Kinoko

Voice

Speaks in mushroom puns and cryptic warnings, so everything important he says gets laughed off or puzzled over until it's too late. He sings the same song three times across the season, and every word is true all three times. What changes is how much you know.

The arc

Kinoko introduces himself in episode two as a pilgrim in a wide-brimmed hat, the kind of figure nobody looks at twice on a road in feudal Japan, pointing the team toward a town with a corn demon problem. From then on he's a fixture, materializing whenever the team needs a direction, handing them advice and a mushroom pun, and vanishing in a puff of spores with a tap of his hat. He travels with the Nokos, tiny adorable mushrooms that wander around aimlessly while he talks and carry messages through the forest for him. The team adores him. The audience mostly does too. His introduction song is a charming number about trusting the forest and listening for where the trouble is, sung as a promise of community. It's a literal description of his surveillance system, performed for the people he's surveilling. Ume is the only one who ever asks why they follow his directions, and a passing Noko is all it takes for the team to forget she asked.

When things get hard for the team, he gets more serious, and in a later episode he tells Kabu that he was once an aspiring hero too. He became an ascetic monk in pursuit of enlightenment and a higher station, and learned that the only way up was to fight for himself, until a monstrous Tengu who couldn't see the good in what he was doing knocked him back down to the lowest point of his life. It's all true. What he leaves out is that he was trying to become an immortal Tengu himself, that he tried to break the cosmic balance to get there, and that his punishment was to be cursed into a regenerative role in the circle of life: the mushroom network that breaks down what dies so something else can grow. Centuries later, that network runs under every forest in the country, and everything it touches, he sees. The blight is fungal, and it was his first move. He gave the Crow Witch the spell she put on the sunflower, too. Kabu's entire journey, every fork in the road and every next town, has been Kinoko putting a hero in the path of ever-increasing danger. He can't climb the mountain. So he's growing someone who can.

The finale pays it off for the audience, though not for the team. He guides them toward Mount Madarao and the Tengu at its summit, a fight he can't take on himself in his cursed form. When Kabu defeats Madarao, the spell holding Kinoko down breaks with him, and the old pilgrim is free to travel up the mountain, while the blight is free to spread farther than ever. The team still thinks of him as a slightly silly sage who has done them a lot of favours, and they're glad to have helped him in return. They've also started to want some distance from him, without being able to say why. His song plays here for the third time, same melody as episode two, no comedy left. The forest has ears, and those ears are his.

Relationships