Kagatsu has a small population and every one of them has a visible daily routine. Learning where people are and when is the practical core of village life, and it is also how the game's night sequences get their tension - because you know exactly where your neighbours should be, and can tell when something has moved them.
Villagers are not quest dispensers. Each has a home, a job, a set of daily locations and a relationship value that moves in both directions. They notice where you go and when. Talking to a resident you have built trust with opens up dialogue options that simply do not exist otherwise, and it is these conversations that carry the story's quieter half - the half about what the village wants from you.
Not every figure you meet in Kagatsu is a resident, and the game does not label them clearly. Some are visitors passing through. Some are people who live somewhere you have not been. Some are something else entirely. The village has a habit of introducing people without introductions, and the only reliable test is whether you can place them in your own mental map of the village.
How thoroughly you know the village feeds into which ending you reach. Spending a whole run focused on cultivation and cooking produces a different final stretch than one spent talking to people, and the game measures both without ever showing you a raw number. It is worth playing more than once to see how much of Kagatsu you can genuinely get to know.