What Is a Kitsune? Shrine Messenger, Fox Wife and Possession Belief

Lafcadio Hearn, walking through the Izumo of the 1890s, noticed that about nine in ten stone foxes had a broken nose. He asked a friend why. The friend answered with one word: children. Those foxes stood at small shrines of a rice kami, their backs green with moss. Yet the same country told another kind of tale, about a fox that takes a woman's shape, lights false lanterns on a dark road, or enters a person and speaks from inside. Two traditions share one animal. This page separates them and asks where each record comes from.

The messenger and the kami

Start at the shrine. Fushimi Inari Taisha in Kyoto answers the question on its own FAQ page: foxes are said to be messengers of Inari Okami, but they are not the foxes seen in the mountains. Like the kami, these messengers cannot be seen, and they are called white foxes. The page adds that this does not mean Inari Okami is a fox.

The Encyclopedia of Shinto fills in the history. It counts more than 30,000 shrines devoted to Inari, and it says that one name of a food kami sounded like the characters for "three fox kami," which in effect brought fox kami into being. Hearn, writing in 1894, makes the same point from the other side: the old mythology is explicit about the spirit of food and silent about foxes. A shrine fox is a servant at a kami's door. It is not the kami.

Earliest records

What kind of source is this?

The first row is a silence, and silence is evidence. Kagawa Masanobu, a folklorist who writes for Nippon.com, points out that Japan's oldest writing has almost nothing on foxes, and that fox legends came from China with Buddhism. Hearn also gives the origin as Chinese. The tale collection of about 822 is a set of Buddhist parables, so its stories were chosen to make a point. Sources disagree on whether it dates to 822 or 823.

Hearn's own date is a caution. He thought the fox as a supernatural being was probably not known in Japan before the tenth or eleventh century. A book from about 822 contradicts him.

Hearn also admits the muddle. He lists several kinds of fox, among them the Inari fox, the wild fox and the "man-fox" of possession, then says that one cannot unravel the confusion of these beliefs, which vary from district to district. He quotes a letter, said to be kept at Todaiji in Nara, in which Hideyoshi complains to Inari that one of the kami's foxes has bewitched a servant. We did not see that letter, so it stays Hearn's report. If it is genuine, even a ruler of the sixteenth century treated the shrine fox and the troublemaking fox as one. We did not read the Nihon Ryoiki itself. What we say about it comes from Kagawa and a general survey.

A wife who was a fox

The earliest fox-wife tale is set in Mino Province. A man marries a woman who bears him a child, but the household dog keeps harassing her, and one day, frightened, she turns back into a fox. The survey we read adds that the story offers a folk explanation of the word kitsune as "come and sleep," and that the child is said to be the ancestor of a family named Kitsune-no-atae. It is a story about a marriage, not a monster.

The tale type lasted. Kagawa notes that in early tellings of the legend of Tamamo no Mae, the fox-woman had two tails. The nine tails date only to the Edo period, after a Chinese story entered Japan. He adds that the fork-tailed cats called nekomata, a tradition touched on in the Bakeneko article, seem to have influenced the legend.

Tales of this kind survived into the folklorists' notebooks. In Yanagita's Tono Monogatari of 1910, entry 60 follows a hunter in a pheasant hide. A fox keeps chasing the birds, the hunter aims, the fox looks back unbothered, and the gun will not fire. When he checks it, the barrel is packed with earth from muzzle to grip.

Foxes also light the night. Kagawa explains that the phrase "fox wedding" for a sun shower was first tied to glowing lights seen far off in the mountains.

Possession and its cost

A darker strand is fox possession. The Encyclopedia of Shinto describes a spirit that attaches itself to a person without consent, usually blamed for disaster, and lists foxes among the animals involved. It adds that families said to hold such spirits were shunned, so that the belief worked as social exclusion. Hearn saw this in Izumo. Families believed to keep foxes could not easily marry, and a possessed person might be beaten or burned by relatives before a mountain ascetic was called to argue with the spirit.

This is the part of the tradition that did real harm. Read these records as testimony about fear, not as quaint color.

How to tell the shrine fox from the story fox

• Ask where it stands. A stone fox at a gate marks a shrine of Inari. A fox met on a road in a tale belongs to narrative.
• Ask what it does. A messenger belongs to worship. A fox wife or a false lantern belongs to folk narrative.
• Ask who wrote it. A parable in a Buddhist collection, a literary scroll and a traveler's notes serve different purposes.
• Ask whether a living group is affected. For possession, the answer is often yes.

Common mix-ups about the kitsune

• "Inari is a fox." Fushimi Inari Taisha says it is not.
• "Nine tails are ancient." In the legend of Tamamo no Mae, Kagawa dates them to the Edo period.
• "The oldest books are full of foxes." The Kojiki and Nihon Shoki barely mention them.
• "Fox possession was harmless folklore." Beliefs about it shunned families and led to cruelty, according to the Encyclopedia of Shinto and Hearn.