The Fox's Craft in Japanese Religion and Culture: Shapeshifters, Transformations, and Duplicities (Religion in History, Society and Culture-Outstanding Dissertations, 7)

RELIGION IN HISTORY, SOCIETY, AND CULTURE Edited by Frank Reynolds and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan The University of Ch...

Author: Michael Bathgate

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RELIGION IN HISTORY, SOCIETY, AND CULTURE Edited by Frank Reynolds and

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan The University of Chicago, Divinity School

A ROUTLEDGE SERIES

RELIGION IN HISTORY, SOCIETY, AND CULTURE edited by Frank Reynolds and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan 1. LAS ABEJAS

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3. EXPLAINING MANTRAS

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4. LITURGY WARS

Ritual Theory and Protestan’t Reform in Nineteenth-Century Zurich Theodore M.Vial

5. HEAVENLY JOURNEYS, EARTHLY CONCERNS

The Legacy of the Mi’raj in the Formation of Islam Brooke Olson Vuckovic

6. LEST WE BE DAMNED

Practical Innovation and Lived Experience among Catholics in Protestant England, 1559–1642 Lisa McClain

THE Fox’s CRAFT IN JAPANESE RELIGION AND FOLKLORE SHAPESHIFTERS, TRANSFORMATIONS AND DUPLICITIES

MICHAEL BATHGATE

ROUTLEDGE NEW YORK AND LONDON

Published in 2004 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 www.routledge-ny.com Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE www.routledge.co.uk Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Copyright © 2004 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bathgate, Michael, 1967– The fox’s craft in Japanese religion and folklore: shapeshifters, transformations, and duplicities/by Michael Bathgate. p. cm.—(Religion in history, society & culture; 7) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-96821-6 (alk. paper) 1. Foxes—Religious aspects. 2. Foxes—Japan—Folklore. 3. Inari. 4. Japan— Religious life and customs. I. Title. II. Series. BL12211.I5B37 2003 398′.3699775′0952–dc22 2003014635 ISBN 0-203-48476-2 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-57929-1 (Adobe eReader Format)

For Wanda, who taught me stories, And for Buzz, who lived one.

Contents Series Editors’ Foreword

1

2

3

4

viii

Preface

x

The Jewel Maiden and the Murder Stone: Orientations to Shapeshifting and Signification

1

Metamorphosis and Duplicity

7

Imagined Foxes, Imagined Worlds

17

Shapeshifting and Signification

25

Foxes, Wives and Spirits: Shapeshifting and the Languages of Marriage

33

Vampires, Lovers and Ancestors

38

“A World Never Quite Her Own”

46

Visiting Husbands, Visiting Wives

50

Good Sons and Wives on Probation

60

Shapeshifting, Marriage and the Sacred

67

To Whom Am I Speaking? Shapeshifting and the Semiotics of Revelation

71

“Is it really you?”

