Chapter Text
Spring, Season 121/2006, recounted Spring, Season 121/2006.
Haru was entering his twenty-second year when his father received the strange request. His father, who had said that Haru would receive such requests by-and-by, was delighted and handed him the family kakuri. It was clear that the client had paid very well.
“Cut down all the trees marked in red. You’ll know them by their height. Start early and work fast.” His father’s instructions had been exact, as always. Haru set off before first light.
When he later recounted the tale to the girl from the Hieda household, Haru kept circling back to the morning’s oddities. It was only the last third of Yayoi, yet the morning was summer-warm. The moon had fallen too low, a haughty and august moon squinting barely aloft the trees. Under the lunar gaze, the path to the bamboo became queer with dancing shadows.
The bamboo grove swallowed Haru whole. In the crowding dark he navigated by the distant shapes of the tottering trees. His father had been right: the saplings were tall and unnatural. Although he later left this part out of his account, the sight of them had stirred a closing dread inside Haru’s chest, tight as the bamboo cage he had stepped into.
Despite his welling fear Haru gritted his teeth and began felling the bamboo. The sway and rhythm of the work calmed him, the handsaw sure and biting in his hands. The saplings were yielding and obedient, falling when they should: ten, twenty now. Haru had begun belting out the first lines of his work-song when he felt a thousand eyes stare at the nape of his neck.
Haru froze. This was a mistake, he later recalled, because the silence permitted him to hear a low burbling from all around. The voice was whispered and private, dim words blending into one another. Haru felt then the weight of his saw, the dead stillness of the trees, the aching in his joints. In the pale light of the falling moon Haru searched the grove for the owner of the voice. He had hoped, vainly, that it was human.
The lanky woman drifted into his vision with a careless and familiar gait, almost floating above the leaves. Her face was fixed on the moon like a compass, so that after each small lop she spun her body to face it again. Murmuring in a strange harsh language, the woman sauntered through the grove, making little barking laughs all the while. Haru then saw her ears, alert and beast-like, swiveling to-and-fro in a motion that reminded him of the crawling of insects. In an instinctive motion Haru found that he had drawn his handsaw, and was waving it in a vaguely defensive manner.
Haru swore then that the youkai’s eyes had lit up, and in an instant his vision was filled with their red glare. He saw the split-second shock on her face, her ears standing to attention before she disappeared. Later he would remember an inexplicable shame, as if he had trespassed upon some person’s boudoir. As if youkai had houses or rooms within them with secrets precious enough to keep.
Haru had trembled then, a full body shiver of odd emotion. He was unsure of what he had seen, what omens it entailed. He wondered if he had been threatened by the youkai, or whether (absurdly) he had threatened it. Haru had cut the saplings in silence but felt no satisfaction after the job. As soon as it was polite, he had gone to the Hieda household to report the incident. The young head of the household had nodded along to his tale, and then had served him very delicious tea.
In the nights that followed, odd darting dreams chased his sleep. When the traveling medicine-seller arrived, he had ordered her Butterfly Dream pills and taken them. Afterwards the dreams he had were pleasant and full, but upon waking he would hear a single word echoed in his ears:
“Rude.”