Signs for Lost Children by Sarah Moss (top ten ebook reader TXT) 📕

Makoto sighs. ‘No. I want the land. To come home.’

Tom sits up to see Makoto’s face. The land? To walk away from his career?

‘You want to be a farmer? After all those years of training?’

Firelight plays on Makoto’s face, on his closed eyelids.

‘Not yet, of course. I have my work. And my father is still strong. But later, yes. This is my home.’

Tom tries to imagine having such a home, a place that would call him across years. It is probably necessary to be born to it, it is probably not something one can buy, even with the figure De Rivers mentioned. He tries to imagine having a father, to tell him what he is allowed to do.

‘But your parents perhaps need your salary? Or they are proud of what you have done?’ Perhaps they don’t see why their son should throw away years of work and turn back on the great stride between a village that strikes Tom as essentially medieval and the Engineering Department in Aberdeen.

Makoto puts his hands behind his head, opens his eyes and stares up at the ceiling. The rain seems to have stopped.

‘No. It is the foxes.’

Tom must have misheard. Or Makoto’s English is at last succumbing to the drink. The shochu. The Japanese, James Moorhouse observes in Three Years in the Land of the Rising Sun, have a child’s tolerance for alcohol.

‘Foxes?’

Makoto huffs in exasperation. ‘We own foxes. We are kitsunemochi. It is stupid. A winter’s tale for old women.’

Tom lies back. A person, he supposes, could own a fox. ‘You mean you farm them? Perhaps for fur?’

‘No. No-one does that. No, in the countryside some families are said to be kitsunemochi. It means there are foxes on the land. I should have known. I should not have asked my father.’

‘Well, there probably are foxes on the land. I saw some only today.’

Makoto waves his arm, as if swatting a fly. ‘Not real foxes. Spirits, perhaps you would say. Not devils but bad.’

‘Goblins?’ Demons, he thinks, elves, ghosts. It’s all the same.

‘I have not heard the word. Goblins. Very well. So in each village there is a family who have goblin foxes. And we are that family. And I have annoyed my father by raising the subject again.’

Tom lifts his head to drain his glass again. He is not sure which of them is deranged. ‘You have goblin foxes? You, an engineer?’

Makoto sits up and pours again. ‘Some of the new railway lines are said to have their own fox spirits. People see trains coming to hit them but when the train is on them there is only a fox.’

‘What?’ And what are people doing on the railway lines anyway, fox or no fox?

‘We have had them since my great-great-grandfather’s time. He was adopted into the family, you see, and then inherited and the villagers did not like it. And they said he owned foxes. They cause trouble.’

‘Stealing hens?’ We must make haste and tell the King, because the sky is falling down.

‘No. I told you these are not real foxes. No, they spread lies about people. Gossip. They borrow things and leave them lying around, or they make things break. Sometimes they eat up all the food.’

Gossiping foxes? Tom gives up. ‘I saw two foxes earlier,’ he says. ‘Dancing. The dog fox was dancing for the vixen. At the temple.’

Makoto lies back again. ‘At the temple? Don’t tell my mother. She’ll say you saw—what were they?—golbins?’

‘Goblins,’ says Tom. ‘Though I’m not sure that’s right.’

They lie there. It’s warm, and the Japanese clothes are very comfortable once you get used to them. Tom thinks about what he doesn’t understand.

‘Why do the spirit foxes mean you can’t come back?’

‘They don’t. That’s what I tell my parents. My father says these stories aren’t told in the city, no-one there calls me kitsunemochi, so I should stay there and live my life without these lies. He says they sent me away so I could escape this story. He says he does not wish to hear of this again.’

‘Why don’t they move somewhere else? Another village?’

Makoto drains his glass. ‘They have always been here. And no-one would buy the land because of the foxes. I should not have asked.’

In the morning, Tom thinks, he will try to make sense of this. He will be able to see where the problems are, in the morning.

‘Like the stone foxes?’ Tom asks. ‘At the shrines? I mean, temples?’

Makoto rolls onto his side. His eyes are closing. ‘Inari. No. And yes.’

They are woken by the maid, pulling back the shutters to fill the room with a blinding white light. Tom groans and rolls over. His head hurts. What is the etiquette for vomiting? He pulls the striped gown closed, although the maid must already have seen his hairy white belly. There are reasons for the buttons on European clothes. She speaks to him, the global things that women with things to do say to men who ought to know better. His neck is stiff and one arm is numb. The maid scolds and clucks. Makoto is lying on his back like an effigy, apparently oblivious to the morning. There are kitchen noises: soon the rest of the family will appear, washed and dressed for breakfast. Tom uses the functioning arm to push himself up and sits there, rubbing his neck. A bath, he needs a bath, but as far as he knows bathing is possible only in the evenings. He stands up and the room tilts. It’s a long time since he last drank spirits and he’s felt like this only once before, one night in Aberdeen after exams when he stumbled back to his rooms, his disgrace along the way veiled by a freezing fog that seemed sent to slap him awake. He makes his way to the lavatory like someone testing the ice.

When he comes back, at least approximately washed and dressed, Makoto is sitting at the table with his family. There are steaming bowls on the