Kitsune is a shapeshifting trickster fox woman from Japanese folklore whose character and personality resembles the crafty, playful, elusive, clever fox from the wild. She is a type of yōkai, a class of magical creature with paranormal powers. She often has two different sides: sometimes she is a benevolent deity associated with the gift of the rice harvest, while at other times, Kitsune is depicted as a demon or ghoul-like mischievous trickster who questions traditional female gender roles, seducing men in plots that frequently end in tragedy or bloodshed.
This playful Fox Woman character weaves her way throughout Asia and is known as Kumiho in Korea, Hồ Ly Tinh or Cáo Chín Đuôi (nine-tailed fox) in Vietnam, and Huli Jing in China. Variations on the Fox Woman theme and story also show up in folklore from Ireland as Sionnach Sidhe (a seductive fox fairy with ginger red hair who is fox by night and woman by day) and in Scandinavia she can show up as a Huldra, a supernatural creature and keeper of the forest who is a female from the front, but with a fox tail from the back. In Finland she makes her way across the sky leaving behind a luminous* trail, also known as the northern lights, referred to in Finnish as Revontulet translated as “Fox Fire”. Among the Inuit of Labrador, Canada, she shows up as a Fox Wife. Though each of these landscapes has its own unique version of the Fox Woman story, what ties them all together is some combination of the following qualities: the ambiguity of her shifting identity between human and fox; her supernatural qualities; her power; her association with nature and the wild; her sexually seductive behavior and her sometimes androgynous identity.
A handmade linocut inspired by Kitsune, a shapeshifting trickster fox woman from Japanese folklore whose character and personality resembles the crafty, playful, elusive, clever fox from the wild.
Martin Shaw, legendary storyteller and mythologist, tells a touching and positive version of Fox Woman on YouTube which I highly recommend (I believe he tells the Labrador Inuit version of this myth) which is about a lonely hunter who returns to his cabin in the woods to find Fox Woman preparing him a meal. The story is about his attraction to her human side and his desire for her to be his human wife, but his disdain for the scent of her fox tail and his insistence that she leave her tail outside the house. She tells him she doesn’t come without a tail, that to love her he must embrace and welcome all of her into his home. But he refuses and the next day he wakes up and she is gone, along with her tail and there is no trace of her scent. He lives the remaining days of his life longing for her, regretting his actions, and having gained the wisdom that comes from this loss.
This tale of Fox Woman is a journey of self-discovery and transformation for the human hunter who realizes his mistake and is humbled. Fox Woman shifts her role from object to subject when she teaches us the consequences of demanding that a loved one sacrifice an aspect of themselves in order to be loved. Through her choice to leave her lover, the hunter, she reminds us to honor our complexities and stay loyal to our true nature, suggesting that wild, like us, is complex and flawed, courageous and vulnerable, and requires the same kind of work as an intimate relationship with any human being. In a world where hunters often have the upper hand over their prey, a story that suggests that a fox is able to outwit or teach a hunter is an affirmation of the wisdom of the wild, that humans are not above the wild but in partnership with and always learning from her. Ultimately in this story Fox Woman asks us to reconsider whether the wild is really outside our cabin or already deeply within us. Because the wild is synonymous with a woman, the folktale reveals a culture invested in honoring both women and the wild as wisdom keepers.
Japanese Kitsune statue. Photo Credit: Diana Bondarenko on Unsplash
What we see in this Fox Woman folktale is that she is clearly a Trickster, a character in myth and folktales who plays the role of the deviant disruptor, boundary-crosser, occupying two or more different worlds and who questions the order of things through mischief, playfulness, wit, deception, bewitchment, and defiance of authority. In the variation of the Fox Woman folktale described above this behavior is purposefully used to move other characters in the story to a deeper understanding about themselves, and in so doing, to inspire listeners to reach a new level of awareness as well.
In some other variations of the Fox Woman folktale, Fox Woman is similar to the witch in folklore, marginalized and demonized precisely because of these trickster characteristics and the power she wields because of them. In Vietnam, for instance, Fox Woman is known as Hồ Ly Tinh or Cáo Chín Đuôi. Unlike the Inuit tale where Fox Woman is a mysterious wise elusive teacher, the Vietnamese Fox Woman is sinister and the folktale about her more akin to a horror story. Hồ Ly Tinh does not enter into the home of the hunter, but is outcast to a cave on the edges of society. She deceives villagers by appearing as a beautiful woman who tricks innocent passers by in order to devour them. Unlike the Inuit version where the main male character is humbled and learns some wisdom from Fox Woman, in this Vietnamese tale, the hunter is Lạc Long Quân, the mythical Dragon King and heroic father of the Vietnamese people, who enters her lair and kills Fox Woman and everyone lives happily ever after.
Photo above: Carving the block of artist’s linoleum to reveal an image of Fox Woman in my imagination; Photo below: the finished carving with black ink applied right before printing.
Perhaps Fox Woman was demonized and outcast to a cave and killed in this Vietnamese folktale because sexually autonomous women did not conform to Confucian roles for women at the time of its telling. The name Hồ Ly Tinh sounds very similar to the Chinese Fox Woman Huli Jing and presumably the folktale of Fox Woman came to Vietnam with Chinese colonization which brought Confucian patriarchal norms. (Prior to the Chinese influence, indigenous Vietnam was matriarchal and ancient Vietnamese folktales, songs, and poems that originated during this pre-Chinese time period reveal that Vietnamese women had a lot more social power and sexual autonomy before they were influenced by the Chinese)**. Whenever there are rigidly defined boundaries, where things are kept in perfect order, there are going to be characters, ideas and things that are not so easily compartmentalized and the degree to which these characters are marginalized, threatened, or killed reveals the degree to which variation from this norm is prohibited. A story where a trickster like Fox Woman is killed reveals a cultural climate where people are not open to learning the wisdom of a shapeshifting in-between character who inhabits multiple worlds. Trickster becomes all the more threatening because she embodies what is being actively suppressed, questions the rigidity of the social order, which explains why her death is celebrated.
