallen out of a tear in the black trash bag next to them.

Until then, I'd only collected books, videotapes, CDs, cassette tapes, things that could still be used.

But when I saw these photos, they stimulated something inside me that I'd never felt before.

I quickly grabbed the bag and took it home to better inspect its contents.

More photos from the trip.

Photos taken with friends.

And a single photo of a girl.

The same one from the trip photos.

This must be her trash.

My curiosity swelled.

I've seen this girl in the neighborhood convenience store and at the train station.

I remember her clearly because I found her quite attractive.

It excited me to think that I was peeking into her private life.

I looked further and found an unfinished letter.

She was confiding in a friend about her younger boyfriend.

They had been college sweethearts.

After she graduated and got a job, she found herself in a different environment.

Her boyfriend suddenly began to appear immature and childish.

He always expects her to pay and insists on hanging out at arcades and karaoke clubs.

The other day, he asked her to take photos of them having sex.

Apparently they can sell for good money to the right magazines.

She's fed up with him and wants to break off the relationship.

She wrote the letter, but never sent it.

I also found bills, bank statements and other personal information.

I even found used panties and menstrual products.

That's when I first heard the voices.

That night, I masturbated four times listening to the voices.

I unintentionally learned more about this girl than anyone else could know.

And I realized for the first time that a trash bag is a treasure trove of information.

Fantasizing about a stranger's life is more stimulating and meaningful than living my own banal life.

I can't even validate the existence of my own life.

The creatures of the forest have no awareness of the self.

Even families that look completely normal and happy on the surface have secrets hidden in their trash.

There's a posh looking apartment building just around the corner from my house.

They have their own collection bin, which is always full of interesting articles.

On the fifth floor of this building, there lives a family of three.

The father works at an advertisement agency.

The mother is fit and beautiful.

The teenage daughter attends a private high school.

The father's trash was the most interesting.

Countless envelopes stamped with his company's logo addressed to him.

They contained letters from the receptionist with whom he was obviously having an affair.

Reading the carefully handwritten words, I began to imagine a beautiful woman with a bit of a dark past sorting through her feelings as she writes.

Empty diet food packages fill the kitchen trash, proving that beauty does require hard work.

From the daughter's trash emerged three journals, On June 12th, she got her first period and had to sit through gym class.

I could hear the voice of a girl becoming a woman.

I listened to the voice and masturbated to it.

Shortly after, letters from the receptionist stopped appearing.

At around the same time, the father gets an internet connection.

The discarded user's manual contained scribbled codes, passwords and internet server addresses.

I bribed a computer geek I know with some porn videos I found and had him hack into the father's mail without being noticed.

I have him regularly check and print out any interesting mail.

As expected, massive amounts of erotic mail overshadow the work mail.

They talk about trips to the hot springs, or a new pair of sexy underwear.

Meanwhile, I began to find great numbers of liquor containers from the kitchen trash.

I know the father doesn't drink, and the daughter wouldn't be so careless with the empty containers.

An average of 1.8 litres of alcohol are emptied per day as the paper containers are neatly folded and tossed.

Perhaps the mother has caught on to her husband's affair.

It seems she's become a kitchen drinker.

The daughter has begun working part-time in a fast food restaurant.

Her shifts are marked with a highlighter in her daily planner.

She gets paid about $6.25 an hour to work the registers.

At around this time, cell phone bills begin to materialise from her trash, as well as cosmetics packaging.

The father and his lover have grown to be quite bold and adventurous.

The email subjects read, I can't wait to lick your cute arsehole.

Underarm hair removal prohibited for one month.

And list of lustful and obscene situations for the month of July.

Seen through the trash, all people are equally abnormal.

In the forest, a million mysteries are hidden in the deep fog.

The mother has stopped drinking.

The liquor containers have been replaced by abnormal amounts of cream puff packages.

She doesn't seem to be any heavier than before though.

She must be vomiting them back out.

The poor woman is a mess.

The daughter has gained a passion for famous brands.

Gucci, Chanel, Prada.

None of which can be bought on her meager wages.

She still works at the fast food place.

Her hours are the same as before.

Her cell phone bills have gone up five-fold.

To top it all off, she's been taking strange pills and pregnancy tests.

So far, she's not expecting.

While the father is busy licking assholes with his receptionist, his 16-year-old daughter is high on drugs and going on $1,000 shopping sprees.

And the mother binges and purges on cream puffs at home.

And every Sunday they get together and pretend that everything is normal as they go out for a family dinner.

I can hear the conversations they have through the items in their trash.

The voices are frighteningly quiet and laugh like chills up the spine, like the murmur of sounds in the forest.

From the outside, the light in the forest looks alluring, but take one step forward and you are sinking in quicksand.

It's a feeling not unlike ecstasy.

I try out everything I find that can still be used.

When I found a set of fake eyelashes, I put on some makeup and women's clothing that I'd found before and had my own little drag show.

One evening, I found two packages of unused enemas.

They came from the trash of a female college student.

I became excited as I fantasized about using one of these.

That night, I decided to try one.

I could feel the cold liquid enter my anus and rectum, A short while later, I had a sudden and strong urge to defecate.

It felt refreshing, like washing out my intestines.

The next evening, I decided to try the other one.

The cold liquid is soothing as it enters.

But something isn't right.

The inside of my anus becomes hot and inflamed.

The burning sensation is intense.

Panicking, I frantically pushed the liquid out.

The pain subsided slightly.

What happened?

Was the enema old?

Or was the liquid replaced with something else?

Who would do such a thing?

I soaked in the bath to think.

But thinking won't take the pain away.

My anus still hurt the next day, so I decided to visit the proctologist.

The next moment, we found ourselves in the same forest.

Thinking back on it, I see now that we have been repeating the same things over and over again in order to find each other.

It was inevitable.

I finally realized that it all happened for this single moment.

I'm free from the forest in the wide open.

I can go wherever I choose from here.

There's nothing to hurt me.

Nothing to protect me.

I just walk on.

There are no acorns to gather here, no gentle sunlight shining on me through the trees or the whisper of leaves.

The dry sun covers each and every corner of my body, and a silence like the ringing in my ears wraps around my head.

I tear through the silence and move on.

I am myself again.

I'm out of the forest.

I stand here at the end of a journey that lasted an eternity, yet which ended in a single moment.

Every detail is clearly imprinted in my mind, but at the same time, it all seems like a dream.

The endless song has ended.

In its place is the image of a tiny earring with a white seashell.