Chapter Text
Before obaa-san departed for the next life, she regaled the village children with tales of kitsune passed down for generations in the Kita clan.
“Shinsuke,” she had told him. “The spirits are all around us, always watching.”
He'd seen many foxes in his life, beautiful creatures that robbed him of his breath as they gazed back with perked ears and golden slit eyes, but never once the spirits she had spoken of. Kami and yokai were all around them, weaving in and out of the mortal and spiritual world like the coarse hemp fibres in his hitatare. Always watching. Always hiding.
In the sixth month, the month of water, Shinsuke’s adopted brother carried back a kitsune's star ball—not so much a ball as a twinkle, a resplendent white-gold star plucked from the night sky.
The zenko it belonged to came to him in a dream. Split from its soul, unless Kiyoomi returned its star ball to Inari Shrine in Heian Kyo, it would slowly weaken and die.
And despite ill whispers on the wind of rising tensions at court between the Fujiwara clan and Emperors Emeriti, despite this being his twenty-fifth year, a year of calamity, Kiyoomi answered its plea. When he left their small village in the Musashi Plains, the paddies were still wet. Since then, two moon cycles had passed, and the harvest season was now upon them without a trace of his shadow. With each creeping day, an uneasy tension befell: there was no saying if he would ever come back, not from a journey as long and dangerous as this.
But ever true to his word, a tiny dot eventually peeped over the horizon, and news of Kiyoomi's return spread across the fields like wildfire: It's Uncle Omi! He came back safe and sound! And he brought us riches from the capitol! Before long, the entire village crowded around a cascade of colours spilling from his carrying cloth, the likes of which they'd never seen in their lives: brocades of dyed silk that shone like polished bronze, sue pottery, boxwood combs, washi paper, incense; and for the children, painted wooden tops, and a yakkodako kite.
Kiyoomi was vibrant when he rejoined them in the harvest. Two months on the road had done more to open him up than Shinsuke could in the fifteen years obaa-san had carved a place for him in the Kita clan. Distracted from threshing rice by shrieks of laughter, he saw Kiyoomi chasing their nieces and nephews around the piles of reaped stalks, pretending to be a hungry yokai. In the evenings, Kiyoomi told fantastical tales of the yokai he and the kitsune encountered on their journey over a bowl of millet and pickled vegetables.
Shinsuke suspected these were part truth, part embellishment. Some of them certainly seemed outside the realm of possibility. He wasn't sure, however. Kiyoomi was a deadly honest man, and no matter how his exploits had changed him, he never would bend his core principles just for the sake of amusing village children. At the same time, Shinsuke noticed strange and unsettling behaviours that couldn't be explained, like how he eyed the local Shinto priest with fresh curiousity as he performed rites and offered sake to Inari-Okami-sama in the autumn festival. How, one day, Shinsuke caught him paying teary obeisances before obaa-san’s grave. Or how, once in a while, he smelled incense wafting from Kiyoomi’s pit house.
He paused at the entrance, obaa-san’s words echoing in his head—"As he walked back at dusk, the man encountered a beautiful woman..."—slowly giving form to a quiet, stifling fear that threatened to consume him should he ever follow that trail of smoke inside.
Heart pounding like a mochi hammer, Shinsuke crossed the threshold.
Kiyoomi's house was in neat order, pottery stacked evenly on the dusted wooden table, the fire pit cleared of ashes, dried fish and fruit dangling on strings of knotted reed over earthen jars of pickled vegetables, and a worn straw mat that he aired out ritualistically. The thing that stood out from Shinsuke's memory was the butsudan next to it. Three sticks of incense burned at the foot of the altar next to offerings of fresh golden lace, ripe persimmons, and a plate of pickled plums. It housed a wooden tablet with kanji Shinsuke couldn’t read. He didn’t need to.
Numbly, Shinsuke went back to his house, grabbed his sickle, and made for the fields.
