Prologue

"Ai-chan! Don't go wandering too far away!" Aiko's father called from where he stood on the side of the road.

Aiko waved to her dad and continued the rest of the way across the street to the abandoned fields on the other side. She and her parents were currently visiting her grandparents in a rural part of Kyoto. They'd come to see the turning of the leaves and have only just arrived. Fortunately for them, the sky was clear and it was a fairly warm, albeit breezy, afternoon.

Aiko looked at the fields in anticipation. They were overgrown with weeds and grasses and there was a great deal of dead undergrowth as well. The property had been abandoned for as long as she could remember and it was utterly unkempt. In comparison, her grandparents' fields were currently completely bare except for the shorn stubs of rice plants left poking out of the ground from the last harvest. Definitely not interesting to a seven-year-old child. Across the street though, that was much more interesting to her young imagination.

As soon as she stepped on the property, a cold breeze gusted by, rustling through the grasses. She could barely make out the sound of rattling coming from a house in the distance as the wood boards that protected it from the high winds of typhoons shook in their tracks. Aiko looked at the dark house in the distance and figured the fields belonged to it. Even though it was far away, to her young imaginative mind it seemed to be listing to the side and was quite run down.

She paused briefly before forcing her way through the weeds. The dry crackle of her footsteps echoed loudly, and she shivered slightly as a shadow fell across the lands. She took another hesitant step into the weeds when another cold gust of wind blew past.

Aiko stared at the field and the house in the distance. From her grandparents' home, the abandoned house and fields looked like the ideal place to go exploring and have some fun. But now that she was actually there, the place seemed dark and forbidding.

She hesitated, unwilling to give up on what seemed like a great place to play, when a warmer breeze drifted by, and the sun seemed to light the fields in a warmer glow again. Cocking her head to one side, she wondered why she thought the place had seemed so spooky. She glanced up at the clear sky above enjoying the warmth of the sun on her face for a moment before turning determinedly towards the grass.