Citation

Chang KY. SARE 2022; 59(1): 88-109.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2022)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Aokigahara Jukai, situated at the foot of Mount Fuji in Yamanashi Prefecture, has historically been known as the home of people who commit suicide. Stories about Aokigahara as a popular suicide spot have fuelled interest. Drawing on filmic representation of Aokigahara, alias "suicide forest," this article proposes to read Gus Van Sant's film The Sea of Trees (2015) through the genre of the EcoGothic, addressing how the film deals with nature, death, precarity, and vulnerability to account for the (im)possibility of transformation in the dark woods. The uniqueness of Van Sant's film compared to other filmic and literary representations of Jukai or the sea of trees, including Jason Zada's film The Forest (2016), has been attributed to Van Sant's incorporation of Aokigahara as a place for meditation and his treatment of the protagonist's relationship with the Gothic forest. Based on new materialist theorist Timothy Morton's thinking on "darkness," this article is divided into three parts: Thinking the EcoGothic; Thinking Darkness; and Thinking Dark Sweet. The essay explores how the film challenges conventional representations of the dark woods by showing how the protagonist, by grieving for his dead wife in the forest, comes to acknowledge death as renewal. © 2022, University of Malaya. All rights reserved.

Language: en

Keywords

Aokigahara; dark ecology; EcoGothic; Gus Van Sant; The Sea of Trees; Timothy Morton