The secret weighed on his chest like a pail of ice water. No longer able to look “Kiyoomi” in the eye, he answered with only nods and grunts. It would have been better if he never came back, if Shinsuke never knew. Year after year would pass, and he would placate himself with the idea that Kiyoomi had found a wife in a faraway village.
It was especially hard to pass the autumn nights. Shinsuke lay in bed acutely feeling each individual blade of straw poke at his back. When he closed his eyes, orbs of golden light danced in the dark like giant fireflies. One night, he finally peeled back his heavy eyelids to find that they were real, not just figments of his distress. They beckoned him from the doorway. He slipped into his straw sandals, following them into the dark, past the other pit houses, past the rice fields into the wild bunches of wispy white miscanthus, until he came upon a patch of pink bush clover where a golden kitsune snugged into a nest of five fluffy tails.
“Come sit with me,” its voice, not Kiyoomi’s, echoed in his head.
Shinsuke lowered into a kneel, the flattened twigs and leaves pleasantly cool against his naked calves.
The kitsune curled up in a tight ball on his lap, chest heaving heavily as it puffed shaky white clouds from its snout, and Shinsuke tried to recall if the kitsune in obaa-san’s old tales had ever cried.
The night chill seeped through his kosode, but Shinsuke trained his body to keep still even as he lost feeling in his legs. A weak breeze carried the earthy scent of mud and silt from the canals and a sharper, harsher sting, the heralding of winter. Field crickets chirped in a steady tune, drowning out his heartbeat. Not knowing how much time had passed, Shinsuke looked up from the balls of dancing foxfire to the canopy of stars and the thin crescent moon. Slowly, slowly, he let go of conscious thought and surrendered to pure feeling.
He woke up on his straw mat to the indigo of daybreak, wondering if last night had been a dream, but the sharp cry of the rooster served as a grounding reminder that spirits mattered little against the demands of harvest. As he did every morning, Shinsuke put on his hitatare and hakama, fetched water from the canal, and boiled a handful of millet to eat before leaving for the fields.
This morning, he felt the weight lift from his chest just a little.
After that, he stopped seeing Kiyoomi’s face. The kitsune must have sensed his discomfort and kept its distance.
Though it never sought him out in broad daylight, some nights Shinsuke saw the same lights dance across his eyelids. Whenever the kitsune beckoned him, he followed them into that patch of bush clover and kept it company deep into the night. Perhaps the kitsune carried its own bucket of grief, and this was the way they could tip them out together, bit by bit.
He came to appreciate these autumn nights. There was a serene peace in stroking the kitsune’s back while filling the silence with tales of Kiyoomi’s village life. He didn’t know how much the kitsune knew, but Kiyoomi obviously meant a lot to it, and likely it to him. Now that Kiyoomi was no longer around, Shinsuke thought he could help fill the gaps.
The kitsune mostly listened in silence, but once in a while, it yipped in laughter, “kon kon kon kon kon kon kon.”
On the seventh night, Shinsuke finally asked, “What is your name?”
“Atsumu,” said the kitsune.
“Why did you come to our village?” he asked on the eighth.
“Because Omi-kun prayed to Inari-sama for a good harvest,” said Atsumu. “I asked him if he wanted to live with me in the imperial palace disguised as courtesans like Samu and Sunarin. We could spend our days wearing pretty clothes, eating good food, and writing poetry. But he didn’t want that. He wanted a good harvest. He told me that’s the most important thing to his family.”
Kiyoomi would have made a good noble if he had been born into that life. He'd admitted himself that he wasn’t cut out to be a rice farmer. He burned easily, fussed at every cut, hated the itch of dust and straw that caked his skin. On summer nights, something in his blood drew in mosquitoes by the swarm. But fouler walks of life had been dulled by repeated exposure, so eventually these nuisances became tolerable to him, almost natural, certainly a small price to pay when plague and starvation had torn through his native village of Itachiyama and claimed his blood family before he turned ten.