This particular variation of Fox Woman reveals the constraints and oppressions of the society from which the story emerges. However, precisely for this reason, Tricksters are medicine because they direct our attention to the wound, and if we allow them to do what they do best, they may help us heal what is hurting. Existing safely within the confines of a fictional story, Tricksters provide a safe place to play around with and subvert social rules and in doing so they invite reflection on these rules and beliefs, ultimately fostering a sense of critical inquiry. Trickster characters express alternative modes of being outside the norms without real consequences, sparking curiosity and creativity, fostering a spirit of adaptability and innovation. In this way Tricksters play a vital role inspiring social transformation, by allowing for the tension between the need for order and its reinvention.
A haunting novel by bestselling novelist Yangtze Choo featuring Fox Woman set at the dawn of the 20th century Manchuria, China. In an interview with Publisher’s Weekly (Dec 1. 2023) about her creative process, Choo says, “The beginning of the novel is the archetypal fox story—someone comes knocking at your door, and you open it. I was always interested in the other side of the door.” Choo offers us the riveting, spellbinding world of Fox Woman behind that door written in a shapeshifting blend of historical fiction, detective horror, magical realism and folklore . . .a story of love and loss that is as crafty as Fox Woman herself!
Sharon Blackie, mythologist and Jungian psychologist, provides a deeply touching version of Fox Woman in her book Foxfire, Wolfskin and other stories of Shapeshifting Women that shows the powerful role Tricksters can play in self-reinvention:
“I didn’t just love the fox, you see - I wanted to be her. Longed for it, as I had never longed for anything in my life. To be sleek and fast; to be beautiful and fierce, feral and unconstrained. To run wherever I wanted to run, to make my dark home in the belly of the fecund earth, to hunt at dawn in the wildness of a moonlit wood. . . . I wasn’t naive, though: I knew it was a hard life. The winters were cold, and food was scarce. There was always the threat of a farmer’s gun, the fear of a hunting dog, or an iron trap to break and tear. But some chances must be taken, if you want to live fully. She lived fully, my fox, and I envied her with all my heart. I wanted to dance with her, sister or lover, across the snow-clad vastness of this land”.
Blackie captures why Fox Woman is so captivating and compelling for her. Fully embodying the wild inside her, Fox Woman as Blackie describes her, shows us a more authentic way she wishes she could be.
Whether you call her Kitsune, Kumiho, Huli Jing, Cáo Chín Đuôi, Revontulet, Sionnach Sidhe, Huldra or Fox Wife, reflecting on this timeless enduring folktale we can ask ourselves a question central to our contemporary moment which is: who in society plays the role of the Trickster Fox Woman for us today? Do we love her, or do we demonize her? Fox Woman, is as much about the power of telling marginal, hidden, forbidden and/or suppressed stories as it is about how we might integrate, embrace and welcome Fox Woman into our lives, love her instead of hunting her, and allow her wisdom to grow us into larger versions of ourselves.
Lewis Hyde, in his book Trickster Makes This World offers us insight into this profoundly impactful role Trickster has in our lives: “The old myths say that the trickster made the world as it actually is. Other gods set out to create a world more perfect and ideal, but this world, with its complexity and ambiguity, its beauty and its dirt, was trickster’s creation, and the work is not yet finished”. Hyde beautifully reminds us how we might give credit to law makers, activists and social movements for transforming our world for the better. . . but the catalyst and change-maker we often forget is the mischievous, clever, shapeshifting Fox Woman secretly smiling in the shadows.
Notes:
*In many stories around the world, Fox Woman is associated with a luminous silvery white and blue hue, and in Japan this is the quality of the mysterious trail Kitsune leaves behind as she weaves her way through the landscape, while in Vietnam and China, her entire body emanates a similar silvery white luminous quality.
**Chinese colonization significantly impacted the societal roles of indigenous Vietnamese women, often relegating them to subservient positions which is mirrored in the literature and folklore of the time, where women are depicted as obedient figures and symbols of virtue with unwavering loyalty to their fathers, husbands, and ancestors. This greatly diverges from the more ancient, indigenous beloved Vietnamese folktale of the Dragon and Crane, for example, which celebrates the union of the Dragon and Crane, two lovers whose many children become the Vietnamese people. The lovers eventually part ways and share their children equally between themselves reflecting romantic and individual freedoms unheard of during the later Confucian periods.
Blog Post cover image credit: Tomas Malik on Pexels
References:
Duong, Wendy N. (2001). Gender Equality and Women's Issues in Vietnam: The Vietnamese Woman—Warrior and Poet, 10 Pac. Rim L & Pol'y J. 191 Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.uw.edu/wilj/vol10/iss2/2
Groot, Kirsten (2020). The Japanese Fox: Sustaining or Subverting the Negative View of Women. Available at: https://kirstengroot.com/en/articles/
Kincaid, Christopher. (2015). Come and Sleep: The Folklore of the Japanese Fox. Createspace Independent Publishing Platform.
Matsuura, Thersa (2024). The Book of Japanese Folklore: An Encyclopedia of the Spirits, Monsters, and Yōkai of Japanese Myth. Adams Media.
Shaw, Martin Fox Woman (Shot 2, 2020) “Martin Shaw: The Hunter and the Fox Woman”, Youtube Video available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YI8TTkT8dI
Thompson, Stith (1966). Tales of the North American Indians. Indiana University Press
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