Bloody Gumiho

The gumiho (구미호, «nine-tailed fox») is, in Korean folklore, the fox that after living many years learns to take human shape. Not all of them hold that shape. Alongside the figures who pass for a maiden, for the lady of a noble house or for a village shaman, the older collections preserve the fox that never stopped being a predator, and this one is known not by its face but by the damage it leaves. Homer Hulbert noted in 1906 that the fox was the most detested animal in Korea and that the country was full of stories of people who turned out to be foxes in human form. James Gale, in 1913, counts it among the long-lived creatures credited with special states. The tale that fixes this version best is that of the fox sister: a couple without daughters prays for one, the daughter born to them goes down to the byre every night, and the brothers who tell what they have seen are thrown out of the house precisely for telling it.

Its mark is not seduction but slaughter at home. In the tale of the fox sister the creature goes into the byre at night and kills the cattle by reaching in to tear out their livers, so that at dawn the animals are found dead with no visible wound to explain it. The same tradition credits it with digging up the recently buried: the fox that prowls the burial mounds and roots in the loose earth is a fixed image of the Korean countryside, and from it come very concrete precautions, such as tamping down graves, covering them with stone and watching over them for the first days. It keeps human shape as long as nobody puts it to the test, and holds it above all inside its own house, where kinship works as an alibi and where suspicion falls sooner on the accuser than on it. When it is finally uncovered, the shape gives way and the animal remains.

What gives it away is not an emblem but a trail. Cattle dead with no blood spilled, earth disturbed over a fresh grave and, above all, the animals of the household: tradition insists that dogs know it before people do and refuse to enter where it is. In the tales the discovery always comes at a slant, because someone follows it by night or tells what they saw and is not believed, and that disbelief is as much part of the story as the creature. All this should be told apart from what twentieth-century fiction has added: the tally of human livers needed to complete a transformation, the tails visible only in spiritual sight and the pearl devoured in an act of self-corruption do not appear in the older collections, however often they are repeated today in film and television.