“Omi-kun had a hard childhood. He told me he was lucky because lots of humans don’t have what he has: food, shelter, a family, a place to belong. He said he owes his life to the Kita clan for giving him that, so he would never trade it for anything else.” Atsumu deflated, ears drooping. “He didn’t deserve to die in his happy years.”
After that, it was like a dam spilled.
“At first, I wasn’t sure. He looked like a kind farmer, but you never know these things. But then he promised to bring back my star ball, and he protected it from evil monks and yokai, so I knew I found a good man. Stupid Samu made fun of me for wanting to marry a peasant, but where does he think he gets the rice to make the tonjiki he sneaks into Sunarin’s chambers? The sky?”
“How can you tell I’m not Omi-kun? My disguise is perfect. I double-checked my ears and tails and fangs, and I made sure my pupils are round. Everyone says I’m the best at transforming even though I only have five tails.”
“I can turn into anything, so I knew Omi-kun would want to keep me, but I didn’t know for sure. But we had such a long journey ahead that, even if he didn’t love me yet, I’d make him love me by the time we got to Heian-Kyo. And then that bastard tanuki told every single yokai in the land that I lost my star ball, and they all came to pick a fight with me. It made me look so bad I wanted to hole up in my den for years! But Omi-kun was the sweetest! He fought them all off and told me that he didn't think any less of me.”
“So I made up a story because everyone loves a good story! I was the beautiful, young daughter of a local magistrate who just so happened to stay at the same travelling inn as Omi-kun. That night, I was attacked by a vengeful spirit. Awakened by my scream, Omi-kun burst through the door and hacked it apart with his sickle, scooping me up in his strong, tanned arms. My heart swooned at the handsome stranger who saved my life. I fell in love on the spot and repaid him by marrying him and following him back to his village.”
“There are a few problems with that story,” Shinsuke felt the need to point out since, presumably, it had originally been meant for him. “The magistrate would never allow one of his daughters to marry a peasant, not even the daughter of a concubine, and without a proper purification ritual, the vengeful spirit would just come back.”
“I think it’s an excellent story,” Atsumu insisted. “I also thought of four other stories, but Samu and I agreed that this is the best one. Even though I worked so hard on the details, Omi-kun said that there was no need; he'd much rather I come back as myself...
"But in the end, I couldn’t...”
How suffocating it must be to hold on to broken dreams.
“He’d be happy that you answered his prayers.”
“I know,” Atsumu sniffled. “I know, but it just hurts too much.”
Shinsuke did know, which was why he could never bring himself to ask the one question that continued to loom over him: How did he die?
Hopefully, it was quick, he found himself thinking, forehead gleaming with sweat as he stripped the husk from grains of rice with a wooden stick. Painless.
For a whole month, the skies were unprecedentedly clear. Just as Kiyoomi had prayed, their village was blessed with a perfect harvest that yielded well over twice as much rice as the mandated field tax. While the villagers spoke excitedly of harvest feasts, Shinsuke pondered what would happen once autumn came to an end.
After all, Atsumu was a messenger of Inari-Okami-sama, not their village god. He certainly couldn’t stay.
Faced with a creeping end to these soothing nights, Shinsuke put off his question for as long as he could. Before he knew it, the whole village was loading tax rice for the myoshu into an ox cart borrowed from the Aone village. It was the first time he had seen Kiyoomi Atsumu's disguise up close for a month. Shinsuke drank in his laughing face in broad daylight.
When he was seventeen, Shinsuke’s father suddenly collapsed in the field. Just hours before, he had been cackling heartily at the skinny loaches that Uncle Keishin had dug from the mud. Then, all of a sudden, gone. For the first year, his face appeared in Shinsuke’s dreams, as clear as a mountain stream. Three years later, it became a hazy moon in the fog of the morning. Eight years, and he could barely retrace its outline.
