Kitsune Yakō

In Japanese folklore the kitsune (狐) is the fox endowed with intelligence and supernatural power, and tradition sorts it into two opposed classes: the zenko (善狐), the good foxes attached to the deity Inari, and the yako or nogitsune (野狐), the field or wild foxes, mischievous and at times harmful. The distinction deserves care, because this is where popular accounts go wrong: in the Japanese sources those two classes are opposed moral categories, not two stages of one animal. What is attested as a progression is age. A fox that lives long enough gains powers and tails, and the Zen'an zuihitsu arranged that reckoning into ranks in the nineteenth century. The yakō stands at the beginning of the count: the ordinary fox that after many years begins to shapeshift on its own, with no discipline and no divine patron. Unlike the Chinese huli-jing and the Korean gumiho, which are predominantly female, the kitsune may take either sex. The collections that preserve it (the Konjaku Monogatari of the twelfth century, Yanagita Kunio's Tōno Monogatari of 1910) place it above all in the countryside: rice paddies, night roads and mountain villages.

The yakō can take human shape, though something almost always gives it away: a tail under the clothes, a shadow that does not match, the reflection in water. Two powers define it in folklore. The kitsune-bi (狐火), the fox fire, is the light that appears in a row over the fields at night and leads travellers astray. The kitsune-tsuki (狐憑き), the possession, is the better documented of the two: the possessed person's voice and temper change, and a sudden hunger comes over them for aburaage, the fried tofu that is the foxes' favoured offering. The village accounts Lafcadio Hearn gathered in Izumo treat kitsune-tsuki as a real affliction, met with offerings and with exorcisms at the shrines of Inari. Beyond that the yakō deceives with illusions and with dreams, acts on opportunity rather than on plan, and runs once it is found out: it is not an adversary that stands its ground, but one that vanishes.

On the ladder this catalogue models, the yakō is the first form, out of which may come in time the myōbu in Inari's service or the celestial tenkō that rises on its own. The caveat of the first section holds here too: the ladder orders the archetype, but no source narrates a particular fox climbing all three rungs. It belongs to the same family as the Chinese huli-jing and the Korean gumiho, with which it shares the motif of the fox that becomes a person, and it keeps what is properly Japanese: the bond with Inari, the kitsune-bi and the kitsune-tsuki. Against Tamamo-no-Mae, who is an individual with a name and a life story, the yakō is nobody in particular: it is the whole class of the field foxes, the untamed nature of the animal before any elevation.