The household of Hanlin Academician Dong was troubled by fox-spirits. Tiles, pebbles, and brick shards were liable to fly around the house like hailstones at any moment, and his family and household were forever having to take shelter and wait for the disturbances to abate before they dared carry on with their daily duties. Dong himself was so affected by this state of affairs that he rented a residence belonging to Under-Secretary Sun, and moved there to avoid his troubles. But the fox-spirits merely followed him.
Pu Songling, “Scorched Moth the Taoist.” Translated by John Minford.
I.
Clefairy and Clefable, the previous Pokémon I covered, are multicultural hybrids, reflecting the influences of fairies, the moon rabbit, aliens and other sources from various times and places. Vulpix and especially its evolution Ninetales, on the other hand, come from just one source, the Japanese yokai known as the kitsune. Just as Charizard represents a direct translation of the western dragon into the Pokémon world, Vulpix and Ninetales are child-friendly versions of that ancient and enduring creature.
Pokédex entries on Vulpix and Ninetales make this mythical connection clear. When Brock acquires a Vulpix in the anime’s 28th episode, Ash’s Pokédex informs him — and the viewer — that Vulpix “uses powerful flame attacks” and that it grows more tails as it evolves. Similarly, each of the Red and Blue, Yellow and Pokémon Stadium Pokédex entries mention the creature growing more tails as it gets older.
The Red and Blue Pokédex describes Vulpix’s evolved form Ninetales as “smart and vengeful,” warning that “grabbing one of its many tails could result in a 1,000 year curse.” The Yellow Pokédex does not go into the creature’s appearance or habitat but instead notes that “according to an enduring legend, 9 noble saints were united and reincarnated as this Pokémon.”
Finally, the Pokémon Silver Pokédex entry reads as follows: “its nine beautiful tails are filled with a wondrous energy that could keep it alive for 1,000 years.”
In sum, then, these fox creatures have an arsenal of strange powers and abilities, even for Pokémon: pyrokinesis, cunning, long lifespans, shapeshifting, the ability to curse. This constellation of abilities points to neither an obvious analogue in western mythology nor a two-word high concept like so many other Pokémon, like “electric mouse” or “rock snake” or “water turtle.” Instead, they point back across the centuries to one of the most long-lived and multifaceted characters in east Asian mythology.
Perhaps the best place to start is with the fox itself, specifically the red fox (Vulpes vulpes), which is native to Europe, the Middle East, central and eastern Asia and North America. One of the world’s most widespread mammal species, red foxes have interacted with humans for millennia. Hunted then as now for their fur, the fox’s incredible ability to evade its hunters impressed cultures across the world, transforming it into a fairly universal trickster archetype. Sometimes we still say “crazy like a fox” or “outfoxed.”
Like coyotes in North America, foxes have the intelligence and adaptability to not just survive but thrive in an increasingly urbanized world. Thus, as with the mouse, millennia of close proximity between humans and foxes have given the latter a starring role in the folklores of many cultures. Aesop’s fables, for instance, abound with foxes who often prove too clever for their own good. While this post will of course focus on the kitsune and its direct ancestors in Chinese mythology, it is important to note that foxes are one of the most widespread animals in world mythology, from Native American tribes to Ireland to the Arab world to Korea.
“Their favorite haunts,” Jonathan Guthrie writes in a Financial Times article on 21st century urban foxes, “are places we visit little — neglected gardens, cemeteries and railway embankments. These fastnesses are connected by routes through streets safest in the early morning, when humans are scarce and traffic is light.”
Raluca Nicolae makes a similar point in a 2008 Journal of Ethnography and Folklore article:
The fox (kitsune) is both an animal in nature and a bakemono, or ‘transforming thing.’ Once very common throughout Japan, foxes were nevertheless seldom seen since they moved at night; dead birds, broken fences and chicken’s blood were the only evidence of their nocturnal passages. It may have been the difficulty of seeing a fox, or of keeping it in view for any period of time, which led to the notion that they undergo actual physical shift.
Across the world, then, foxes live in liminal spaces and come out at liminal times. Nocturnal creatures whose worlds only intersect with ours at dawn and dusk, in close proximity to humans but rarely seen, evasive, simultaneously wild and urban, inhabitants of overgrown and abandoned places, constantly slipping across the border between the human world and the natural world, foxes seem like perfect candidates to become not just tricksters but ghostly shapeshifters in mythology.