74

Shifty Means and Hidden Ends

82

Foxes and the Politics of Revelation

94

Foxes in Semiotic Theory and Practice

100

The Gift of the Fox: Shapeshifting and the Power of Wealth

102

Shifting Values and Shitty Wealth

104

The Black Lineage of the Nouveaux Riches

121

vii

5

Foxes, Inari and the End of the World

136

Using the Fox: The Crafts of Shapeshifting and Signification

140

Signification and the Contest of Sorcerers

143

The Persistence of Heresy

153

Foxes and the Foreign

153

Foxes and the Folk

160

Foxes Past and Future

163

Man Into Fox

166

Glossary

169

Bibliography

173

Index

185

Series Editors’ Foreword

Religion in History, Society and Culture brings to a wider audience work by outstanding young scholars who are forging new agendas for the study of religion in the twenty-first century. As editors, we have two specific goals in mind. First, volumes in this series illumine theoretical understandings of religion as a dimension of human culture and society. Understanding religion has never been a more pressing need. Longstanding academic habits of either compartmentalizing or ignoring religion are breaking down. With the entry of religion into the academy, however, must come a fully realized conversation about what religion is and how it interacts with history, society, and culture. Each book in this series employs and refines categories and methods of analysis that are intrinsic to the study of religion, while simultaneously advancing our knowledge of the character and impact of particular religious beliefs and practices in a specific historical, social, or cultural context. Second, this series is interdisciplinary. The academic study of religion is conducted by historians, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, psychologists, and others. Books in the series bring before the reader an array of disciplinary lenses through which religion can be creatively and critically viewed. Based on the conviction that the instability of the category itself generates important insights, “religion” in these works encompasses and/or informs a wide range of religious phenomena, including myths, rituals, ways of thought, institutions, communities, legal traditions, texts, political movements, artistic production, gender roles, and identity formation. In The Fox’s Craft (the sixth book in the series), Michael Bathgate generates a richly researched structural history of the fox-focused imagery that was ubiquitous in the religious imaginaire of traditional Japan. Working through a millennium of Japanese history, he brilliantly identifies and analyzes the themes of shapeshifting, deception, and duplicity

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that characterized this imagery in virtually all of the contexts in which it was deployed. At the same time, he vividly describes several very different articulations of fox-related patterns that were associated with particular historical and social contexts. He explores ways in which these patterns were used to identify and interpret the ambiguous position of maternal identity in the negotiation of patrilineal family relations. He demonstrates how they were quite differently deployed in order to identify and contest various Shinto, Buddhist, and syncretistic understandings of divine revelation. He provides a fascinating account of distinctive ways in which they were marshaled in order to explain and confront a major seventeenth—and eighteenth-century economic transformation that threatened the stability of the traditional social order. In a fascinating final chapter he goes on to explore various ways in which nineteenth—and twentiethcentury nativist and empiricist interpretations of the character of fox imagery were deeply implicated in the construction of the Japanese mode of modernity. Those who have strong theoretical interests will be especially engaged by Bathgate’s interpretation of the ways in which the Japanese storytellers and the characters they depict utilize fox imagery as a kind of semiotic metalanguage that enables them to deal creatively with “the troubling indeterminacies at work in undermining the integrity of human regimes of significance.” Rejecting the notion that fox imagery and the narratives in which they were embedded can be easily dismissed as a form of popular superstition, Bathgate takes great care to demonstrate how it is that they display epistemological insights, rhetorical strategies, and techniques of signification that can be usefully juxtaposed to the comparable insights, strategies, and techniques that inform his own research. Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, The University of Chicago, Divinity School Frank Reynolds, The University of Chicago, Divinity School

Preface

“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Archilochus, 7th century BCE (Berlin 1993:3) Any foray into the landscapes of Japanese religion and culture will sooner or later catch a glimpse of the fox (kitsune ), darting in and out of virtually every genre of Japanese discourse and playing at the margins of virtually every field of human endeavor. From at least the ninth century to the nineteenth, in literature and in legend, in accounts of popular practice and in the documents of the elite, the figure of the fox is an almost unavoidable presence, as ubiquitous as it is multifarious. As an animal whose cries portend the future and as a magical temptress of men, as a playful spook and as a possessing spirit, as an associate of divinities and of heretic sorcerers alike, the manifold cultural and religious significance of the fox proves every bit as difficult to capture as the animal itself. In grappling with such a complex and commonplace figure, one is quickly confronted with a troubling question of scope. As Mircea Eliade argued, “It is the scale that makes the phenomenon” (1958:xiii), and the fox—a symbol whose diverse meanings are interwoven with an equally diverse range of historical contexts—admits the study of any number of different phenomena at any number of different levels. The sources in which the fox appears—from the virtual anonymity of collected folk literature to the named-and-dated accounts of scholars and literati—frequently permit both a close reading

