The Suicides of Tojinbou

Ever since I excommunicated myself from the Mormon church, when I was 15, I have been more a man of Logic and Coincidence, with some Chaos and Absurdity thrown into the batch. I lost most of my spiritual beliefs over time, they were absorbed by more pertinent things to me like creativity and the beauty to be found in the simple. Superstition is now just memories of a wild imagination as a child. After rereading Kierkegaard in my early thirties I had regained a strong understanding of the importance of belief, and have reincorporated it into my life, but now without religion attached to it. Mostly I know it is important to believe in people and to trust the inexplicable feelings we often cannot come to copes with.

This post has gone to a place I didn't expect. What I really wanted to share, which I suppose the aforementioned paragraph gives some backstory to, is this: When I was at Tojinbou with Shogo and Akiko, while standing on the jagged rocks looking out over the Sea of Japan, they told me that this was one of the most popular places in Japan to commit suicide, so much so that the city installed a phone booth with a bowl full of coins to use to make a call and a hotline to dial for support. This is pictured below. They also told me that the island just across the way, Oshima, was a place of unsettled ghosts, the ghosts of the thousands of suicides. Then Shogo turned to me very seriously and through broken English told me that people say that at night you can look out over the cliffs towards the island and witness arms stretching out from the sea. This is no joke, and they are not ones to pull a prank on me. Later that night when we were looking through our photographs, we spotted this strange picture of me sitting on the rocks. Take a look. And tell me that that isn't weird!