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There’s a distinct sound she hears every morning as she wakes up. When she had first noticed it many years ago, her mother had told her that it was the voice of a woman who lived in the forest just as they did. A woman who had once been a famous opera singer in the city, who moved deep into the forest after she retired to where her lover was rumored to have died during the Second Great Shinobi War. Every morning she sang songs of hope that he would one day come home to her, her mother said with a smile, and every morning after that Kazane would close her eyes and listen to the high-pitched garble and try to decipher what she was saying. She never could figure out what exactly the woman was saying, and years later when she realized that it was not, in fact, a woman that was singing but instead various uguisu and some songbird she remembers the wistful smile on her mother’s face as she spoke of the phantom opera singer waiting for her husband to return from war. Maybe there was more to the story than okaa-san led on, maybe in this metaphorical story she was the singer waiting in some remote part of the Leaf Village to be swept off her feet by some promising soldier. Maybe Kazane’s father was a soldier, and maybe he was dead. Maybe he was both, or neither.In truth she didn’t know much about herself than she’d like to admit. And it didn’t help that like most people her age, both her parents were dead (or at least one of them, for sure). Kazane’s origins are a cloud of mystery, and where at one time she remembers living with okaa-san, there is another where she lives in this very house with the rice patty lady. It’s all very confusing, and the worst part was that even when her mother was alive, she never spoke about anything actually important. And when Kazane would ask, her mother would smile and tell her maybe some other time. Kazane never pushed, she was just a girl then, who lived to make her mother’s eyes crinkle and mouth twist with laughter. But she could count in her hands the amount of times that happened in the years they spent together, in the few years Hanada Michiru actually spent raising Kazane.In fact, their entire cohabitation consisted of her mother acting like a ghost that Kazane wasn’t sure she even deserved the title of okaa-san, really. It may be a terrible thing to say, but Kazane was done caring. The majority of years that Kazane spent getting raised by anyone that seemed to care was with Old Lady Yumi, the sweet old rice patty lady. She was the one that told her who was actually making those noises in the forest, and the one that kept her belly full during the times her mother was there and the times she was not. Maybe only she deserved to be called okaa-san.