xi

of the discursive give-and-take between individual historical agents and the longue durée analysis of meaning over centuries. At the same time, the rich symbolism of the fox extends beyond the confines of Japanese culture and history, prompting numerous questions about the historical links between Japanese and Chinese sources, their symbolic parallels with the fox imagery of the West, as well as the possible influences on each of these from the natural history of human-vulpine interaction. Faced with such an “embarrassment of riches” in materials related to the fox, one quickly becomes aware of the difficult balance (and sometimes frustrating compromises) that must be struck between two basic poles of scholarly analysis, methodological orientations that Wendy Doniger has characterized as the microscope and the telescope (1998:9–11). In my own approach to this subject, I have been inclined to envision this methodological terrain—both its choices and its challenges—in terms of a distinction drawn by Isaiah Berlin, whose reflections on a cryptic verse-fragment by the Greek poet Archilochus led him to delineate between two basic scholarly temperaments: the fox, who “knows many things” and the hedgehog, who “knows one big thing.” Like the fox of Japanese symbolism, the fox of Berlin’s methodology is at home in the manifold diversity of the particular. The hedgehog, on the other hand, seeks coherence, recurring patterns through which to express the unruly multiplicity of particulars in terms of a single unified meaning. Among scholars, the fox runs the risk of distraction, of losing the forest of significance among the trees of manifold evidence. The hedgehog, on the other hand, poses the danger of reductionism—even of caricature—subsuming the nuance of multiple meanings and their interplay in favor of a single, “one size fits all” interpretation. As a figure characterized first and foremost by its manifest diversity, it should not be surprising that previous studies of the fox in Japanese culture have tended to show a marked affinity for the fox of Berlin’s methodology. A great many such studies present what amounts to a catalogue of diverse particulars, collections of curiosities whose complex uses and deeper significance are left largely unexplored.1 That is not to say, however, that the methodological tracks of the hedgehog

xii

are entirely lacking from past studies of fox symbolism. Scholarship that attempts to penetrate the rippling surface of the fox’s manifestations has frequently done so by isolating a single body of meanings and declaring them to be essential or legitimate, thus rendering all other forms as secondary phenomena, as derivations or distortions of a more basic archetype. In a fashion that continues to prove influential in the study of Japanese popular traditions, this approach often takes the form of a search for origins, one that typically ignores the creative and adaptive work of culture over time in favor of a pseudo-geology of unchanging cultural “strata.”2 By embracing the fox in all its radical diversity, the catalogue approach views Japanese religion and culture through a kaleidoscope. By attempting to collapse that diversity, on the other hand, the search for origins views the same material through blinders. Both represent a distortion, one that fails to take seriously the cultural work of those who simultaneously

1. The number of such catalogues (some more comprehensive than others, and following a number of organizational schemes) are greater than what might be productively listed here. In many respects, Lafcadio Hearn’s 1894 essay “Kitsune” can be read as a standard of the genre of popular writing by the West on Japan, one that seems to have continued to influence folkloristic and anthropological treatments of fox symbolism up to the present (1976: 310–342). Perhaps the single most complete of these collections remains Marinus de Visser’s 1908 report to the Asiatic Society of Japan, entitled “The Fox and Badger in Japanese Folklore.” More recent works in Japanese, such as Kaneko Junji’s Nihon kitsunetsuki shi shiryō shūsei (1976), make use of a similarly broad array of textual sources, but continue to take an encyclopedic approach, long on specificity but typically short on analysis. 2. 1 would argue that the application of geological metaphors like “stratum” to the history of culture tends to obscure as much as it reveals, framing the creative activities of historical agents (agents who are, admittedly, all too frequently anonymous in the historical record) in terms of forces no less impersonal and unreflective than the movement of tectonic plates. Questions concerning the “original meaning” of particular themes, as well as the matter of their historic and cultural origins (whether indigenous to Japan or the result of continental influence) are recurring themes in the scholarship with which I have dealt in this book, and is an issue to which I will return again in later chapters.

