Kitsune

The stone foxes have no noses. They sit in pairs at the mouth of half the shrines in the country, moss to the shoulders like green velvet, tails tipped with the dead gold of fungus, a strip of faded red cloth knotted at the throat, and nine out of ten have had the tips of their snouts knocked off. A visitor to Izumo once asked why, and was given a one word answer: kodomo. The children. Behind the statues, low in the shrine wall, there is often a round hole about the width of a soup bowl, and inside it a block of tofu quietly going sour in the dark. The tofu is not for the statues. It is for the fox nobody can see.

Those shrines belong to Inari, whose oldest name in the Kojiki is the August Spirit of Food and whose business is rice, and therefore wealth, and therefore almost everything. The fox is only the retainer. Somewhere in the long centuries the retainer ate the master: peasants prayed to the foxes, carved the foxes, feared the foxes, and left the god himself faceless. Look at the stone animals outside a prosperous merchant’s shrine and you may find a key held crosswise in the jaws, the key to the rice granary, which is the same thing as the key to the money.

The fox was a late arrival in Japanese religion. The Kojiki, the Nihon Shoki and the old provincial gazetteers are full of animals with uncanny powers, and the fox is not among them; those texts belong to the snake. Supernatural foxes were already old in China by the Han dynasty, and they seem to have crossed over with Buddhism and its literature. By 823 the Nihon Ryōiki, Japan’s first collection of Buddhist parables, has foxes changing shape and foxes crawling into people, and the snake has been quietly demoted.

One of those early stories is still the best one. A man of Ōno in Mino Province takes a wife who is beautiful, obliging, and not what she appears. She bears him a child. Then the household dog, a puppy the child’s own age, begins to bark at her with a hatred no one can explain, and one morning it comes for her throat, and in her terror she loses her hold on the human shape and is a fox on the roof beam looking down at her husband. He does not chase her out. Come back at night, he says, and sleep in my arms. And she does, every night, in the shape of a woman, and leaves again in the morning as a fox. The tale hands you a neat etymology on the way out, kitsu-ne, come and sleep. The derivation is almost certainly built backwards from the story, which is what folk etymologies are for.

What the fox looks like is simply a fox. That is the disquieting part. Everything strange about the kitsune is a matter of accumulation: the older it grows, the less it is. It must survive a certain span, five hundred years by one reckoning, or escape death by thunder three times, before it can transform at all. At eight hundred to a thousand years it is at its most dangerous, and then it may be taken up into the heavens as a celestial fox, golden coated and nine tailed, serving in the halls of the sun and moon and knowing the secrets of nature. Painters give it a burning jewel at the tail tip. The nine tails, incidentally, are an immigrant. Tamamo no Mae, the most famous fox in Japan, had only two of them until the Edo period, when the Chinese story of Daji, the nine tailed vixen who destroyed the house of Shang, arrived in translation and lent her seven more.

Becoming human takes work. The fox finds a skull, preferably a human one, and some old horse or cattle bones, and balances them on its head. It decks itself in grasses and leaves. Then it turns to the north star and bows, slowly at first, then faster and faster, leaping at the sky, until it has made a hundred obeisances and the skull has not once fallen off. It can now pass for a man. To pass for a young woman it must live near a graveyard.

In Izumo, whole households were said to keep the smallest kind, the ninko, no bigger than a weasel and invisible except to those it attached itself to. When the rice was done, the head of the family would rap the side of the iron pot and lift the lid, and the foxes would come up through the floorboards, seventy-five of them, no more and no less, and eat in complete silence while the steam went up and the level of the rice went down. They ate first. They always ate first. In return they kept the water in the paddy and the rice in the pot, until the day they took offence at nothing in particular and carried off everything the family owned.

Out on the roads the fox worked in fire and false coin. The lights that wander over marsh and hillside are kitsune-bi, foxfire, struck out of the ground with a blow of the tail or breathed out of the mouth, and they burn steadily to lure a traveller into a house that is not there, or bob ahead of him until the road is gone and the swamp is all around him. A physician of Matsue was once fetched at night to a great house on the hill of Shiragayama, delivered a fine son, dined well, was paid handsomely, and went to pay his respects the next day. There is no house on Shiragayama. There is nothing on Shiragayama but forest, and in his purse the gold had turned to grass.

