"I took very well to both," Seimei says. "That was...sort of what my mother was concerned about. When I was born I had no fox features at all, and she thought I was completely human. But when I was five or six, I did a very unusual thing.

"Out in Osaka, we were very isolated. I had no other children to play with. So where a child my age would normally have one imaginary friend, I had a few. And one day, they stopped being imaginary." Seimei turns back a page, to the picture of him and his mother. He points to a group of small ogre-like creatures in the near distance.