There’s Something in the Woods

"Fair love, you faint with wand’ring in the wood.

 And, to speak troth, I have forgot our way."

A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act II, Scene 2

Ghost of Tsushima is a game about nature.

That’s an oversimplification – it’s about Jin Sakai, a 13th-century Samurai who, when Mongols invade his home island of Tsushima, must abandon his code of honor and wage an asymmetrical one-vs-one hundred war. It’s about the struggle between maintaining one’s honor and getting results no matter the moral cost. It’s about fighting an endless parade of goons with your samurai sword, or occasionally just hurling dynamite at their faces to make things quick, and it's about clearing side quest icons on a cluttered, icon-infested open world map. It’s about human nature, and whether or not honor is a counter to baser instincts, or an appeal to our inherent “good” nature. It’s about what separates a proud warrior from a craven vandal. But it’s also about watching the wind blow through tall grass, the blades tilting toward your next objective; following animals like foxes and golden birds as they interrupt your travel; and standing in the shadows of giant trees in beautifully-rendered Japanese forests that seem to stretch on forever.

In the early story mission “Whisper in the Woods,” Jin’s journey teeters on the brink between “natural” and “supernatural.” Not long after beginning his one-man counterattack, Jin stumbles into a village whose residents claim the nearby woods are haunted by vengeful specters that kill “Japanese and Mongol alike.” Jin is skeptical about anything supernatural going on, but — being the protagonist of the game and a self-appointed arbiter of law in this war-torn area — he agrees to investigate. We, the player, are inclined to agree with Jin: this is a game about stealth stabbing enemies with a katana, not using magic powers (at least in the base game — a squad-based multiplayer title, Ghost of Tsushima: Legends, was released soon after launch and is drenched in Japanese folklore, yokai, and the like).

But deep in the woods, the shadows are longer, the echoes of distant voices louder, and our connection to reality becomes slimmer and slimmer. It’s early in the game, though –  maybe I don’t actually know what genre space I’m in here? Maybe the title is more literal than I thought? Suddenly this isn’t just a mission about saving some villagers – it’s about investigating what kind of world I’m in.

I’d return to the memory of these eerie, potentially malevolent woods a few months after I first played Tsushima. In Winter of 2021, I found myself in a real-life haunted forest experience during an artists’ residency for playwriting in Taos, New Mexico. I arrived in late January and stayed until the end of April. When I first saw my living quarters, a tiny one bed/one bath casita tucked deep in the woods, I was charmed by the cozy sense of privacy and wowed by the most continuous snowfall this Southerner had ever seen in their life. I envisioned the next three months as a straightforward cycle – wake up, leisurely write and work through a laundry list of projects, video call with friends to maintain sanity, game to relax, then go to sleep and wake up the next morning to repeat the cycle.

One item missing from the aforementioned to-do list was getting food. My joyful isolation turned into disorientation when, walking home from my first grocery run, I found myself in the middle of a snow flurry during sundown. I was completely turned around, with no sense of where I was or where my house was, no landmarks to ground myself, nothing to feel except dread. The snow swirled around me and the indifferent skeleton trees that loomed over me at every turn. I didn’t know any of the other people in the residency — this was pre-Covid vaccine, so we were discouraged from socializing. I was truly alone in the elements. 

Which way was home? Which way led to safety? The trees didn’t care to answer — wherever I went, whatever direction I chose, I was in The Woods. Their dominion was total, and I was just another small, frightened prey animal scampering through an apathetic environment. They had been here for years and years – I hadn’t even finished unpacking yet. The blankness of a barren forest in a white expanse is in itself neutral, but I couldn’t help but feel like I was being mocked. You thought you were a farmer’s kid, The Woods seemed to jeer at me. You thought you could make your way on your own? You are only ever a tourist here. You’re only ever passing through, if you know what’s good for you. And if you’re not passing through, you’re passing on.