The third habit is the one that filled hospitals. Kitsune-tsuki, fox possession, announces itself as a lump that travels under the skin, sliding away from the needle and slipping out from under a strong hand. The possessed run naked in the street, froth, bark, speak languages they never learned, and eat enormous quantities of fried bean curd and red bean rice, insisting all the while that the hunger is not theirs. Families burned and beat their own children to drive the fox out before they sent for the yamabushi, who would argue theology with the animal through the victim’s mouth until it agreed to leave in exchange for tofu, delivered to the particular Inari shrine it claimed as its home.

The suspicion ruined lives. A family known to be kitsune-mochi, fox owners, could not sell its fields; nobody would buy land where a spiteful fox might open the dikes in a dry season. Their daughters, however clever and however lovely, went unmarried, because marrying one meant importing seventy-five invisible retainers into your own house and into the houses of everyone you were related to.

Even Hideyoshi lost patience. There is a letter of his, kept at a temple in Nara, addressed to Inari Daimyōjin and complaining that one of the foxes under the god’s jurisdiction has bewitched a servant. He asks for an investigation. If the fox has no adequate reason to give, he writes, arrest and punish him at once, and if you hesitate, I shall issue orders for the destruction of every fox in the land.

Nobody destroyed the foxes. Their gifts, on the day they choose to give, are real enough: a fox saved from dogs came back that evening in the shape of a pretty girl with two ducks and two heavy old coins, and only one of the coins turned into a blade of grass by morning. Against the rest of it, the defences are small and strangely domestic. A dog always knows. Water always tells, because the reflection that falls on it is a fox’s, whatever is standing on the bank. A young fox cannot quite tuck the tail under the hem of a kimono, and cannot say moshi-moshi twice in a row, and knocks at a door with a dull sound, because it is knocking with its tail. Catch the invisible messenger in a trap and it becomes visible, which is the whole superstition in one image: a creature of infinite vision and boundless illusion, sitting in a snare by the roadside, entirely solid, waiting to see what you will do.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a kitsune?

A kitsune is the supernatural fox of Japanese folklore, a shapeshifter that grows more powerful with age. Kitsune serve the rice deity Inari as invisible messengers and guardians, and in their wilder forms they deceive travellers with illusions, kindle ghostly foxfire, and take possession of human beings.

What powers does a kitsune have?

Kitsune can take human shape, most often that of a beautiful woman, an old man, or a Buddhist priest, and can make people see, hear and imagine whatever the fox wishes. They produce kitsune-bi, foxfire, by striking the ground with the tail or breathing it out, and they can turn leaves and grass into what looks like food and money. The oldest of them are credited with knowledge of the past and the future.

How can you tell a kitsune from a human?

A dog can always tell, and will bark at a disguised fox until the illusion collapses. Water betrays the fox as well, since its reflection shows a fox no matter what shape is standing on the bank. Folklore adds smaller tells: the tip of the tail escaping the hem of a kimono, a dull knock at the door made with the tail rather than the knuckles, and an inability to say the greeting moshi-moshi twice in quick succession.

Why does the kitsune have nine tails?

Tails are a measure of age and power. A fox that survives eight hundred to a thousand years may become a celestial fox, golden furred and nine tailed, serving in the halls of the sun and moon. The nine tailed form is a relatively late idea in Japan: Tamamo no Mae, the most famous fox of all, was a two tailed fox until the Edo period, when the Chinese legend of the nine tailed vixen Daji reached Japan in translation and reshaped her.

What is kitsune-tsuki, or fox possession?

Kitsune-tsuki is the affliction of having a fox enter the body. Its signs were a lump moving beneath the skin, fits of barking and frothing, speech in unknown languages, and a ravenous appetite for the foods foxes are said to love, such as fried bean curd and red bean rice. A yamabushi exorcist would bargain with the fox through the victim’s mouth, and the fox usually agreed to depart in exchange for food offered at the Inari shrine it named as its own.

Related Entries

Inari, Tamamo-no-Mae, Abe no Seimei, Tanuki, Nekomata, Bakeneko, Tengu, Onibi, Oni, Jorogumo, Yuki-onna, Ubume, Tsukumogami, Huli jing, Gumiho