Kitsune

What is a kitsune?

Kitsune is simply the ordinary Japanese word for a fox, and that is the first thing to understand about the kitsune of folklore. Over many centuries the real red fox of the farming villages gathered a second identity: a clever, long-lived creature able to bewitch people, change its shape and serve the gods. When people today speak of kitsune as yokai, they mean this second, supernatural fox, but the line between the animal at the edge of the rice field and the spirit in the story was never sharply drawn.

That double nature explains why the kitsune is so hard to pin down. In one tale it is a loving wife and mother; in another it leads a drunk traveller into a ditch; in a third it is the honoured messenger of a major Shinto deity. Folklorists usually sort these roles into two broad camps. Benevolent foxes, sometimes called zenko, are linked with the deity Inari. Wild or field foxes, called yako or nogitsune, are the troublemakers of village lore. Both kinds are kitsune, and much of their appeal lies in never knowing which one you have met.

Appearance and powers

The defining power of the kitsune is transformation. Foxes in Japanese stories take human form, most famously as beautiful young women, but also as monks, old men, relatives of the person they mean to deceive, or even inanimate things such as trees. In the classical kyōgen comedy Tsurigitsune ("Fox Trapping"), an old fox disguises itself as a hunter's uncle, a priest named Hakuzōsu, to talk him out of setting traps; actors play the part in a special fox mask.

Kitsune were also credited with illusions of every kind. Village stories describe foxes that made people see a warm bath where there was really a cesspit, or serve horse dung that looked like rice cakes. Glowing lights in the night fields were called kitsunebi, "fox fire," and were said to lure travellers off the path. A rain shower that falls while the sun is shining is still known in Japanese as kitsune no yomeiri, "the fox's wedding," as if a fox bridal procession were passing unseen.

The idea that a fox's power grows with age, and that the oldest foxes have many tails, came to Japan from Chinese fox lore. Chinese accounts describe a fox that can take human shape at fifty years and becomes a "heavenly fox" after a thousand years, and the nine-tailed fox appears in early Chinese classics. Japanese tradition took up the image: some stories say a fox gains a tail with each century of life, and the nine-tailed fox became the mark of the most ancient and dangerous of them all.

The darkest power attributed to foxes was possession, kitsunetsuki. Stories of people seized by fox spirits are attested from the Heian period, and the Nihon ryōiki fox wife may be an early example of the idea. The Kokugakuin University Encyclopedia of Shinto notes that foxes were believed both to deliver oracles and to haunt households, which gave rise to shamanic practitioners known as kitsune tsukai, "fox handlers."

Origins and history

Foxes enter the Japanese written record very early. The Nihon Shoki, completed in 720, records foxes as omens: a white fox reported from Iwami Province in 657, and in 659 a fox that snatched a vine from a labourer's hand, read afterwards as one of the signs that Empress Saimei was about to die.

The first true fox story comes in the Nihon ryōiki, a collection of Buddhist tales compiled in the early ninth century. In it, a man from Mino Province marries a beautiful woman who bears him a son. The family dog hates her, and one day it frightens her into revealing her true form as a fox. Her husband tells her that since they share a child, she should keep coming back to sleep with him, and the tale explains that this is why the animal is called kitsune: read one way, the word suggests "come and sleep." This is a folk etymology, not real linguistic history, but it shows how early the fox wife became a Japanese story type.

From the Heian period onward, fox tales multiply. The great twelfth-century anthology Konjaku monogatarishū includes foxes that disguise themselves and pay for it, and a fox that repays a man for returning a jewel it had lost. By the medieval period the fox had also become bound up with the cult of Inari.

Kitsune and Inari

Inari is one of the most widely worshipped deities in Japan. Fushimi Inari Taisha in Kyoto, the head shrine, dates its enshrinement of Inari Ōkami to 711, and counts around thirty thousand Inari shrines across the country. Inari is above all a deity of rice and harvests, later also of commerce and household prosperity.

The fox is Inari's messenger, not Inari itself. The Encyclopedia of Shinto explains several threads that tied the two together: the folk belief that the mountain deity was led down to the rice paddies in spring by a fox; places where the deity was welcomed being known as "fox mounds"; and a play on words, since one of the food deities associated with Inari, Miketsu-no-kami, sounds like "three fox gods." At Fushimi, a subsidiary shrine called Myōbusha (or Byakkosha) honours fox spirits directly. This is why pairs of stone foxes guard Inari shrines all over Japan, and why the white fox in particular is a good omen. Shinto and Buddhist priests have long discouraged identifying the deity with the fox, but popular devotion has always blurred them.

Famous legends

Tamamo-no-Mae. The most notorious kitsune is the court beauty Tamamo-no-Mae, whose story took shape in medieval tales. Many retellings set her at the court of the retired Emperor Toba in the twelfth century, while the Muromachi-period prose versions name Emperor Konoe. She dazzles the court with her learning and beauty until the emperor falls gravely ill; a court diviner, named in the tales as Abe no Yasuchika, unmasks her as a fox with nine tails. She flees to the plain of Nasu, where warriors sent by the emperor hunt her down, and her spirit passes into a poisonous boulder called the Sesshō-seki, "killing stone." The rock still stands near the hot springs of Nasu in Tochigi Prefecture. In March 2022 it was found split in two; local officials put the break down to rain and freezing temperatures working on old cracks.

Kuzunoha, mother of Abe no Seimei. The celebrated court diviner Abe no Seimei was a real tenth-century figure, but legend gave him a fox for a mother. In this story a white fox, rescued from hunters by a man named Abe no Yasuna, returns in the form of a woman called Kuzunoha, marries him and bears his son. When her nature is discovered she leaves, writing a farewell poem that tells her family to seek her in the Shinoda forest. The earliest known version appears in a book printed in 1662, and the tale was later staged as the puppet play Ashiya Dōman ōuchi kagami (1734).

The fox of Yoshitsune Senbon Zakura. In this puppet-theatre classic, first staged in Osaka in 1747 and adapted for kabuki the following year, a young fox takes the shape of Satō Tadanobu, one of the warrior Yoshitsune's retainers, in order to stay close to a drum made from the skins of his fox parents. When the deception is exposed, his devotion moves Yoshitsune to give him the drum, along with the name Genkurō.

In art and popular culture

Foxes run through Japanese art, from Noh and kyōgen masks to woodblock prints. One of the best known is Utagawa Hiroshige's New Year's Eve Foxfires at the Changing Tree, Ōji (1857), from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. It illustrates a local legend that on the last night of the year foxes from the surrounding provinces gathered at a tree near Ōji Inari Shrine, and that farmers read the coming harvest from their fires.

In modern popular culture the nine-tailed fox is everywhere. Kurama, the nine-tailed fox sealed inside the hero of the manga Naruto, is probably the most widely known example. Akira Kurosawa's 1990 film Dreams opens with a boy who spies on a foxes' wedding procession in the rain.