II.
I began this post with a passage from a story by Pu Songling (1640-1715), whose book Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (Liaozhai), praised by Borges, continues to inspire Chinese, Taiwanese and Hong Kong film and tv adaptations, notably A Touch of Zen (1971), Painted Skin (1992 and 2008) and the Chinese Ghost Story series. In 2016, China’s Hunan TV broadcast Legend of Nine Tails Fox, a series inspired by the strange, shapeshifting fox-spirits that appear in many of the Strange Tales.
The story I quoted, “Scorched Moth the Taoist,” ends with an exorcism performed by the title character. He confronts a “huge fox crouching on the ground” that possesses the family maid and casts it out, leaving the maid unconscious.
All of a sudden they saw four or five lumps of some strange substance go bouncing like balls one after the other along the eaves of the building, until they were all gone. Then peace finally reigned in the Dong household.
By the time Pu Songling wrote this story, mischievous, supernatural foxes had haunted Chinese culture for approximately two millennia.
They first appeared in a book I mentioned in the introduction to this series, the often-copied and often-illustrated Guideways Through Mountains and Seas (4th century BC—1st century AD), an ur-encyclopedia of strange creatures and other phenomena perhaps best described as east Asia’s bestiary.
As the title suggests, this book is a travel guide, and multiple sections warn the ancient Chinese traveler about the dangerous, supernatural foxes he or she might encounter in the wilderness. Green-Hills Mountain, for instance, is inhabited “by a beast whose form resembles a fox with nine tails.” This beast “makes a sound like a baby and is a man-eater.” Similarly, Beautiful Duck-Mountain is also inhabited by a man-eating nine-tailed fox that makes a sound like a baby; its fox-beast is distinguished by also having nine heads. A winged fox that resides on Mount Gufeng is an omen of great drought, while a finned fox residing on Shining Mountain “is an omen of panic in the state.” (All quotes are from Richard E. Strassberg’s abridged translation, A Chinese Bestiary: Strange Creatures from the Guideways Through Mountains and Seas.)
The central image of the Guideways Through Mountains and Seas fox-creature — a deceptive creature that lures in travelers with a baby’s cry and then eats them — both sets the stage for the creature’s Chinese, Korean and Japanese descendants and resonates with western fox folklore. The following image from the Rochester Bestiary illustrates the medieval bestiary narrative of foxes playing dead to lure and then devour birds, an allegory for the devil’s deceit. Both ancient Chinese and medieval Europeans, in other words, observed foxes’ natural intelligence and embellished it into a trickster to be wary of.
Beginning at this somewhat similar point, the western and eastern folkloric foxes evolved in completely different directions. The medieval European cycle of beast fables/satirical mock-epics featuring Reynard the Fox so defined the animal’s place in culture that the French word for fox remains le renard. Reynard and his progeny are mischievous, lovable rogues, picaresque heroes that live by their wits. After a Disney adaptation of the Reynard cycle died in development hell in the 1960s, the animators reused the title character’s design in Robin Hood (1973) because the fox archetype so perfectly matches that of Robin Hood. Think of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox (or Wes Anderson’s), or Dr. Seuss’s Fox in Sox. (Devious foxes have also survived in modern pop culture: Br’er Fox in African American folktales, ‘Honest John’ in Pinocchio, foxes in any cartoon adaptation of Aesop’s fables.)
In east Asia, on the other hand, the fox became a seductress, a femme fatale. As Colette Balmain writes in an article on the Asian gothic aesthetic, one common term for this creature, huli jing, combines the characters for ‘fox’ and ‘life essence’ and “is nearly always used in relation to female foxes and means ‘the enchantment of a female beauty and her power for lustful destruction.’” The Tang Dynasty poet Bai Juyi (772–846), for instance, wrote an influential poem titled “The Old Gray Fox,” which describes the fox’s shapeshifting into human form. Here is the first stanza, in Jordan Alexander Gwyther’s translation:
The old grave fox, bewitching and ancient. It transforms into a woman with a countenance so fine. Hoar changed into cloudy loops. Face changed with made-up cheeks. A great long tail dragging behind is made into a long red skirt. Slowly she walks alongside the deserted village road. About in dusk's hour, in a quiet place with no people around. Whether she sings, whether she dances, or whether she sadly wails, jade eyebrows not raised, a flowery face held low.
