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, and Yanagihama sits in the middle of it. By day it is a working forest: deer and boar for the hunters, timber for the mills, foraging on the Great Willow's hill. Off the roads live wolves, black bears, giant stag beetles, and spiders of genuinely upsetting size — and that's before the things the Eight Practices are for.

The hauntings wax and wane with the year and crest in the first weeks of summer — the ghost season — when sensible folk are indoors by dusk with the lanterns lit. The forest's people have always lived with the wood rather than against it: kodama tend the oldest groves, kappa hold the streams (mind your courtesy and carry a cucumber), and the dead keep their own seasons. The deep vales appear on no map, and the woodsmen's advice about them is unanimous and short: don't.