xiii

shape and are shaped by the life-worlds of which the fox is a part. In the time since I began my research for this book, two English-language studies have appeared whose discussions of Japanese fox symbolism chart a course between these two methodological poles. In so doing, they have begun to suggest both the power and profundity of this popular figure in the history of Japanese religion and culture. The first of these is Karen Smyers’ The Fox and the Jewel (1999), an anthropological study of the discursive practices that have shaped the complex field of meanings characterizing the in contemporary Japan. As Smyers worship of Inari argues, the virtually unconstrained meanings of symbols such as the fox play a constitutive role in maintaining the broad appeal of this tradition, allowing multitudes of different meanings (some widely shared, others utterly idiosyncratic) to co-exist within the same outward forms, continually adapting to changing circumstances while simultaneously supporting a coherent sense of shared identity. The second of these works is Steven Heine’s Shifting Shape, Shaping Text (1999), an exploration of the intersections between erudite Buddhist doctrine and the popular imagery of didactic literature in the tradition. Representing an expression of elite Zen kōan philosophical concerns regarding the nature of causality at the same time that it embodies popular narrative themes of exorcism and repentance, the figure of the fox represents for Heine a “doorway between realms,” enabling the interaction of multiple social and discursive levels within a common yet variegated “force field” of medieval Zen Buddhism (129). In both of these works, the authors navigate between the methodological demands and limitations of the fox and the hedgehog by considering complexity within boundaries, addressing the various meanings and functions of fox symbolism within specific sectarian and historical frameworks. Although my own approach to the fox is guided by a similar concern, I have chosen to chart a course that is in some respects perpendicular to that taken by Smyers and Heine. Rather than a sectarian approach, this study focuses on a recurring theme in fox symbolism, namely the portrayal of the , shapeshifters able fox as the foremost of the bakemono to influence others’ perception of themselves and of the world.

xiv

In the chapters that follow, the theme of the fox as shapeshifter will be explored in a number of different social, historical and sectarian contexts, providing a perspective from which to understand the place of the fox in a larger religious and cultural world. Chapter One, for example, elaborates the basic structure of shapeshifter fox narratives, especially as they appear in genres of folk literature. Chapter Two considers the folkloric motif of the fox wife (kitsune nyōbō ), a variant of the shapeshifter fox story in which traditional marriage patterns intersect with ideas concerning the place of divinities in human society. The idea that spirits like the fox may serve as a kind of “divine ancestor” to prominent families is, of course, an ancient one in Japanese mythology, but it is by no means the only way in which the shapeshifter fox figures in Japanese portrayals of divinehuman interaction. Chapter Three thus explores the place of the fox in a more general Japanese “semiotics of revelation,” an understanding of religious signs that integrates both Buddhist and indigenous religious elements. In each of these chapters, the religious and social meanings of the shapeshifter fox are seldom far removed, and Chapter Four continues this line of analysis by tracing the symbolism of shapeshifting, ) and the imagery of Inari as a god of defilement (kegare monetary wealth in the language of popular protest and witchcraft accusations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A figure that appears virtually everywhere, yet virtually everywhere appears only at the margins, the figure of the shapeshifter fox escapes the boundaries of ordinary social, historical and sectarian frameworks, allowing it to serve as one of the recurring threads in a continuously rewoven and contested patchwork of shared significance, one that integrates (however unsystematically) multiple registers of human existence. When I began research for this work, I envisioned the theme of the shapeshifter as a hedgehogish solution to the fox’s symbolic diversity, a kind of skeleton key that would unlock the most fundamental meanings of the fox and thereby enable me to tie up the bulk of its most troubling loose ends. As the work progressed, however, I found that my perspective on the shapeshifter fox itself began to shift, and I increasingly came to see its symbolism, not as a key but as what John Strong has