The best western analogues of these creatures (also known as nine-tailed foxes or jiǔwěihú) are seductive shapeshifters such as vampires or lamia, or the female demons known as succubi. (The western world does share some of this fox symbolism, perhaps most notably in the word ‘vixen,’ Jimi Hendrix’s song “Foxy Lady,” The Doors’ “Twentieth Century Fox” and Pam Grier’s titular blaxploitation heroine in Foxy Brown (1974); “sexually attractive” is one definition of this word in the Cambridge Dictionary.)
For the past 1200 years or so, the fox-seductress has co-existed with two often overlapping categories of mythical foxes: the fox-poltergeist, as seen in Pu Songling’s story, and the celestial fox (huxian) which would go on to influence the Japanese Inari fox. In rural China, folk belief in the latter two lasted well into the twentieth century. The huxian in particular influenced both the kitsune and its eventual Pokémon descendants, being an incredibly long-lived (if not immortal) creature that keeps growing new tails as it ages.
In Japan, illustrated copies and translations of The Guideway Through Mountains and Seas and other Chinese books combined with native fox folklore to create a yokai (Japanese mythical creature), if not the yokai: the kitsune.
III.
Michael Dylan Foster describe the kitsune as “multitalented” in The Book of Yokai, noting its many roles across mythology, literature and pop culture as well as its enduring appeal to the non-Japanese. It has appeared in Akira Kurosawa movies and anime series, kabuki, noh and kyogen plays, netsuke, woodblock prints, plush toys, manga, video games and, of course, all of Pokémon’s various multimedia manifestations.
The kitsune is only one of two mythical foxes that inhabit Japanese mythology. The other is the symbol and messenger of the kami known as Inari or Inari Ōkami, a nature god associated with the harvest, rice and metalworking. In Pandemonium and Parade, Foster notes a traditional distinction, albeit a fuzzy one, between yokai and kami, specifically mentioning that “the fox-related Inari” and other Tokugawa-era kami “were generally treated as something different from yokai.” He cites two scholars, Yanagita Kunio and Komatsu Katzuhiko, who identify the presence or absence of worship as the dividing line between the yokai and the kami. (The latter refers to yokai as “fallen kami” as one might describe the nymphs of ancient Greek mythology as “fallen nature goddesses.”)
While Ninetales clearly takes visual inspiration from the fox statues guarding Inari shrines across Japan, most of it and Vulpix’s characteristics reflect the kitsune rather than the Inari fox, so I will focus on the former. (These statues, incidentally, have another Nintendo connection — they also inspired Fox McCloud, the anthropomorphic protagonist of the Star Fox series.)
Foster’s entry on the creature in his bestiary focuses on four main themes: kitsune as seductive shapeshifters; kitsune weddings; kitsune possessing humans; and kitsune and fire.
As Lafcadio Hearn writes in Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894), “innumerable are the stories told or written about the wiles of fox women.” In Foster’s words, kitsune have “been turning into beautiful women and attracting men since at least the nineth century.” This aspect of the kitsune, a Chinese inheritance, has continued on in pop culture. In Ran (1985), directed by Akira Kurosawa, the retainer Kurogane repeatedly compares the treacherous Lady Kaede (a female analogue of Edmund in the film’s samurai retelling of King Lear) to a kitsune, at one point presenting her with the head of a fox statue to illustrate the point.
Ran is not the only Akira Kurosawa film to feature the kitsune. The first episode of the anthology Dreams (1990) dramatizes the old Japanese folk-saying that rain while the sun is shining is the sign of a kitsune wedding. The protagonist, a young boy, wanders away from home on such a day despite his mother’s warnings and witnesses a kitsune wedding procession. The kitsune observe him spying on them and vow revenge; the short ends with the boy embarking on another journey, this time to find the kitsune and ask for their forgiveness.
Foster writes that this superstition has devolved into a commonplace if not a cliche in modern Japan — “even today whenever it is raining and the sun is shining, someone is sure to mention that a fox is getting married.”
“Goblin foxes,” Lafcadio Hearn writes in Glimpses of Unknown Japan,
are peculiarly dreaded in Izumo for three evil habits attributed to them. The first is that of deceiving people by enchantment, either for revenge or pure mischief. The second is that of quartering themselves as retainers upon some family and thereby making that family a terror to its neighbors. The third and worst is that of entering into people and taking diabolical possession of them and tormenting them into madness.
