The Cucumber Thief

Emi had inherited her grandmother's small farm outside Tono only six months earlier, and she was still learning, slowly, which of the old woman's warnings had been practical advice and which had simply been stories.

"Never leave cucumbers near the river unwatched," her grandmother used to say, half-joking, half-serious in a way Emi had never quite figured out. "The kappa will take them."

Emi had laughed it off at the time. She was laughing considerably less now, standing at the edge of her cucumber patch at six in the morning, staring at yet another row of plants stripped bare overnight.

This was the fourth time in two weeks.

Small, damp footprints — three-toed, unmistakably not human, not any animal she recognized either — led from the cucumber patch directly toward the river that bordered her property.

She crouched down, examining them more closely. Whatever was taking her vegetables clearly wasn't a deer, a badger, or any other creature she could think of.

"Okay," she said to nobody in particular, thinking of her grandmother's old warnings with considerably more seriousness than she had a month ago. "Tonight, I'm staying up."

Emi settled into a folding chair near the edge of her field just after eleven, a flashlight in her lap, wrapped in a blanket against the cool night air, feeling slightly ridiculous for taking her grandmother's old warning quite this seriously.

She almost fell asleep twice.

Then, a little before midnight, she heard it: a soft, wet, deliberate splashing sound, coming from the direction of the riverbank.

She switched on her flashlight.

Crouched among her cucumber plants, caught directly in the beam of light, was a creature roughly the size of a small child — greenish skin, webbed hands, a shell-like patch on its back, and, most strikingly, a shallow, bowl-shaped indentation right at the top of its head, filled with water that caught the flashlight beam and glinted strangely.

A cucumber, half-eaten, sat forgotten in its hand.

The creature froze, staring back at her with wide, startled eyes, clearly as surprised to be caught as she was to have actually caught something.

For a long moment, neither of them moved.

Then, deep in her memory, one specific detail from her grandmother's old stories surfaced, unbidden, exactly when she needed it: kappa, more than almost anything else, cared deeply about proper manners.

Slowly, deliberately, Emi bowed.

The kappa's reaction was immediate and entirely involuntary.

It bowed back — deeply, formally, exactly as good manners apparently demanded, even under the circumstances — and in doing so, tipped the shallow dish of water on top of its head forward, spilling every last drop onto the ground.

The effect was instant. The creature's shoulders slumped. Its movements slowed dramatically, as though the water itself had been the source of most of its strength.

It looked up at Emi with an expression of pure, undignified panic.

"Please," it said, in a small, wet, croaking voice that Emi hadn't expected it to have at all. "The water. I need the water. I promise, I promise anything, just please—"

Emi crouched down slowly, studying the now-harmless creature in front of her, remembering, suddenly, every single one of her grandmother's old warnings all at once, and, underneath the fear, feeling something closer to fascination.

"You've been stealing my cucumbers for two weeks," she said.

"I like cucumbers," the kappa admitted, somewhat pitifully. "I am sorry. Please, the water—"

"What do I get," Emi asked, surprising herself with her own steadiness, "if I refill your dish?"

The kappa considered this question with surprising seriousness, despite its obviously weakened state.

"I will stop taking your cucumbers," the kappa said quickly. "I promise that completely."

"Go on," Emi said.

The kappa hesitated, water dripping slowly from what remained in its dish, clearly growing weaker by the second. "I will also... watch your fields. Warn you, somehow, if the river ever rises too fast, too dangerously, during storm season. My family has lived in this river for a very long time. We notice these things before humans do."

Emi considered this for a long moment. It seemed, at minimum, like a fair trade.

She walked to the river's edge, filled her cupped hands with water, and carefully poured it into the dish atop the creature's head.

The effect was immediate and dramatic. The kappa straightened up at once, color returning to its skin, strength visibly flooding back into its small body.

It bowed to her again — properly this time, without the accidental water-spilling consequence — and, without another word, scurried quickly toward the riverbank and disappeared beneath the dark water with barely a splash.

Emi stood alone at the edge of her field for a long moment, the night quiet again, her cucumber patch undisturbed for the first time in two weeks.

She found herself smiling, despite everything, already imagining how she would eventually tell this exact story to her own grandchildren someday — half-joking, half-serious, in exactly the way her grandmother once had.