being the digitised quest-log of an amateur folklorist, kept at the last warm hour
Quest the First — of the Wind That Turns Pages
We were halfway down a column of beech notes when the page lifted itself, held a breath, and lay down again two leaves on. There was no draught we could feel; the window had been shut since morning. We have decided, after some thought, that this is the work of the smallest koakuma — the one that lives in the seam between two pages and grows bored of whatever we are reading. We did not chase it. We turned back, found our place, and let it have its small triumph. A mischief, after all, is only a mischief if someone notices, and we are content to be the someone.
plate i — the page, caught mid-turn, 4.49pm
Quest the Second — of the Acorn Out of Place
An acorn sat on the third step of the porch this morning, where no oak grows for forty paces in any direction. We measured the distance. We considered the squirrels, who are honest workers and rarely careless, and decided this was not their doing. The koakuma of the threshold, we think, carried it there overnight as a kind of calling card — a small round seed left like a coin on a counter. We left it where it was. By evening it had moved again, to the rim of the watering can. We are no longer keeping score; we are simply keeping company.
Quest the Third — of the Footprint That Was Not There
In the soft mud by the gate we found a single print — narrow, three-toed, pressed deep on one side as if its owner had paused mid-stride to look back at the house. We sketched it carefully. When we returned with a ruler the print was gone, and the mud lay smooth, and a low gold light sat over it like a held thought. We did not feel watched. We felt, if anything, politely included — as though the koakuma had left us a riddle it already knew we could not solve, and did not mind.
plate ii — the print, before it left
Quest the Fourth — of the Cup of Cooling Tea
The tea was hot when we set it down to label a specimen, and stone-cold when we lifted it again, though the labelling took no more than the time it takes to write nine words. We do not believe in hurried clocks. We believe, rather, in the koakuma of the windowsill, who likes the steam and breathes it in while we are not looking, leaving the cup a little emptier of warmth and a little fuller of having been visited. We made fresh tea. We left the first cup out as an offering, and did not check whether it was taken.
plate iii — a snail-shell found on the saucer, unexplained
Quest the Fifth — of the Moth at the Lamp
A pale moth came to the desk lamp at dusk and stayed, not battering itself the way moths do, but resting on the warm brass with its wings half folded, as if reading over our shoulder. We turned the lamp low. The moth stayed. We have come to think of it as the koakuma's quiet courier — the one mischief that is no mischief at all, only attendance. When we finished writing it lifted off without fuss and went out the gap in the window, and the room felt, for a moment, like a room that had been kept company in.
Quest the Sixth — of the Cracked Twig
On the path behind the orchard a twig lay snapped clean across, white at the break, with no boot-mark near it and the grass around it undisturbed. We have walked that path a hundred times and never broken a twig we did not mean to. The koakuma of the hedgerow, we suspect, breaks one small thing each autumn so that someone will stop and look at how a twig is made — the pith, the green of it, the way the bark holds on at one corner. We picked it up. We have pressed it between these pages, where it will dry and keep its little fracture for whoever reads next.
plate iv — the twig, snapped clean, white at the heart
Quest the Seventh — of the Moon at Noon
At midday, with the sun full and the field bright, we looked up and there was the moon — thin, half-erased, hung in the blue like a coin left in a pocket through the wash. We know the moon does this; we have read the reasons. And yet we have chosen, for the purposes of this folio, to record it as the largest of the small mischiefs: the koakuma of the open sky, who once a season puts the night's lamp out where the day can see it, just to watch a folklorist stand in a field with her head tipped back, no longer cataloguing anything, only looking.