In a passage quoted by Foster, Hearn gives a vivid description of fox possession that attests to the seriousness that this superstitious fear retained well into the modernizing Meiji era:
Strange is the madness of those into whom demon foxes enter. Sometimes they run naked shouting through the streets. Sometimes they lie down and froth at the mouth and yelp as a fox yelps… Possessed folk are also said to speak and write languages of which they were totally ignorant prior to possession. They eat only what foxes are believed to like—tofu, aburage, azukimeshi—and they eat a great deal, alleging that not they, but the possessing foxes, are hungry.
(As seen in the Pu Songling story mentioned above, this ability to possess humans was inherited from Chinese mythology.)
This traditional belief in fox possession also took a more playful form in late 19th century Japan. The Japanese equivalent of the ouija board is called kokkuri and takes the form of a round disk balanced atop a tripod of three bamboo rods. According to believers, the spirits of three mythical creatures — kitsune, tengu and tanuki — communicated with participants by tilting the tripod in answer to questions posed to them.
The Meiji government clamped down on both the deadly serious and parlor game versions of belief in fox possession as part of a much broader strategy of modernization and westernization. In 1886, Kyoto police investigated a “kokkuri teaching center.” Beginning in 1872, the government passed laws against shamanism; one 1905 law specifically outlawed the exorcism of fox spirits. As Foster writes, these exorcisms were replaced by psychiatric diagnoses. Colette Balmain argues that the stigmatization of kitsune by the increasingly totalitarian government led to the creature’s almost complete disappearance from Japanese culture until the ‘yokai boom’ of the 1980s. Decades after the fall of Imperial Japan, manga artists, animators, video game designers and live-action filmmakers (as we’ve seen) returned to the kitsune, casting it in old and new roles.
IV.
Vulpix and Ninetales, both pure fire-types, can learn a number of fire attacks, including Ember, Flamethrower, Fire Spin and Fire Blast. Does this fire have a mythological origin?
Stepping away from Japan for a second, there is of course an obvious connection between the red-orange color of the most common fox species and that of fire. The previously mentioned Financial Times article, for example, quotes Fox Project founder Trevor Williams, who describes a boyhood experience of seeing a fox “blazing out of the long grass like a flame.” (Mozilla Firefox, the browser you may be using to read this post, apparently takes its name from a nickname for the Chinese red panda rather than from the kitsune or the actual red fox.)
In Japan, there is a much closer and more supernatural connection between foxes and fire, as illustrated in the exquisite ukiyo-e print above, which I had the good fortune to see in person at LACMA in 2019.
According to science, the phenomenon known as the will-o’-the-whisp, ghost lights, hinkypunks, corpse lights or friar’s lanterns (as well as by many other names) is caused by organic decay in swamps and marshes, which creates light through the oxidation of methane and phosphine gases. Western culture, on the other hand, has traditionally associated these lights with the devil, fairies, or ghosts who intend on leading travelers away from the safe paths and into bogs and pits. Perhaps most familiarly, they are the origin of the jack-o’-lantern that we still put out at Halloween. They appear throughout English literature, from Milton’s Paradise Lost and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre to Dracula, the Dead Marshes in The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. A thorough discussion of the legend and superstition generated by these strange fires — which are now much rarer than they used to be due to the draining of swamps — would take up all of this post and then some.
Japanese folklore associates these lights with the kitsune; one Japanese word for this phenomenon is actually kitsunebi. (In the Game Boy Advance remakes of the first Pokémon games, Vulpix and Ninetales can learn a fire-type move called Will-O-Whisp.) In multiple accounts of the aforementioned kitsune wedding, forest the wedding procession appears as a distant ‘parade of lights’ or of torches seen through the branches of forest trees.
Like the European will-o’-the-whisp, the kitsunebi is often used to lead unsuspecting nocturnal travelers to their death. As Raluca Nicolae writes,
foxes are very fond of luring people to unholy places by creating a welcoming kitsunebi… It will either burn quietly, like a lamp, to attract the intended victim to a phantom house, or it will wander about like a torch and confuse the later traveler, sometimes ensnaring him into an inextricable forest or a swampy moor.
