The Yūreimori, the Ghostwood, is the vast haunted forest that blankets Akanegumo from the feet of the Kibo No Taiga highlands to the shores of the Sea of Ghosts, with Yanagihama sitting near its center. By day it is a working forest of hunters and woodsmen; by the old reckoning it is something else again. Its hauntings rise and fall with the year and crest in the first weeks of summer, the ghost season, when every settlement under its eaves bars its doors, lights its lanterns, and keeps the old practices.

By day the Yūreimori gives freely: deer and boar for the hunters, timber for the mills, foraging on the slopes of the Weeping Sentinel's hill above Yanagihama. It drains east down the river valleys toward the Sea of Ghosts and climbs west into the mountain country toward the Pilgrim's Path. Its heart, the deep vales, appears on no map, and the woodsmen's advice about them is unanimous and short: don't.

Off the roads live wolves, black bears, giant stag beetles, and spiders of genuinely upsetting size, and that is before the things the Eight Practices are meant for. Kodama tend the oldest groves and kappa hold the streams and pools (mind your courtesy, and carry a cucumber), while the dead, the forest's true population by local reckoning, keep their own seasons.

The forest's people have always lived with the wood rather than against it, and the customs run deep: lanterns lit by dusk, offerings left at the wayside shrines, and courtesy paid to whatever holds a grove or a stream. The hauntings crest in the ghost season of early summer, when even the roads empty by dusk and the old families keep the Eight Practices without fail. And every child of the deep province learns the oldest rule of all: if a voice calls your name from behind you at dusk, do not turn around.