Tales from Hachikokuyama

Deep in the Musashino plain, where Tokyo and Saitama meet, there runs a ridge of hills — too gentle, really, to be called mountains. One stretch of that ridge bears the name Hachikokuyama, the Hill of Eight Provinces. The wind moving through the crowns of the old trees carries the noise of the city away before you even notice it is gone. Those who step inside feel, without quite knowing when it began, that time here flows by different rules. Ordinary life is a thin membrane, and in this forest it peels away without a sound. Musashino Shigure. Koko-chan. Sora-chan. Reo-kun. And Shami. Each of them trails a shadow of their own, and each of them is drawn, sooner or later, to this place on the edge of things. An edge — which is to say, the seam between this world and the one beyond. The light that falls between the trees is sometimes so clear it hardly seems to belong to the living world at all. It is the kind of light in which you find yourself face to face with something unexpected: a thing you had forgotten, a thing you had lost, or a thing that does not yet have a name. This is a record of such encounters.

Table of contents (English) · serial, 10 episodes