Kabu has spent more of his life inside folk stories than outside them. Furumi is small, and the version of himself he's built comes from every scroll about Raikō and Momotaro and the demons they cut down, a template he's sure fits him too, the moment a real chance shows up. Kabocha has spent her time more usefully: sparring in her father's forge, selling kunai to travelers passing through, the daughter who stayed while two of her brothers already left to make names for themselves elsewhere.
When Furumi's crops fail all at once, Kabu's father tells him plainly not to go looking for a fix in the woods. The village will ration what it has and wait the blight out. Kabu talks Kabocha into going anyway, citing every hero he's ever read about, and she comes along less because she believes the plan than because someone sensible should be there when it falls apart.
The witch in the foothills turns out to be closer than either of them expected, and warmer-looking too: a shadow that slides out of the treeline and resolves into an aunty-like woman surrounded by crows. She calls herself Aunty. She gives them a golden sunflower that blooms fresh every morning with one seed for every villager: eaten on the spot, one per person, and any seed unclaimed by sundown thrown away, never kept. She warns them the way she does everything, wrapped inside a song: once there was a farmer who took more than his share, and the ground itself rose up and claimed him for it. She doesn't say whose story that actually is.
Kabu carries the flower home like the miracle it looks like, and it works. He eats the first seed himself in front of the whole village: it's the best thing he's ever tasted, and it leaves him fully fed for the entire day. A starving village finally has food again. Kabu becomes the boy who fixed it, hoisted onto shoulders in the square while his father watches from the edge of the crowd, smiling, then not quite.
Being the hero turns out to mean paperwork. Every morning Kabu harvests the bloom with his scythe and hands out seeds against the ledger Kabocha keeps, one per person, no more. When a family is away for the day, their unclaimed seeds are supposed to be thrown out by sundown, and this is where Kabu cuts his first quiet corner: he can't bring himself to destroy perfect food, so the spares go into a jar instead. Just in case the flower fails one morning. Just in case someone comes home late and hungry. It holds for four days, and technically he hasn't broken anything, because the rule says unclaimed seeds must go uneaten, and uneaten is exactly what they are. On the fifth day a girl asks him for a second seed. Nobody in Furumi is hungry anymore; it's just the best thing she's ever tasted, and everyone knows Kabu keeps spares. The rule he memorized loses to the kid in front of him. He hands her one from the jar and she eats it on the spot. It's the whole problem with Kabu in one gesture: he'll always choose the person he can see over the rule he can't.
That night the sky over the square fills with crows. The witch steps out of the dark, not smiling this time, and doesn't need to raise her voice. The bargain is broken because somebody broke it, and the golden bloom twists into a blackened husk in front of the whole village. Every seed it ever grew scatters out into the world in the crows' beaks, each one carrying a person's worst quality far enough away that nobody in Furumi will ever have to meet it. Kabu and Kabocha will meet several of them by name before the year is out.
The curse lands on Kabu alone. His head is a turnip by the time he looks down at his own hands. Kabocha isn't touched, and neither is the girl who ate the second seed, nor anyone else in the square. Why the curse singles him out specifically is a question the witch doesn't answer, and nobody else can, for a long time.
The only way to lift it, she tells them, is to collect every scattered seed and bring it home. Kabu picks up his father's scythe, because the seeds certainly aren't coming to him, and walks to the edge of the village he broke. He doesn't get far before a traveler on the road mentions a demon two towns over. A demon, apparently, made of corn.
OPEN THE BEAT SHEET ▼
- 1Kabu, raised on folk-hero stories, convinces Kabocha to go looking for the Crow Witch in the foothills after Furumi's crops fail, against his father's warning to stay put.
- 2The witch turns out to be closer than expected. She gives them a golden sunflower that blooms each morning with one seed for every villager, eaten on the spot, and any seed unclaimed by sundown thrown away. She warns them in song: a farmer once took more than his share and the ground itself claimed him for it.
- 3Kabu eats the first seed himself, in front of the whole village. It's the best thing he's ever tasted, and it leaves him fully fed for the entire day. The village celebrates. Kabu becomes the boy who fixed it. His father watches from the edge of the crowd, smiling, then not quite.
- 4TURNING POINT — Being the hero turns out to mean paperwork: every morning Kabu harvests the bloom and distributes seeds against the ledger Kabocha keeps, one per person, no more. When a family is away for the day, their unclaimed seeds are supposed to be thrown out by sundown. Kabu can't bring himself to waste perfect food, and quietly starts setting the spares aside. Just in case.
- 5TURNING POINT — Four days hold without incident. On the fifth, a girl asks him for a second seed. Nobody in Furumi is hungry anymore; it's just the best thing she's ever tasted, and word has gotten around that Kabu keeps spares.
- 6CRISIS — Kabu is looking right at her. The rule he memorized loses to the kid in front of him, and he hands her one from the stash. He doesn't agonize over it.
- 7TURNING POINT — That night, crows fill the sky over the square. The witch steps out of the dark, not smiling this time.
- 8TURNING POINT — The golden bloom twists into a blackened husk and every seed it ever grew scatters into the world in the crows' beaks. The curse lands on Kabu alone: his head becomes a turnip. Nobody, including the witch, explains why only him.
- 9CRISIS — Kabu picks up his father's scythe and walks to the edge of the village he broke. On the road, a traveler mentions a demon two towns over. A demon, apparently, made of corn.
SUPPORTING CASTKenta · Daisuke▼
Nagano is Japan's fifth-largest prefecture by area and one of only eight landlocked ones, a mountain-bound world of alpine passes, deep valleys, and isolated post towns strung along ancient trade routes. Winters sealed the passes for months at a stretch, and a village this far from the coast or the capital learned to solve its own problems, because nobody was coming to solve them first.
The region carries an old story about the cost of that kind of isolation. Obasute, a real valley near Chikuma, takes its name from a legend in which a village too poor to feed everyone carried its elderly up the mountain during a famine and left them there. The same slope has been one of Japan's most celebrated moon-viewing spots since the Heian era, written about for how the harvest moon sits over the rice terraces below. The postcard and the famine sit on top of each other, and only one of them made it onto the postcard.
We didn't have to invent a village that turns to a stranger in the woods instead of each other when the crops fail. Nagano had a few centuries' head start on that story already. The crow witch, per the episode's geography, lives in the mountain foothills, right at the edge of where the human world becomes something else.