xv

called a “bellevedere phenomenon” (Strong 1992:xii). Instead of the essence of the fox’s meaning as a symbol, the imagery of shapeshifting represents a vantage point from which to view a much wider field of significance, involving not only the shapeshifter as a more general cultural figure, but also the implications of shapeshifting as an integral element in the “work of culture” itself (Obeyesekere 1990). The focus of this work, in other words, has become less the fox itself than the fox’s “craft,” a term whose multiple senses represent what I take to be the most compelling aspects and implications of fox symbolism in Japanese culture. On the most basic level, the aspect of the fox’s craft that first drew me to this complex figure was its portrayal as one of the foremost embodiments of cunning and deception in the history of Japanese popular culture. Of course, just as the theme of shapeshifting fails to exhaust the range of meanings associated with the fox, the fox itself is only one among a host of bakemono—including snakes, cats, wild boars and raccoon), gods dogs (tanuki ), as well as ghosts, goblins (tengu and bodhisattvas. Yet the fox is seldom far removed from this larger company of tricksters, providing what is in many respects an illustrative (even representative) example of the sly duplicity—the foxiness—that characterizes them all. It thus provides a useful case study by which to begin exploring the implications of craftiness itself as a recurring trope in Japanese discourse. Any historical analysis of the uses to which that trope was put, however, will also quickly reveal the craft—the shrewd art and strategic cunning—of those who forged and employed the figure of the shapeshifter fox in that discourse. The meanings of the shapeshifter fox, in other words, are bound up with the history of social signification, the frequently contested negotiations by which events and individuals were incorporated into shared fields of significance in the course of Japanese history. In this sense, the craft associated with the fox provides a useful vantage point from which to explore the more general craft by which human beings make sense of their world (and each other). Throughout this work, I will suggest a number of recurring trends in the fox’s history as an instrument of meaning, strategies that appear by turns both insightful and archly manipulative.

xvi

These two senses of the fox’s craft are seldom distinct, and the meanings and uses of the shapeshifter fox reveal a striking reflexivity, in which representations of the fox’s cunning is sometimes used to signify the very human cunning at work in such representations. The symbolism of the fox, in other words, operates in certain contexts as a kind of “metalanguage,” a means of making sense of the strategies by which sense itself is ultimately made. Following the phenomenological insight that all efforts at human understanding—whether popular or scholarly, ancient or contemporary—shares certain fundamental characteristics in common (Giddens 1993:57–65), I have attempted to take this metalinguistic aspect of the shapeshifter fox seriously, by bringing the insights of Japanese fox discourse and Western theoretical discussion into conversation. Chapters Two through Four, for example, begin not only with a Japanese fox narrative I take as illustrative of the chapter’s theme, but also with an epigraph drawn from Western scholarship, ranging from Aristotle to Umberto Eco. The point in doing so is not to suggest that the meanings of the former can be “explained” through the insights of the latter, but rather to place the two in juxtaposition, as comparable metalanguages concerned with fundamentally analogous social and semiotic phenomena. In a similar fashion, I have begun my more theoretical discussions in Chapters One and Five with quotations from Japanese narratives, and I suggest that key elements of the social semiotics by which the meanings and uses of the shapeshifter fox have unfolded in history can be understood precisely by using the tropes and idioms of the shapeshifter fox itself. In short, I have found in the course of this work that the shapeshifter fox’s ability to alter human perception extends well beyond those who fall prey to their tricks in Japanese folk tales. As a part of the Japanese life-world, its compelling power also reaches out to those who have told its stories throughout the centuries, and (if it is only given a chance) those who have come to study it, as well. In completing this project, I have incurred manifold debts of gratitude, much easier to acknowledge than they will ever be to repay. I am especially indebted to Professors Frank Reynolds, Wendy Doniger and James Ketelaar, whose insight, guidance and encouragement during the formative stages of

