Nitori's illustration in Mountain of Faith is very adorable. Hello, Charin here, who can't stay put whenever something about Nitori comes up.
I just wanted to draw a comic about Nitori, so I started this with that mindset from this spring.
Among the books I bought last winter was 『The Fall』by Mr. Kakuchou (PLANT, year 2009). When I read it, I had the sensation that I visualized Gensokyo, which hadn't been so clear in my mind until then. I reckon that we all have a different image of the Gensokyo of our own. That should be the beauty of doujin works: that we can apply different feelings to the same game.
Perhaps I shouldn't say 『The Fall』 granted me the image that didn't exist within me previously: rather, it reawakened the image that I already had but had dimmed. What I visualized was the world of 『Tohno Story』 (Yanagita Kunio, year 1910) that I'd read some years ago.

『Tohno Story』 is a book that collaborates the legends and folk tales in the Tohno region in Iwate. It's full of stories about kappas, tengu, mountain gods and Mayohiga that any Touhou fan would grin upon reading. Yes, that's where the title of Chen's Stage 2 of Perfect Cherry Blossom background music came from.
I realized that what I felt upon reading Tohno Story fit perfectly with Gensokyo.
I even wonder why I never tried to actively give the image of Mayohiga to Gensokyo, simply thinking "Ah, that's the place that appears in Tohno Story". So I suppose the work 『The Fall』 was instrumental in helping me. It led me to wish to make a story like that for myself.

『Tohno Story』 is a book that collaborates the legends and folk tales in the Tohno region in Iwate. It's full of stories about kappas, tengu, mountain gods and Mayohiga that any Touhou fan would grin upon reading. Yes, that's where the title of Chen's Stage 2 of Perfect Cherry Blossom background music came from.
I realized that what I felt upon reading Tohno Story fit perfectly with Gensokyo.
I even wonder why I never tried to actively give the image of Mayohiga to Gensokyo, simply thinking "Ah, that's the place that appears in Tohno Story". So I suppose the work 『The Fall』 was instrumental in helping me. It led me to wish to make a story like that for myself.

The mascot character of Tohno Stories would be the kappa. There are several stories like that, about how kappas leave their footprints on sandbeds near ponds, how kappas in Tohno have scarlet faces. What left the deepest impression was the story of a human maiden birthing a kappa child.
A scarlet face, a huge mouth, flappers for hands. The ugly child is helpless before its treatment of being torn alive and buried or being abandoned out of the village.
But what if the name kappa were merely used to justify the cruelty? In other words, this can be interpreted to mean that they blamed kappas and murdered mutated children out of fear or that they attempted to hide it with the tale that the kappa were frequenting in their houses.
The identity of a kappa could be an abandoned child. Their characteristic red face and the word for baby(水子) support the theory. The characters literally stand for water child. Notice how the boy's father in the story was referring to Nitori as the water goddess.