It’s not like I’d never seen a forest before. I grew up on a farm in rural South Carolina, and my dad had taken me on plenty of nature walks during my childhood. He always stressed the importance of familiarizing myself with the lay of the land to understand where home was. 

“It’s not that nature’s out to get you,” he told me, clearly fumbling to fit some harsh truths into words for a child. “It’s just that it doesn’t care about you one way or the other.” 

I didn’t get it at the time, as it seemed too obvious a statement for my child mind to unpack. Of course the Woods didn’t care about me. They didn’t think or have opinions on anything: they were just woods. But the Woods can also contain unseen multitudes — my dad swore once that he saw a bear there, and snapping twigs in the distance suggested he was right, that something was out there, hopefully as scared of me as I was of it. Hopefully. But how could one be sure?

While the woods I grew up near housed unknown animals with unknown motives, I knew how to navigate them well. The woods in New Mexico, on the other hand, were devoid of context, leaving me floundering to find my bearings. I can’t tell you if I was wandering and lost for hours or only a few undignified minutes; being lost makes time immaterial. When I finally stumbled headfirst into my door, I could have cried. Maybe I did, I honestly don’t know.

In “Whispers in the Woods,” the unmitigated nature is even more threatening: everything is Unknown. The moonlit fog yawns out in all directions — you don’t know what’s out there beyond trees, corpses, and more trees. The atmosphere tests your rationality, urges you to accept the possibility that you’re facing something paranormal for the first time. When you’re left with barely enough light to see in front of you, and no evidence to ground you in reality, your mind can come up with anything; everything seems plausible when you can’t see your hand in front of your face. So why wouldn’t there be real phantoms in this forest? Maybe Jin isn’t the only “Ghost” in Tsushima after all? 

It’s the kind of set piece that exemplifies Ghost of Tsushima’s representation of the natural world lurking on the periphery of manmade settlements. Jin has been to cities and camps, enemy encampments and palaces. He’s seen society and civilization functioning as intended, but when he leaves those confines and enters the moonlit wood, he remains skeptical of the spirits. His objections get quieter and less convincing as the mission goes on. He loses his certainty the longer he goes without seeing any banners of enemy clans or merchants to trade with. There’s just the fog, and the trees, and the ominous shapes they cast in the moonlight.

The metaphorical understanding of the forest as a place unbound by logic and human perception has been around for as long as humans have built societies and settlements to escape those same woods. In Ancient Greece, wily forest spirits called Satyrs represented the untamable chaos that flourishes in nature, and their imagined antics inspired short comedic plays mocking the mores of Greek society and culture – Satyr plays, from which we get the word ‘Satire.’ Followers of Dionysus (or Bacchus, to the Romans) drank, partied, hooked up, and celebrated all the good things in life in grand festivals that they thought would bring them out of the limiting domain of civilization and into the divine wildness of the God of Wine (from whose name we get the word Bacchanal, meaning a celebration of extreme drunken rowdiness).

It’s a shorthand they still teach in theatre curriculum — whenever characters leave The City (whichever city it is) and go to the Forest, they’re abandoning the rigid certainty of society. They leave the status quo and enter the liminal state of the forest, wherein they might be changed by whatever misadventures await them before returning to the stasis of the City as different, often better versions of themselves.

That strain of order vs. chaos was especially prevalent in the Elizabethan era and the work of a certain William “Big Bill” Shakespeare himself. The Bard uses the forest as a repository for all the wild things human civilization rejects in such plays as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, and Timon of Athens. In these plays, the Woods are a refuge from the limitations of “civilized” society, where young lovers may flee the demands of their parents or disgraced souls might retreat to reclaim their sense of self. They’re also a place where the rules of humanity break down and hold no sway, where mischievous faeries might bewitch you, and where a literal lioness might attack you out of nowhere (how many lions were prowling the English forest in Shakespeare’s time is outside the scope of this study). 