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the work—as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago Divinity School—allowed me to uncover potential (in my material as well as in myself) that I scarcely knew existed. In revising the work for publication, I was able to benefit from the expertise and careful reading of Professor Richard Parmentier, whose thoughtful advice and criticism enabled me to clarify and strengthen the arguments that follow. I would also like to express my heartfelt gratitude to the numerous friends and colleagues who generously offered their precious time to read and discuss the many drafts through which the work has passed, especially Christopher Lehrich, David Aftandilian and the colleagues with whom I passed many an enjoyable hour in the research seminars of Professors Reynolds and Doniger. While at Chicago, I was also greatly assisted by financial support from the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies. A portion of the research for this work was completed in Japan thanks to financial assistance from the Association for International Education, Japan and the support of the University of Tsukuba. At Tsukuba, I was indeed fortunate to benefit from the patient guidance of Professors Araki Michio and Lindsay Jones, not to mention the warm hospitality and friendship of Miyamoto Yōtarō, Theresa Shim and the Institute’s graduate students. It is to my wife Linda, however, that I owe the deepest debt of gratitude. Her willingness to follow me to Chicago, her patient acceptance of the times when research called me far away, and the (nearly) unlimited good humor she has mustered, through years of stacked books and scattered papers, quite simply made my work possible. More important still, it was her unflagging love, support and commitment to my ability (even when it was not always shared by myself) that made this work imaginable.

CHAPTER 1 The Jewel Maiden and The Murder Stone Orientations to Shapeshifting and Signification

“People…say that foxes transform themselves into human beings, but this is a delusion… I do not change into a human; human beings transform themselves into foxes!” Hōsei monogatari (Yasunaga 1992:149) A story is told of the reign of Toba-no-in, the retired emperor who ruled Japan from the throne and behind the scenes for much of the first half of the twelfth century. At his court was a mysterious woman of uncertain pedigree, who compensated for her lack of family ties with a degree of beauty, wit and learning against which the other ladies simply could not compete. She became the retired emperor’s favorite, and was seldom absent from his side. His devotion to her was only deepened by the marvelous events of one autumn night, when Toba sought to distract himself from a storm raging outside with an evening of poetry and music. When a gust of wind extinguished all the lamps in the room, everyone was plunged into darkness—everyone, that is, except for Toba’s consort, who radiated a light like the morning sun. The guards and ministers in attendance were terrified, but Toba took the marvel as further sign of her profound moral and spiritual (“the cultivation, and dubbed her Tamamo no mae Jewel Maiden”).1 When both the retired emperor and his son, the reigning emperor Konoe (r. 1141–1155) grew ill soon afterwards, ) however, the court astrologer and exorcist (in’yōshi

2 THE FOX’S CRAFT IN JAPANESE

Abe no Yasunari offered a different explanation. Yasunari determined that Toba was under the influence of a malevolent spirit, and placed the blame directly on Lady Tamamo. He begged the retired emperor to put her away, but Toba remained beguiled, and refused to accept Yasunari’s assessment. The exorcist was determined to save his lord, however, and plotted to reveal the truth to him by any means necessary. He called for a grand ceremony to be performed, , dedicated to the Lord of Mount Tai (Taisan fukun one of the Chinese gods of the afterlife), where he said he would pray for the extension of the retired emperor’s allotted life span. In organizing the ritual, he insisted that Lady Tamamo take part—in one variant, she is even asked to serve )—a gesture that as bearer of the purificatory wand (gohei seemed to affirm her essential place in the retired emperor’s circle. She demurred, but ultimately couldn’t refuse to participate in her lord’s recovery. As Yasunari had planned, the ceremony proved the truth of his earlier accusations. As the ritual began, Tamamo appeared noticeably uncomfortable, and as Yasunari recited the invocation, her discomfort grew into torment As she cried out, the ceremony was quickly revealed for what it really was: a ritual to expose and expel the malign spiritual influ ence of Lady Tamamo from the imperial court.2 Unable to withstand the superior spiritual forces at Yasunari’s command, she was forced to reveal her true form, and a nine-tailed fox rose from her place (see Figure 1). Before anyone could recover their senses, however, the creature flew away to the northeast (the

