Kitsune

Also Known As: (狐), the ordinary Japanese word for fox, used of the living animal and of the supernatural one without distinction; divided in later folklore into zenko, the good foxes, and nogitsune, the wild ones
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Shapeshifters
Mythical Attributes: A kitsune takes human shape, kindles fire from its tail or its breath, raises houses and banquets out of nothing, and enters people to speak through them, its power increasing with every century it survives.
Role in Mythos: It serves Inari as messenger between the divine and the human world, and works the other side of the same street as Japan’s chief trickster and deceiver.
Relation to Humans: Foxes live close to people, guard their rice from rats, carry their prayers and occasionally marry them. They also strand travellers on moors, empty their purses, and take up residence inside their daughters.

Rain falls through bright sunlight, warm on the back of the neck, and somewhere at the edge of the fields a farmer looks up and says the foxes are marrying. Kitsune no yomeiri, the bride being carried to her new house. Nobody sees the procession. The lights that drift along the marsh after dark are said to be the torches, carried in order of rank toward a house that no one has ever managed to find in daylight.

Foxes were close neighbours in old Japan, closer than they are now. They denned along the margins of rice land and hunted the rats and mice that came for the grain, which is a useful habit in a country that counted its wealth in rice, and that is probably the root of everything that followed. An animal that guards the harvest without being asked stops looking like an animal. By the eighth century foxes were appearing in the Nihon Shoki as portents rather than vermin, and in time they attached themselves to Inari, the kami of rice and prosperity, as messengers and servants. Walk up to an Inari shrine now and they are waiting on their plinths in pairs, lichen packed into the grooves of the stone, muzzles rubbed smooth by weather and by hands. There are something over thirty thousand of them standing in shrines across the country.

Where the shape-shifting came from has never been settled. Karen Smyers, whose fieldwork at Fushimi Inari in Kyoto and Toyokawa Inari in Aichi produced the standard modern study, traces the fox as seductress, and the Buddhist end of the tradition generally, to Chinese stories, while holding that parts of the Japanese material have no mainland counterpart. Kiyoshi Nozaki argued the opposite direction: that Japan thought well of its foxes very early and imported only their bad manners. There is a third thread as well. Buddhist scripture is full of the yakan, the cunning shape-shifting jackal, and Japan has no jackals, so the fox took the part.

The oldest Japanese telling is a short one and it is still the best. In the Nihon Ryōiki, the collection of Buddhist miracle tales that the monk Kyōkai assembled around the turn of the ninth century, a man of Ōno district in Mino Province goes out looking for a wife and meets a woman crossing a moor. They marry. She bears him a son, and on the same day the household bitch whelps. The pup grows up hating her, snarling whenever she crosses the yard, and one morning it goes for her in earnest. In her fright she loses the human shape, clears the fence and runs for the open moor. He does not chase her. He stands in the yard and shouts after her that whatever she is, she is the mother of his son, and that she should come back and sleep with him. She came every night after that, and slept in his arms, and was gone before the light.

Come and sleep, in Japanese, is ki tsu ne, and the tale is offered as the origin of the word. It is a fine story and it is not true. Linguists take kitsu as an old written form of the noise the animal makes, with ne an affectionate ending, the cry itself having since drifted to the kon kon that Japanese children learn today. The family descended from that marriage kept the name regardless. They were the Kitsune no Atae of Mino, and the point of the story, for the people who told it, was the pedigree.

A fox wearing a person can be caught out, if you know the signs. It gives off a faint light, so that on the blackest night the colour of its hair and the pattern of its kimono stand out at six feet as though something were burning gently underneath the cloth. The borrowed face is usually a little too long. A beginner cannot get the whole tail inside the clothing, and the tip shows, which is where the phrase shippo wo dasu, to stick out one’s tail, comes from when a person’s real character surfaces. Its true outline hangs beside it like a reflection thrown on the wrong side, so that anyone meaning to strike is advised to aim not at the human figure but at the faint fox shape standing to its left or right. In Izumo they said you could tell one at the door, because it knocks with its tail and the sound comes dull. It also cannot manage to say moshi twice in quick succession. Japanese telephone etiquette doubles the word to this day, and the reason given is that a single moshi alarms people.

Power comes with age and nothing else. Only a red, white or yellow fox is held capable of transformation at all, and even then it must reach five hundred years or survive the danger of thunder three separate times before the skill is safe in its hands. The ones to be careful of have lived eight hundred to a thousand. At a thousand the fox is taken up into the heavens, turns gold, grows nine tails, serves in the halls of the sun and moon and is said to know every secret in nature. Edo writers tried to formalise all this. The essay collection Kyūsensha manpitsu ranks the good foxes with the celestial tenko at the top and kinko, ginko, kuroko and byakko descending below, though other books arrange them differently and the hierarchy never quite hardened. Against them sit the nogitsune, the wild and masterless foxes, who have no shrine, no master and no particular reason to behave.