The forests of Tsushima may be a far journey from Greece and Elizabethan England, but they remain just as emblematic of all that primordial randomness in the natural world. As we stalk through the trees in “Whisper in the Woods,” we get some insight into what the game thinks makes a person "honorable" and what makes a society "civilized." 

Ultimately, Jin discovers that there are no ghosts in the forest. The real culprits of the killings are just random bandits, who are after a bit of coin and using their surroundings effectively to drum up fear. They’re effectively acting out a Scooby Doo plot, albeit with a higher body count and without any goofy rubber masks. As opposed to his own samurai brethren or even the oncoming Mongol army, these robbers in the woods are indiscriminate in their violence. They know no nationality; flags have no place in the woods. For all the Mongols underhanded tricks, they announce their presence in Tsushima. They present themselves honestly rather than hide or pretend to be something more than human. The bandits in “Whisper in the Woods” are guilty then not just of robbery and murder, but of existential dishonesty, of stealing the valor of shadows and spirits in an attempt to surpass their own limitations as a small band of common criminals.

When I first played the game, this resolution felt a bit like a let down, but looking back, I think it’s an reiteration of the obvious: Nothing supernatural here will save you. You won’t be unlocking any magic powers or special moves to make things easy. You have to fight your battles on your own. 

I didn’t think there were ghosts in the woods when I was fumbling for my bearings in the snow and the dark — but I knew there was nothing that could help me. I was isolated from all the other cabins and I knew that I had no idea where anything was. There was nothing in the woods with me, and that was precisely the problem. I was haunted by my own poor decision making — Why get groceries so close to sunset? Why not wait until tomorrow? — and my inability to foresee the coming storm. The forest was the setting for my potential undoing, and I had no bandits or spooky spirits to blame, just myself. I was a child of civilization, someone who sleeps in a bed and uses an electric toothbrush, who wakes up in the morning to a digital alarm clock. But civilization couldn’t help me here.

I may be flesh and blood, a carbon-based life form like everything in those woods, but that’s about where the similarities stop. Drawing a binary between nature and constructed society is not the same as pitting natural harmony vs manmade myopia — my Dad is a former hippie, and if he still believed in Flower Power, his warnings about the woods might have been less grave. 

As Tsushima’s story continues, Jin Sakai ultimately has to take a similar path to these bandits in order to get the justice he craves: in becoming the rampaging vigilante he needs to be to repel the Mongols, Jin abandons his samurai code of honor and, ultimately, his status as a citizen of Japan itself. His radical violence gets him excommunicated by the Shogun and branded an outlaw. His sense of what’s “civilized” comes back to bite him, even though his internal sense of morality remains (or adapts to become as flexible as we, the player, allow it to be).. He becomes an outlaw, living on the run — a ghost, haunting the land he defends, unable to move on from this nation wherein he has unfinished business. 

"Whispers in the Woods” is a thematic microcosm of Jin's arc. Like the bandits, he exists outside of the context of Japanese law and society. He’s someone who cannot walk around cities and town unnoticed, exiled to become a Ghost on the periphery of the land who delivers justice beyond societal means. If we view societal laws and means by which nations govern what is or isn’t permissible in their borders, then anything outside those parameters is beyond what the government deems natural, e.g., “supernatural.” By his own code of ethics and ideas of honor, Jin should not exist — but he does. His only home now is the Woods, and he, like the bandits, is playing a role, embodying a fiction of someone supernatural to become a symbol that spreads fear among his enemies.

Nature is amoral in the truest sense of the word — there is no doctrine beyond ‘anything with roots must grow, and anything with a mouth must feed.’ For everything else, whatever happens, happens. In the woods, where society breaks down, our imagination may run wild with the possibility of all the things we can’t assimilate into our city streets: the wild animals, the winding vegetation, the things we cannot see but feel might yet exist. The spirits, the Sasquatch, all those yet-unseen creatures. Hamlet assures us, “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” and how can we definitively disprove him? It’s all theatre, at least until someone gets stabbed.