According to an 18th century Japanese encyclopedia cited by Foster, kitsune cause fires by striking the ground with their tails. “Because of their relationship with fire,” Foster continues, “kitsune were sometimes blamed for actually starting fires.” He recounts one tale of a kitsune getting revenge on the provincial governor who shot it with an arrow by transforming into a human being and burning his house. Nicolae’s article mentions multiple accounts of fiery foxes, including foxes “breathing fire from their mouths,” using bones as torches, and glowing at night as if they were actually lit by fire. In an albeit gamified way, Vulpix and Ninetales have inherited these powers.
V.
Compared to their fellow fire-type Charmander, which lost almost every other aspect of the mythical salamander on the way to becoming a Pokémon, Vulpix and Ninetales have kept many more of their old mythical attributes. Of course, demonic possession and seduction by shapeshifting animals was off the table for a children’s game. But they’ve kept the fire, multiple tails, longevity ability to deceive unsuspecting foes — both can learn Confuse Ray — and overall cunning.
And for my younger self and, I suspect, many other young westerners, this was enough to spark first a curiosity about and then an interest in the creatures of Japanese mythology.
Author’s Note: I’ve recently read Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf in a bilingual edition with Old and modern English on facing pages. I don’t know Old English but while reading this book I had multiple experiences of glancing across to the other page and being able to read words and even entire sentences of the poem in its original language, recognizing the direct ancestors — sometimes unchanged by the centuries — of words we still use today, words like ‘sword,’ ‘shield,’ ‘sea,’ ‘swan,’ ‘holy,’ ‘heaven,’ ‘storm,’ ‘wind,’ ‘water.’
Recognizing and reading these Old English words gave me a sensation that J.R.R. Tolkien — himself a scholar and translator of Beowulf — perfectly describes in “On Fairy-Stories,” the sublime sensation of encountering “a great abyss of time.” Knowing that we still use those same words today felt like crossing a bridge over that abyss and for one brief moment connecting with people who live and told stories and died more than a millennium ago.
That is the sensation I hope these posts give you — in this case, the sensation that the fox creature on the card you pulled out of a pack as a child is, in some sense, the same creature described in an old Japanese legend or painted on the wall of an ancient Chinese tomb.
Bibliography
Balmain, Colette. "East Asian Gothic: A Definition." Palgrave Communications, vol. 3, no. 1, 2017, pp. 31.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Selected Non-Fictions. Edited by Eliot Weinberger. Penguin, 2000.
Foster, Michael Dylan. Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yokai. University of California Press, 2008.
—. The Book of Yokai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore. University of California Press, 2015.
Goff, Janet. “Foxes in Japanese Culture: Beautiful or Beastly?” Japan Quarterly, April-June 1997.
Guthrie, Jonathan. “How I Learnt to Love the Urban Fox.” Financial Times, 24 April 2021.
Gwyther, Jordan Alexander. Bai Juyi and the New Yuefu Movement. (2013 University of Oregon master’s thesis).
Hearn, Lafcadio. Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan. Houghton Mifflin, 1894.
Iserles, Inbali. “Cunning as a Fox.” The Independent, 4 October 2015.
Masatomo, Kawai and Robert T. Singer, eds. The Life of Animals in Japanese Art. Princeton University Press, 2019.
Morrison, Elizabeth, ed. Book of Beasts: The Bestiary in the Medieval World. Getty Publications, 2019.
Raluca, Nicolae. “Illusory Fire in Japanese Folktales: Kitsune-bi, Tengu-bi, Oni-bi, Hoshi no Tama.” Journal of Ethnography and Folklore 2-1, 2008.
Songling, Pu. Wailing Ghosts. Translated by John Minford. Penguin, 2015.
Stevens, Keith. “Fox Spirits (Huli).” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch Vol. 53 (2013), pp. 153-165.
Strassberg, Richard, ed. and trans. A Chinese Bestiary: Strange Creatures from the Guideways Through Mountains and Seas. University of California Press, 2002.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Monsters and The Critics and Other Essays. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. HarperCollins, 2006.
Wakabayashi, Haruko. “Monks, Sovereigns, and Malign Spirits: Profiles of Tengu in Medieval Japan.” Religion Compass no.7, 2013
White, T.H. The Book of Beasts: Being a Translation from a Latin Bestiary of the 12th Century. 1954. Dover, 2010.
Dissecting the fox to a building block level makes me wonder...which actor's role in cinematic history best portrays the attributes of a fox?
Wow that was great! It was such an exhaustive exploration into a Pokémon!
Thank you.