My half-sister, eight-years my senior, has a given name represented by the “kanji,” or Chinese-based logographic characters that represent its pronunciation, which read something like, “Ten-Thousand I.Q. Child.”  To me, my parents gave a more common Japanese girl’s name.   When written, its kanji mean something like, “Forever Beautiful Child.”  I sometimes think that, maybe as a second daughter, my parents didn’t expect much from me.

Many years later, my bright but also stunningly beautiful onēsan, or older-sister, would float through a college major in Art History.  I ended up being the rough-edged sibling who would press through an advanced degree in a hard-science.  Had we been fraternal twins, our given names might have suggested we’d been switched at birth… so perhaps the joke was on my parents. But I also ended up with a different family name in my “koseki” (戸籍), or Japanese family registry.

It’s not an especially common family name in Japan. It references a mountainous region in the Aomori Prefecture of far northern “Honshu,” Japan’s main island. And according to my father, it represented a sort of challenge from a particular feudal clan there, that they would remain loyal to the Edo leadership, but only so long as their functionary status was recognized. Apparently, my ancestors were a tribe of entitled bureaucrats.

Still, a certain romance seems to have developed around the name.  Its kanji evoke images of a mysterious and perhaps dangerous domain, a place from which an unwelcome visitor might never return.  Consequently, to search the characters in Japanese results in links to everything from traditionally-made blades to high-tech bike frames, and from manga characters and video-game monsters to ubiquitous Japanese pornography (no, none of it me). But not too long ago, I heard an expression that suddenly struck me as a close variation on the interpretation of the meanings of the kanji.  And it bothered me a little.

The “Aokigahara-jukai” is a forest at the base of Mount Fuji’s north-western slope. But in that near interpretation of my own family name, the area is also known as the “kuroi jukai,” or the “black sea-of-trees,” due to its sun-obscuring canopy and waves that appear to move across its surface when viewed from the surrounding mountains on windy days. The forest is noted for its dense and tangled foliage, shadowy atmosphere, and a disconcerting quiet due to an unusual scarcity of wildlife. Underground volcanic iron deposits also disrupt cell phones, magnetic compasses and GPS receivers, making it a notoriously easy place within which to become hopelessly lost. But the location also has a far darker notoriety.

“Ubasute” (姥捨て) translates literally as, “old-woman abandonment.” It refers to an ancient Japanese tradition of carrying an infirm or elderly family member to a remote location and then leaving them behind, presumably to die by exposure or starvation. Historically, it was an uncommon practice, and most often associated with times of famine. But ubasute is also viewed as an allegorical part of Japanese lore, remembered in stories of self-sacrifice, as in the classic 1958 Japanese film, The Ballad of Narayama, remade in 1983.  And the tangled depths of the Aokigahara forest were apparently used for the practice, possibly until the 19th-century.

In 1960, the well-known Japanese author, Seichō Matsumoto, added to the forest’s dark reputation when he published, Nami no Tou (波の塔 ), “Tower of Waves.” It’s the story of a doomed relationship between two lovers. And capitalizing on the forest’s mystique, the story concludes dramatically with the heroine ending her own life in the kuroi jukai.  Since then, the book has been found alongside several suicides in the forest.

Suicide has a strangely romanticized place in Japanese society, evoking images of samurai or kamikaze. It’s not necessarily seen as a desirable outcome, but it may be perceived to be an acceptable, or at least accessible form of personal escape. It is, perhaps, the Japanese cultural equivalent of mood-assuaging drug use in Western societies.  Indeed, Matsumoto’s book portrays it as something of a beautiful pilgrimage, a peaceful ending to a shattered life while embraced by nature.  And this darkly iconic image of the Aokigahara forest was emphasized again in 1993, when Wataru Tsurumi’s, The Complete Manual of Suicide, called the kuroi jukai a “…perfect place to die.”