1. In summarizing this tale, 1 draw primarily on Komatsu Kazuhiko (1992a:42–74), who relates the story as it appears in an illustrated scroll (emaki) entitled Tamamonomae zōshi . Other variants and versions can be found in Kakubari (1888), de Visser (1908:51–55), Abe (1992:49–57), and Matsumoto and Shimura (1994: 586–7). The translation of “Tamamo no mae” as “Jewel Maiden” was made by Faure (1996:71). The term tamamo literally refers to a kind of seaweed, but it plays on the common poetic conceit by which tama also suggests both “jewel” and “spirit” (as well as “ball”). Perhaps the name was intended to play on what the emperor took to be her spiritual accomplishments as well as her mysterious origins, as a marvelous being who drifted like seaweed into the emperor’s court from elsewhere.

THE JEWEL MAIDEN AND THE MURDER STONE 3

traditional direction of demonic influence). Two warriors were sent to destroy the beast, and with the help of the imperial tutelary divinities Amaterasu and Hachiman, they were able ) in to track her to far-off Nasu moor (Nasuno Shimotsuke province (modern day Tochigi prefecture). The warriors pursued the fox on horseback, firing volley after volley of arrows, but she proved too fast and too agile to be hit. They withdrew, and honed their archery skills, but still the monstrous fox evaded them. It was only when one of the warriors called on the support of the bodhisattva Kannon that he was finally able to kill the beast, and he returned to the capital in triumph. The story does not end there, however. Deprived of her body, Tamamo’s vengeful spirit assumed the form of a stone, emitting poisonous vapors where once she had radiated light. The noxious gasses produced by this “Murder Stone” ) killed anything that approached, and the (sesshōseki ground around it could not be seen for the small animal bones and dead insects that covered it. A century later, the Sōtō Zen patriarch Gennō traveled to the site and succeeded in subduing the stone’s angry spirit. Thus pacified, she was eventually enshrined as a tutelary deity, venerated in Nasuno as Sasahara Inari, where the deadly stone remains today. In the course of his encounter with the Murder Stone, Gennō learned that Tamamo’s seduction of Toba was in fact only one episode in a malevolent career that spanned millennia. In ancient India, she had inspired King Hanzoku to invade his neighbors, so that he could perform a grisly sacrificial ritual requiring the heads of one thousand of his fellow kings. In China, she had been the consort of King Yu, where her corrupting influence helped to bring about the end of the Western Zhou dynasty. Although she had been interrupted by the timely intervention of Yasunari, her work seems to have had similarly dire political repercussions for Ja pan—shortly after Tamamo’s flight from the capital, emperor

2. In the nineteenth-century tale Sangoku yōfuden (Kakubari 1888), it is Yasunari who carries the gohei, surprising everyone by using it to strike Tamamo no mae at the height of the ceremony and thus forcing her to reveal her true form (see Figure 3).


Figure 1.

The Nine-tailed Fox Reveals Her True Form and FliesAway (from the Sangoku yōfuden, Kakubari 1888:71).


