Kitsune

The story

In Kyoto, on a hillside, there is a path that seems to go on for ever.

It is covered by thousands of red gates, the torii, one after another, so close together that the light comes through in stripes. You walk through a tunnel of orange wood, and all you can hear is the sound of your own footsteps. At every bend, on either side of the path, a stone fox watches the people going by. Some hold a key in their mouths. Others a jewel.

This is the shrine of Fushimi Inari, and the foxes are the messengers of Inari, the deity of rice. But in Japan people say that foxes are not only messengers.

They say that as a fox grows old it grows wiser, and that over time it grows an extra tail. The oldest have nine. They are called kitsune, and they can change their shape: into a traveller, a monk, a girl with long hair. At night they light little flames along the paths, flames that give no warmth. If they feel like it, they turn leaves into coins. Some do it as a joke, and the next morning somebody finds their pockets full of dry leaves. Others do it to help.

In the villages, when it rains while the sun is still shining, farmers say that somewhere a fox wedding is taking place, with a procession of lanterns that nobody must look at. People also say that a kitsune is never completely bad and never completely good, like the wind: it depends on how you treat it.

One of the oldest stories is written in a ninth-century book, the Nihon ryōiki. It does not end badly. But it does not end quite happily either.

There was once a man, in the province of Mino, who was looking for a wife.

One evening at the end of summer he was riding across a wide plain. The grass was tall and the wind bent it all the same way, with a long rustle, as if the plain were breathing. There was nobody about. Then, in the middle of the road, a woman appeared.

She was beautiful. She was alone, and that was strange. She had no bag, no umbrella and no travelling companion. She looked at him and smiled as if she had been waiting for him for a long time.

“Where are you going at this hour?” she said.

“I'm looking for a wife,” the man answered, half joking.

“Then perhaps you need look no further,” she said.

They married. Nobody knows what his relatives thought, or whether anyone found it odd that the woman never spoke about her family. What we do know is that they were happy. The house always smelt of freshly cooked rice, and she had a special grace in the way she moved, light and silent, as if she were walking on tiptoe. The next year a baby boy was born.

In the same house, on the same day, a puppy was born too.

It was the puppy who spoiled everything. As he grew, he began to growl at the wife. Every time she came into the room, he flattened his ears and bared his teeth. She would turn pale. “Kill it,” she would whisper to her husband. But the man could not bring himself to do it, and the dog stayed.

Then came the day of the rice.

It was late autumn. The woman was pounding rice in the mortar for the women of the house, and the pestle beat out a rhythm: thump, thump, thump. The dog was asleep in the doorway. Suddenly he got up, came into the room and barked with all the voice he had.

The woman spun round. And in that moment she was no longer a woman.

Her robe slid to the floor. Her hands became paws, her face grew long, and out of the bottom of the robe came a red fox with wide, staring eyes. The fox leapt up onto a beam, then onto a fence in the yard, and stayed there, trembling, looking at the man. The dog was still barking. The whole household had come out to see.

The man did not shout. He did not pick up a stick. He looked at the fox on the fence and thought: that is the mother of my son.

“There is a child between us,” he said. He spoke softly, so that she would not run away. “I cannot forget you. Come here and sleep with me. Every night, whenever you like.”

The fox looked at him for a long time. The wind stirred the red fur on the fence, and for a moment it seemed she would run off towards the fields, towards the tall grass, towards the plain where he had met her. The dog had fallen silent. Nobody in the yard dared to breathe.

Then the fox climbed down from the fence.

From that day on, the woman came back every evening. She arrived at dusk, when the lamps were lit, and came into the house as a woman; and every morning, when the sky began to grow pale, she was gone. People say that this habit gave its name to all the foxes of Japan: kitsune, which can be read as “come and sleep”, or as “always comes”.

The boy grew up, and he grew up strong. They say he was so fast and so sturdy that no one could match him, and he was called Mino Kitsune, the Fox of Mino. His descendants too, for many generations, were remembered for their strength.

The tale in the book ends there. It does not say what the husband thought on the evenings when his house filled, once again, with that gentle presence. It does not say whether, now and then, the fox wife lingered on the doorstep a moment longer, listening to her son's footsteps in the room.

It does not say, and perhaps that is why people still love the story.

At Fushimi Inari in the evening, when the pilgrims have gone home and the torii turn almost black, anyone who stops to listen may hear a rustle among the trees. It may be the wind. It may be a fox passing by, a messenger of Inari returning to her shrine.

Or else, the old people say, a mother on her way home to sleep.