I might not remember all the details correctly, but it's from a manga I read in Apple Mystery a long time ago. I forgot the circumstances, but the protagonist and their friend get lost in the Aokigahara forest. Along the way, the friend disappears, and people they ask for help turn out to be ghosts. Somehow, the protagonist manages to make it back home on their own, only to find their own funeral being held. Apparently, the protagonist had actually died in the forest. Overhearing conversations from the people attending the funeral, the protagonist learns that neither their body nor their friend's body has been found yet. The story ends with the protagonist heading back into the forest, muttering, "I'm going to find my body for sure." It left me with an unsettling feeling, thinking about how even if they found their own corpse, there would be no way to let anyone know.
Reading that brought back a memory. When my older brother was in high school and I was in junior high, he once said, "I had a dream about my own funeral." When I asked him what it was like, he said it was held at Tet-chan's temple. (Tet-chan was a junior high science teacher who taught both my brother and me. He lived relatively close to our house, and his family home was a temple. Both Tet-chan and his father served as priests there.) There was an unbelievable amount of flowers, making it an extremely extravagant funeral, and right in the middle was a black-and-white photo of him smiling broadly. That's how he knew, "Ah, I'm dead." When he looked around, there were tons of people—well over a hundred—and he told me he was so happy thinking, "Man, I must be really popular." Since Tet-chan's temple belonged to a different Buddhist sect, and our family was poor, we could never afford such a lavish funeral, and it sounded exactly like that song about having a hundred friends, so the two of us just laughed it off together.
About six years later, a few months after getting his first job, my brother died in an accident. The accident happened far away, so our parents went to deal with the police and procedures in that area. Since only my sister and I were left at home, our uncle took care of arranging the funeral. Our father called our uncle and told him, "He passed away young, and there's nothing left we can do for our son, so please give him as grand a funeral as possible." Our uncle said, "I understand," and booked the highest-tier funeral available for individuals. It was the top-grade funeral the parlor offered—just one step below a company-sponsored corporate funeral. The cost reportedly exceeded 3 million yen, and I still remember my mother's eyes going wide when she heard the price. The location was set at Tet-chan's temple, which was close to our house. (As a side note, I learned at this time that it apparently is possible to hold a funeral of one Buddhist sect at a temple of a different sect. By the way, a Shingon priest actually came to perform the main services, and Tet-chan only chanted the sutras during the wake.) My brother went to a high school focused on college prep and didn't have many friends back then, but after entering university he really started to come out of his shell. He joined an art club and took on leadership roles, so word spread to friends of friends, and people from other universities even came later on. True to that dream, people easily numbering over a hundred came, and we collected around 3 million yen in condolence money. Looking back, I suppose having a funeral of that scale turned out to be the right choice after all. It turned out to be a bit of a messy story, but thinking about it now, I can't help feeling that the dream my brother saw back then might have actually been a glimpse of his own real funeral.
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