Kitsune-Tsuki

A needle is a poor instrument against a fox. The lump sits under the skin of the arm, or the belly, or the back of the neck, about the size of a small egg and unmistakably alive, and when the needle goes in the lump is already somewhere else. A strong hand can close on it and feel it slide out from between the fingers like a wet plum stone. Everyone in the room understands what this means. There is a fox in her, and it is going to have to be talked out.

Fox possession begins, as a rule, with a meeting. The classic account, taken down by one of the first Western doctors to practise in Japan, ran the same way each time it was told to him in the 1870s: the patient was walking home after dark, the lantern went out, the road disappeared, a light appeared far off and was taken for home. The light receded as he stumbled toward it. Then a beautiful girl came out of the dark, walked him kindly to his own gate, and vanished. The men and women who told that story arrived at his clinic sleepless, anaemic, sick with foreboding, certain that something had come home with them.

The foxes of Japanese folklore are guilty of three things. They bewitch people for revenge or amusement. They attach themselves to households as invisible retainers and make those households feared. Worst of all, they get inside people, and the affliction that follows has its own name.

What that looked like was documented at length in Izumo, on the north coast, where the belief was strongest and where a foreign schoolteacher spent fourteen months collecting it. The possessed ran shouting through the streets, or lay down and frothed and yelped in the manner of a fox. They spoke and wrote in languages they had never learned. Above all, they ate. They wanted fried bean curd, and tofu, and rice boiled red with adzuki beans, and they wanted quantities of it, and they explained with perfect reasonableness that the hunger was not theirs. It belonged to the passenger. The face changed too, or was believed to: the lower jaw drawing out toward a muzzle, the eyes contracting into narrow curves, the whole expression turning foxy, and the appetite growing imperious, because a fox is greedy and expects delicacies at once.

The imperial physician who examined such patients in the Meiji era wrote down the mechanics as they were described to him. The fox comes in through the breast, or more often through the soft gap between the fingernail and the flesh. Once inside it does not merge with its host but sets up as a separate tenant, with its own opinions. The victim can hear it thinking. The two of them hold long, loud, furious arguments, the fox using a voice altogether unlike the one it borrowed. He noted, with the flat confidence of his century, that the sufferers were nearly always women, nearly always poor, and never anyone who had not already heard of fox possession and believed in it.

It reached higher than that on at least one occasion. A daughter of the deposed Emperor Juntoku, in the thirteenth century, was taken by a fox, and the fox was known by name and address: it lived in a field at Sugao in Mikawa. A man called Homma drove it out of her by twanging a bowstring, which is an old and respectable way of frightening spirits, and was given the fox’s field as his reward. He built a shrine to Inari on it, in gratitude, presumably to the fox that had made his career.

For everyone else there was the exorcist. A yamabushi, or a Shinto healer with his paper-streamered wand, or the priests of the Nichiren sect, who were reckoned the finest fox-drawers in the country, would sit down opposite the sufferer and address not the sufferer but the animal, sternly, at length, on the subject of trespass. The fox answered through the victim’s mouth in a dry, cracked, quarrelsome voice, and argued its side. This could go on for weeks. One sour commentator observed that the length of the treatment tended to match the length of the family’s purse. Sooner or later the fox grew bored of being lectured, named the Inari shrine it claimed to serve, and agreed to leave in exchange for food delivered there at a stated hour. The bargain was kept. The possessed collapsed and lay senseless for a long while, and afterward, it was said, could never again touch tofu or fried bean curd or red bean rice for the rest of their life.

Before the priest was called, other remedies were tried. The possessed were burned. They were beaten. The idea was to make the body an unpleasant address.

The fox’s power in all this comes from age and from the peculiar theology of the thing: after a thousand years, it was held, a fox can deal directly with Heaven and feed on the souls of men. Its limits are stranger and more revealing. It cannot enter the strong. Wrestlers were held to be immune and treated the whole business with contempt, and a possessing fox was once heard to explain, through its victim, that it had wanted the brother instead but he was too strong for it. It cannot resist an argument, or a free meal, or the seduction of being addressed as an important personage, which is how every successful exorcism ended. And it could not survive schooling. The doctor who saw those patients in 1872 noted that tonics, hygiene and sensible cooperation cured them roughly as often as the priests did, and the priests, he admitted, did very well.

The affliction has not entirely gone. Two cases were recorded in a mountain village in western Japan and published by a psychiatrist in 1991, who found the old illness still running on the old rails, still a shared performance between a sufferer, a family and a village, and concluded that a diagnosis in a clinical vocabulary only partly translated what was happening. The cruellest part was never the possession anyway. It was the other half of the belief: that certain families kept foxes, seventy-five of them, invisible, fed first at every meal, and that anyone who married into such a family or bought their land became a fox-keeper too. Those families could not marry off their daughters. Their fields sold at a loss. Nobody ever asked them about it directly, for fear of what might be sent, and so nobody ever cleared it up.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is kitsune-tsuki?

Kitsune-tsuki is the Japanese folk affliction of fox possession, in which an invisible fox enters a person’s body and lives there as a second personality. It was one of the most common explanations for madness in Japan, and it was regarded as the worst of the three evils attributed to goblin foxes, ahead of bewitchment and haunting a household.

What are the symptoms of fox possession?

The classic signs were a lump moving beneath the skin that slipped away from a needle or a grasping hand, barking and frothing, running or shouting in the streets, and speech or writing in languages the victim had never learned. The possessed also craved the foods foxes were said to love, especially tofu, fried bean curd and red bean rice, and ate them in great quantity while insisting the hunger belonged to the fox and not to them.

How does a fox get into a person?

Accounts recorded in the nineteenth century said the fox entered through the breast, or more often through the gap between the fingernail and the flesh. It then lived apart from its host rather than merging with them, so that the two could hold audible arguments, the fox speaking in a voice quite different from the victim’s own.

How was kitsune-tsuki cured?

By negotiation. A yamabushi, a Shinto healer with a paper wand, or a priest of the Nichiren sect would address the fox directly through the victim’s mouth and berate it for trespassing, sometimes for weeks, until the fox named the Inari shrine it served and agreed to leave in return for food offered there. Victims were also burned and beaten in the hope of making the body inhospitable, and after a successful exorcism the sufferer collapsed and was said never to be able to eat tofu again.

What is a kitsune-mochi, or fox-owner?

A kitsune-mochi is a person or family believed to keep a household of invisible foxes, traditionally seventy-five of them, who bring wealth and punish anyone who crosses their masters. The belief was strongest in Izumo, and it worked as a social curse: fox-owning families were shunned, struggled to marry outside their own circle, and could not sell their land at a fair price, since anyone who married or bought in was thought to become a fox-owner too.

Related Entries

Kitsune, Inari, Kyūbi-no-kitsune, Kuda-gitsune, Tamamo-no-Mae, Dakini, Inugami, Ikiryō, Onryō, Shikigami, Zashiki-warashi, Tanuki, Obake, Huli jing, Gumiho