The result has been an increase in suicides within the forest to the point where several times each year, patrols must now search its dark and tangled depths for the dead. In 2004, the last year for which police publicly released data, well over 100 bodies were recovered with an estimate that at least half-again as many remained unfound.  Consequently, the expression, “kuroi jukai,” has become synonymous with despair and death.  Last March, Japanese television aired the drama, Kuroi Jukai, in which the lead character struggles to understand the mystery of her own sister’s death in the Aokigahara forest. And last January’s Japanese horror film, The Forest, depicted an encounter with malevolent spirits inhabiting the kuroi jukai.

I sincerely doubt that Matsumoto ever intended that his book be interpreted in this way.  Nevertheless, it’s become a powerful symbol.  And it was during my own high school years that it first occurred to me how people come to identify themselves with the symbols they internalize. In general, humans tend to adopt, and then to unquestioningly repeat the patterns in our lives, whether in our upbringings, beliefs or superstitions, politics, fashion… even the things we see as most important, or what should be important to others. Granted, it’s probably a necessary characteristic of such a social species that we should feel some compulsion and comfort in a binding similarity to others within our own tribes, especially those whom we perceive as either “successful” or as “leaders.”  But it also seems to extend to the ways in which we address our own perceived failures.

This makes me think we far too often miss our own susceptibilities to the self-destructive memes in our lives, especially when we don’t carefully consider sources or underlying motivations. Regardless, it can be an emotionally draining prospect to abandon a long accepted convention, even when we recognize its uselessness or dysfunction. Just as with the names we were given, the patterns we internalize become an unquestioned part of our identities. And that’s made me increasingly cautious about what I allow myself to become.

It was in the late 80’s that I accompanied my dad to Seattle for a presentation and a book-signing by a fairly well-known European mountaineer. Reinhold Messner had only recently returned from the Himalayas, where he had just completed a list of climbs that included all fourteen “eight-thousanders,” or peaks with summits above 8,000 meters. And he had reached them all without the use of either large support teams or supplemental oxygen. Especially for the time, it was a remarkably impressive achievement.

Carefully examining the man as he conversed in German with my father, Messner was very casually dressed, had a rough beard, and he wore a pair of surprisingly small boots. My father later explained that the latter was likely due to Messner having lost his toes to frostbite.  But even in an incomprehensible language, I could sense Messner’s inner-strength and quickness.  And I also noticed a strange object that he wore around his neck, which I would later discover was an ancient Tibetan “xi,” or “dzi” stone.

In my father’s signed copy of Messner’s, All Fourteen Eight-Thousanders, there’s a photo of a Tibetan woman touching it with the explanation that these two-thousand year old, patterned stone beads are seen as, “…barometers of the soul.”  The explanation fascinated me, and over several following years I discovered more about the rare, and still rather mysterious stones.  Now into his seventies, Messner’s xi still appears in images of the man, its particular Tibetan Buddhist adopted pattern symbolizing his own single-minded focus — a self-chosen barometer to his own soul.

In Buddhism, the term, “pāramitā,” refers to six aspects of living a “complete” life. Briefly, they’re generosity, self-discipline, enduring acceptance, effort, concentration and contemplation, and insight or wisdom.  I like this idea; and it turns out there’s a particular type of xi with a pattern that’s associated with the concept.  So along this line, I’ve managed to collect a few examples of truly ancient pāramitā-patterned xi stones (along with some fairly impressive “reproductions”) in the quarter-century since first seeing Messner’s.  They’re among my most valued possessions, though not necessarily by any monetary measure.

“Forever Beautiful”… It was a parental gesture that I’ve always accepted as kind-spirited.  But it also suggests some wishful thinking, and I’m most certainly not a child.  And I don’t really care to identify with manga characters, entitled bureaucrats, or eternal silence in some dark and lonely forest.  Regardless, we’re constantly handed these kinds of ideas, and often through the esoteric symbols with which we come to label ourselves.  Adopted without question, they fill our spirits.  But they also displace what we could make of our own identities.  So it behooves us to remain wary of what we choose to keep, and to leave a place in which to hold something carefully chosen, something through which to see ourselves and our world in a better light.