Their favourite trick is hospitality. A light shows itself ahead on a dark road, steady as a lamp in a window, and there is a house, and a meal, and warmth, and a bed. The man wakes on a desolate moor or in an old graveyard with moss and rotting leaves in his mouth. The light itself is kitsune-bi, fox fire, struck out of the ground with a blow of the tail or exhaled, and it can shoot forward two or three feet from the animal’s muzzle. Sometimes it burns quietly to draw a traveller in. Sometimes it wanders ahead like a carried torch until the road has gone, then goes out.

The most famous of them got much further than a moor. In the twelfth century a woman of extraordinary accomplishment entered the court of the retired emperor Toba and became his favourite, and he neglected everything else, and then he fell ill. Tamamo-no-Mae, the stories say, was a nine-tailed vixen. Exposed, she fled through the air to the moor of Yasu, took back her own shape and was hunted down, and her body hardened into a stone that killed anything approaching it. The Noh play Sesshōseki puts a priest in front of that rock and lets the ghost come out of it. The stone stands at Nasu and it broke in half on 5 March 2022, which caused a certain amount of comment; officials pointed out that it had been cracked for years and that rain and frost will do that to volcanic rock. Even the legend is borrowed. It is a Japanese working of the Chinese story of the ruinous concubine of King You of Zhou.

The worst of what a fox does needs no disguise at all. In kitsune-tsuki, fox possession, one gets inside a person and stays. The afflicted bark, turn against dogs, demand the best food in the house and demand it immediately, and their faces are described as narrowing at the eyes and lengthening at the jaw until neighbours can see the fox in them. Exorcists worked by negotiation rather than force, naming a day and an hour at which the fox would be escorted back to the hills, and the method had a good success rate for reasons that are not mysterious. Whole families in some districts were known as kitsune-mochi, fox owners, holding their foxes by inheritance, feared and avoided and quietly prosperous on the strength of it.

So the fox can become a woman, light a fire without flint, build a house that is not there, foretell, curse, and live inside a human being for a season. Its limits are just as consistent. It borrows shapes but cannot hold one under pressure, and terror or a dog’s teeth will strip it back in a moment. Water refuses to cooperate: a fox that leans over a pool sees a fox. A priest can drive it out, a mirror or a pinch can expose it, and the oldest countermeasure in the collection is also the least dignified, because a fried rat laid in the road will end the performance at once. A dog always knows. That is the honest measure of the kitsune, a creature of near divine rank in the shrines and absolute power in the tales, undone reliably by an unimpressed farm dog and the smell of something better to eat.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a kitsune?

A kitsune is the fox of Japanese folklore, a shape-shifting spirit that can take human form, produce fire, create illusions and possess people. The same word covers the ordinary animal and the supernatural one. Later tradition splits them into zenko, the good foxes attached to the god Inari, and nogitsune, the wild foxes with no master.

Why does a kitsune have nine tails?

Tails are a measure of age and power. A kitsune gains ability over centuries, and at roughly a thousand years old it is said to be taken into the heavens, turn gold and grow nine tails, serving in the halls of the sun and moon. The nine-tailed fox is therefore the oldest and most dangerous form, not a separate creature.

What is the connection between kitsune and Inari?

Kitsune serve Inari, the Shinto kami of rice, fertility and prosperity, as messengers between the divine and human worlds. The link probably began with real foxes hunting the rats and mice that threatened rice crops. More than thirty thousand fox statues stand at Inari shrines across Japan.

How can you tell if someone is really a kitsune in disguise?

Folklore lists several tells. A disguised fox gives off a faint light that makes its clothing visible in the dark, its face looks slightly too long, and an inexperienced one cannot hide the tip of its tail. Dogs always detect them, water reflects a fox rather than a person, and a fox cannot say the greeting moshi twice in quick succession.

Who was Tamamo-no-Mae?

Tamamo-no-Mae was a nine-tailed kitsune who took the form of a beautiful woman and became the favourite of the retired emperor Toba in the twelfth century, causing him to neglect his duties and fall ill. Exposed, she fled to the moor of Yasu and was hunted down, and her body became the Sesshōseki, a stone said to kill whatever came near it. The stone stands at Nasu and split in two in March 2022.