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now, aren’t you?”
    I stared at her, my face burning, but did not answer.
    “Midori,” she said. “Really, you are an impossible child.”
     
    My mother—or my human mother, as I came to think of her more often after that day—suddenly had very little to tell me. So for the second time that day, I snuck away. Out the back door I went, taking a small trail that lay between my father’s cabbage fields and a persimmon orchard. It was autumn and the persimmons were growing to ripeness, their golden-orange globes fattening day by day, weighing down the tree limbs. Mother always picked baskets of them to bring back and cut into slivers for dessert.
    When I reached the end of the persimmon orchard and cabbage field, there was a small road that led out to the main road in town. On the other side of the road was a forest of bamboo and pine trees. I looked both ways, and when I was satisfied that all was safe, I hurried across the road, into the forest.
    I was not certain where I was going, but I stepped with certain strides, as if I knew the path like the inside of my heart. The forest floor was mostly clean. Only a few branches littered the ground. Light filtered down through the treetops like shafts of molten gold. When I finally stopped, I stood in a clearing before a tiny house on a small wooden platform beneath a fir tree. The house’s miniature double doors were locked, and there were little steps leading down to the platform it sat upon. Coins and colored strings and bottles of tea had been left on the steps. It was an old shrine, dilapidated, the wood gray and moldy. A home for the spirits of this place. I looked around, staring up at the canopy of trees surrounding me, and thought, Yes, I remember. These woods are my home.
    My father’s father had made this shrine many years ago, to honor the spirit of this land, and I was that very same spirit. My mother had found me lost in the woods and brought me home with her. This land belonged to me. I was a kitsune , as I’d realized, and this was the land to which I was bound.
    How, then, had I come to be a human child? That was a much more difficult story to put together. But, oh, I was one smart fox.
    My father had worked this land for many years, as had his father before him, with a decent enough crop each year, until suddenly one year a blight plagued his cabbage and persimmon and anything else he tried to grow. He was baffled, but he never thought to honor the spirit of the land as his father had. It was my mother who must have reminded him. She was always saying how he’d forgotten his ancestors, how he’d forgotten the spirits of the land. Yes, I thought, she had to have been the one to remind him of this shrine his father had built years ago.
    So he restored the shrine to appease whatever gods may have been roaming nearby, and soon the land gave forth again. But this only angered him more. He didn’t like that his land did not truly belong to him. So he waited and watched until he saw a small fox visiting the shrine at dusk, sniffing around the steps where he’d left his offerings. “A kitsune !” he shouted through the house that night. And soon he was plotting. “They are the trickiest of all,” he told my mother, “but their weakness is that they’re in love with their own cleverness.”
    This is true, unfortunately. This is very, very true.
    So he began to leave even more offerings at the spirit house, until its steps were full. I could imagine him as he left the door of the shrine open one evening, and sure enough, when the little fox came by, it stood on its hind legs to pull itself up the steps, knocking off the other offerings to see what had been placed inside. And when the fox poked its head through the doorway, my father jumped out from his hiding place and pushed the fox in the rest of the way. Then he barred the door, locking it. The land would be under his control as long as he held me in his power. But it was my mother who would find the