Prologue
The twig snapped under her foot as she trudged through the undergrowth and hopped over little creeks. Normally she'd be more careful about the sounds she made, but at the moment she could hardly care. For such a dangerous place, she felt safe and it was partially true.
Aokigahara was dubbed the suicide forest for a reason and it wasn't exactly a myth. Many humans had come here to commit suicide and plenty of ghouls came here to take away their bodies. Occasionally a few lurked to play with the food, the ones who were alive while contemplating suicide, or the occasional tourist curious and stupid enough to come to Aokigahara as a joke.
Hinami on the other hand, didn't exactly know why she was here. To commit suicide? To get killed? To kill someone else? To think? To hide in the depths of this forest? It was rumoured there was a small ghoul coven here with similar ideals to those of Anteiku.
Strict Buddhists who lived their lives in peace and only ate the bodies of the deceased once they'd taken their own lives. More myth than fact though. Nobody had ever met any of them nor was there any famous name associated with them.
An isolated life had its appeal though. Perhaps she could make the myth come alive by starting the coven by herself. She pursed her lips.
Even she wasn't brave enough for that and the thought of it was enough to even make her crack a smile. That she, Hinami Fueguchi was more afraid of the imaginative Yurei than she was of the actual monsters hunting her down.
The Yurei would be far more merciful she thought.
Eventually, she got tired and found herself a small cave formed by rocks and green undergrowth to lie under and pretend she was dead.
Her thoughts again turned to the philosophies of life. Is this what people who were on the brink of death be it their choice or not thought of?
Granted she had never been religious herself. Her father believed religion was a poison that addled men's brains and their faculties of reason. Her mother only ever spoke of 'meaning of life' questions she'd asked as a child in an objective manner, stating clinically that people of different faiths and walks of life had different views of the after-life.
"Do you believe in reincarnation?"
She'd once asked her mother as she placed a cool cloth on her forehead as she battled through the end stages of her life.
Her father couldn't handle seeing his wife in such a state or accept that his wife would die and so immersed himself in his work in an effort to save her.
Ryouko Fueguchi contemplated her daughter for several moments before answering.
"Reincarnation? I don't believe in death worship. One cannot logically be punished for the sins one did as a complete stranger in the past life."
"Death worship?" An eleven-year-old Hinami asked full of childish ignorance on religion and philosophical teachings. Mathematics and methodological reasoning were her strong points, not literature and the double meanings in words.
Her mother only smiled. Smiled sadly.
"If there is such a thing as reincarnation, the closest we get is the genes we pass on through our children and how all our secrets, memories and stories are within them, in their essence, in their very DNA as they pass down."
Hinami didn't understand what her mother was referring to exactly, but It was intriguing nonetheless.
"You know in the monotheistic faiths, great important was placed upon descendants. Abraham sprung up an entire nation in ancient times from his only son whom he waited so long to see."
Ah, yes these stories. Such religion was out of practice these days and moving out of fashion. The world had moved on.
But she remembered the story of the patriarch.
"Abraham had two nations. He had another son."
Ryouko began to have a coughing fit and Hinami dutifully held out the small bucket to gather vomit, phlegm and blood.
"Nobody considered the wanton bastard child. Just like nobody considered Cain and his descendants."
Hinami disagreed.
"They would have, if Isaac's line died."
"Ishmael couldn't have lived without Isaac, Esau without Jacob, Cain without Seth. The individuals may have been enemies, their nations too, but occasionally you will find an anomaly where they made peace, where they inter-mingled and there was happiness…for a time."
Hinami didn't understand.
"Are you saying I should read the Old Testament?"
Ryouko snorted at that.
"I am saying you could learn a few things about how many things they did wrong and consider the possibilities of what could have been done to make it right. Then there needed to be no killing, no genocides, no generational cycles of bitterness and hatred. Understanding."
Her mother had said no more on the matter and for many years after her death, Hinami had wondered if her mother had been a closet Christian, but she realised eventually that too was nonsense.
Her mother was just the moralist to her father's libertine. But she couldn't help, but notice how relevant her lessons were to her now.
As soon as she had finished school, young and way ahead of her peers by a long margin, she'd entered into psychology and had started studying ghouls at Cochlea as a CCG employee. She had asked questions about their lives, customs and mannerisms, their beliefs and values.
They were so human as her father had said. Just as he was.
Then by chance she'd entered into politics, using her research findings to present to the public ghouls in a more sympathetic light. She didn't exactly advocate for them, since she had no solutions for the current dilemma-their need for human flesh-but she did make attempts to humanise them to the general public.
Feelings were split and mixed. Many appreciated her works and findings and those who leaned towards more humanist philosophies agreed towards finding a solution instead of remaining with the status quo of people being eaten and killed.
Some suggested and liked the idea of 'good' ghouls who only ate suicide victims and dead bodies. Others on social media fronts suggested feeding ghouls convicted criminals or encouraged a movement of vigilante violence championed by ghouls to eat the human scum off the streets.
Plenty of others were against and disgusted by it arguing ghouls were devoid of all morals and accepting them meant accepting cannibalism and the moral decline of society. One suggested the fact that ghouls sometimes had relationships with humans on friendly terms was proof how devoid of moral sense they were.
That had been during a live interview. When Hinami pointed out humans have friendly relationships with animals (though made it clear she didn't view ghouls in such a light), she had no answer for when the interviewee elaborated.
"Some ghouls are known to have sex with humans, even on the rare occasion, have produced stillborn children from such unholy alliances. If we are their food, it would be the equivalent of a human having a loving and sexual relationship with a cow or a pig! How disgusting is that?"
The man had had a point, but it wasn't necessarily true. The relationships between ghoul's and humans was different to humans and animals. They looked the same, their psychological and most physical needs were almost identical. Humans could technically eat human flesh as well and the fact that ghoul's and humans could produce children, ones that occasionally lived was proof they were compatible.
She wisely hadn't said these things on air. Humanity needed time to adapt for change. She'd conceded the point, but made it clear that nowhere had she advocated for human-ghoul sexual relationships or even friendship for that matter. Just a simple recognition that ghoul's did have feelings and family and friends (even humans though she didn't say) that they loved as much as anybody else.
The journalist had looked at her with narrowed eyes and stated though there may be 'good ghouls' there wasn't enough food to go around to feed them all via the solutions given by the public on survey polls and that plenty of ghouls would always resort to murdering innocent people.
The debate was up in the air despite Hinami adding that such solutions would lessen murders, but that was all she could do. At the very least, she had started the public debate about 'ghoul rights' and created several factions in the media sympathetic to the ghoul cause.
It wasn't without its ramifications. Her father had to remain in the shadows, she herself had been under several investigations of suspicion of being a ghoul or associating with them and in many ways had to walk on egg shells. But she had been vigilant and so thus far in her short life, was quite safe.
That was until a year ago, when everything got shot to hell because of her own foolish actions.
She had known he was a ghoul when she got involved with him, but she hadn't been aware of his affiliations and now that it quite possibly could be brought to the public, everything she and her father had worked for could possibly be damned.
Hinami buried her face in her hands and tried very hard not to cry.