The Haunted Forest

Finding echoes of Japans ancient past, and of the enchanted woodlands of Hayao Miyazaki's animated masterpiece Princess Mononoke, deep among the trees of Yakushima island.

- Hanya Yanagihara

IN ORDER TO see one of the oldest living trees on earth in one of the oldest evergreen forests in the world, you must first fly two hours from Tokyo to the town of Kagoshima on Kyushu, which is the southern- and westernmost of Japan’s four major islands. From there, you board a little twin-propeller plane for another short flight south to Yakushima, which appears on maps as a near-perfect circle, the last piece of significant landmass before the Okinawa archipelago, another hour’s flight south.

If you haven’t visited Japan — and probably even if you have — you have likely never heard of Yakushima. The island, which has a population of just 13,100 and is less than 200 square miles (approx. 518 sq km), is distinguished by its curious ecosystem. The eastern side, where my friend and I landed, is semi-tropical: The road is edged with giant bromeliads and chusan palm and camellia bushes whose fallen petals paint the tarmac with fuchsia. The houses are built of sun-bleached painted wood and corrugated tin, much like the houses on the northern side of Oahu, in Hawaii, where I grew up, and there are dragon fruit trees, with their cacti-like, three-planed leaves and spiny pink fruits, and trees bearing two different kinds of oranges — the sour-sweet ponkan and the thick-skinned, meatier tankan — that, along with flying fish, are the island’s culinary specialty.