Thinking of how the same would happen to Kiyoomi, a man who only continued to live in his memory, and only for as long as he could preserve it, all the water that Shinsuke tipped from his bucket came flooding back at once.
That night, when he came upon the patch of clover, it was not a kitsune with five tails that awaited him but Kiyoomi. His heart sank with finality, knowing this was the last time he would ever see them in this life, both Atsumu and his brother. Though they weren’t related by blood, Kiyoomi was the closest brother he ever had, and Shinsuke wasn’t ready to let him go.
“Tell me how he died,” he begged, afraid Atsumu would fade and leave him in the dark.
“We were so close,” whispered Atsumu, staring wistfully at Hikoboshi and Orihime high in the night sky and the river of stars that divided them. “We made it to Omi Province. On Mount Hiei, two Buddhist factions have been feuding for centuries. Centuries. How did I not know? We were offered shelter at a small jimon temple. The sanmon warrior monks torched it. At the time, Omi-kun was with me in a dream. I realized what was happening, but I couldn’t use my powers without a physical body. I tried all I could to wake him up, but.”
But instead, he’d been burned alive.
“It didn't hurt,” Atsumu quickly assured him, seeing his face of horror. “He was stabbed in his sleep. It’s just—”
His voice cracked, Kiyoomi’s face warping into expressions that went against the laws of nature. With a shaky sigh, he closed his eyes in resignation. “It’s just that he didn’t realize. Omi-kun woke up in a frenzy, cradling my star ball as he fled the chaos, not knowing he was already dead. He hid in the forest until dawn and carried it back to Inari Shrine as a spirit, just like he promised he would.”
The disguise slipped away in a flash of light, leaving behind a man in a pure white kariginu. His hair was as gold as his fox coat, and five tails swished behind him like reeds in the wind. Slowly, Atsumu blinked open a pair of slit eyes, and Shinsuke's insides twisted with the knowledge that the kitsune of legend really do cry.
“In the Musashi Plains
hills of harvest rice gleam gold
kissed by midday sun
endless like my lonely love
piling high, stretching on.”
No longer did the crickets chirp this late in the season. The night was a windless one, but no less cold. In obaa-san’s stories, the farmer and his kitsune wife shared only a few blissful years. She was always exposed and forced to return to the wild, leaving behind her husband and children.
“Where will you go?” Shinsuke asked.
“To Itachiyama. There’s something I have to find.”
Kiyoomi's hardest years were the ones in between leaving his village and joining Shinsuke’s. A skinny little child, he wandered the country begging, scavenging, stripping corpses of their belongings and trading them for a bite to eat. The only thing he took from home was a stone left to him by his parents, bought with the bounty in the good years that had long faded from memory. In a fit of hunger and rage, he’d thrown it off a cliff and watched it fall into the treetops. It took years for him to confide in Shinsuke enough to tell that shameful story, deeming it one of his darkest moments. He once returned to Itachiyama in search of a brother who left and never returned. By then, the village had been newly settled with strange faces. Wanting to do at least one thing right, he climbed to the bottom of the cliff and scoured the vast, dark cypress forest. Eventually, Kiyoomi returned without his stone or news of that brother.
“You should go back. Come morning, everyone will think that Omi-kun left to serve as a bushi for the Ushijima clan.”
Shinsuke shook his head. “Let me tell them what happened to him.”
“It'll hurt less this way.”
Shinsuke was firm. “We're his family. We deserve to know. Our village will arrange for proper funeral rites so that he can cross over. We'll move his tablet to the family grave. You can come back to visit him on Obon. You’re always welcome here.”
Atsumu nodded, giving him one last watery smile and a bow of gratitude. Then, he was a fox again, threading into the tall miscanthus. One by one, the orbs of foxfire snuffed out, and then the moon, and then the stars, leaving Shinsuke swathed in pitch black.
He woke up at dawn in a soft bed of bush clover to the thin mist of rain.