Konoe succumbed to his illnesses, followed the next year by Toba himself. The succession disputes that followed extended over the next three decades, ultimately leading to the decline of imperial power and the establishment of the first military government in Kamakura . Like the career of Lady Tamamo herself, the story of the Jewel Maiden and the Murder Stone proved to be both longlived and far-reaching, with versions appearing in virtually every genre and medium from the fifteenth century until the nineteenth. It can be found in various forms of devotional literature, especially hagiography and the foundation legends ) of shrines and temples associated with the (engi drama, illustrated scrolls patriarch Gennō. It inspired no ), popular print literature and poetry, as well as the (emaki work of several prominent artists (see Figure 2). The story also appears in learned compilations and the diaries of literati: the fame of Nasu moor even drew the eminent seventeenth-century poet and tourist Bashō, who described the Murder Stone and its environs in his travel journal Oku (Yuasa 1966:103–5). no hoso michi Nor should the lasting appeal of this tale—which seems equally suited to entertainment, didacticism and devotion—be particularly surprising. It is, after all, a gripping narrative, a story of seduction, marvel and revelation, in which sagacious exorcists and valiant warriors struggle to save a dynasty from an evil spirit bent on its destruction. At the same time, it draws on the conventions of epic, hagiography and didactic literature to weave tales of local spirits like the Murder Stone into the pivotal moments in Japan’s dynastic history, and places both within the larger mythohistoric milieu of the ) against which Japan’s “Three Kingdoms” (sangoku geographic and cultural horizons were commonly mapped. In a story that reaches back to ancient India and China, the exploits of Japanese heroes and holy men receive pride of place, appearing as players in a cosmic drama of law, chaos and historical destiny that finally culminates on Japanese soil. Just as the episodes in this tale are strung together by the career of its single antagonist, the conventions and themes that make up this story achieve much of their coherence, power and significance in reference to a common underlying


Figure 2. Abe no Yasunari Exposes Tamamo no mae (detail of a nineteenthcentury print by Kunisada). In this rendition, Lady Tamamo holds the gohei while Yasunari reveals her true form in a sacred mirror. Illuminated in the beam of the mirror, hordes of foxes can be seen wielding the implements of peasant uprisings (ikki ), anachronistically suggesting the civil chaos of the twelfth century in the idiom of the artist’s own time (Ball 1927:138–9).

motif, a constellation of meanings and associations which dates back to at least the ninth century and which continues to ap pear up to the present day. Like the patriarch Gennō, whose investigations at the frontiers of the empire embroiled him in historic events that shook the thrones of the Three Kingdoms, the reader who follows the threads of this single tale is confronted with a body of cultural logics that cut to the heart of the religious and social milieus that have shaped Japanese history for a millennium. These logics intersect in the figure of the “shapeshifter” ), a ubiquitous presence in Japanese (bakemono literature and public dis course whose meanings and uses this study will explore. Just as the vulpine shape Lady Tamamo assumes when she is exposed is usually reckoned as her “true ), foxes (kitsune ) are foremost among the form” (shōtai creatures commonly associated with shapeshifting in Japan, and it is their exploits that will provide the focal point for this


book. In the chapters that follow, I will chart some of the common motifs associated with these marvelous creatures, including their predilection for insinuating themselves into human domestic relationships (Chapter Two), their tendency to misrepresent their marvelous powers as signs of spiritual attainment or divinity (Chapter Three), as well as the links drawn between these creatures and social upheaval (Chapter Four). As they do in the tale of the Jewel Maiden, these narrative themes often overlap, revealing a recurring set of modi operandi characterizing not only the shapeshifter but also those who struggle with them. At the same time, tales of marvelous foxes and their victims reflect on the wider world in which they are set, a world shared by their authors and their audiences. In tales, accounts and accusations, the language and logic of the shapeshifter fox reflects a range of fundamental human concerns, including the ever-shifting nature of social identity, the problem of religious knowledge and the machinations by which both are negotiated in practice. In so doing, the figure of the fox often highlights the shapeshifting activities of a range of other figures— women, gods, merchants, as well as the scholars who study them. Following the exploits of the shapeshifter fox, in other words, quickly leads to a confrontation with shapeshifting in all its forms: animal, spirit and human, from the marvelous world of texts to the prosaic world of their authors. Metamorphosis and Duplicity: The Semantic and Narrative Fields of Shapeshifting Like Lady Tamamo herself, the figure of the shapeshifter changes roles as easily as it changes form, appearing first in one genre then another, and leaping from register to register with contemptuous ease. Animal, demon and divinity, political power and force of nature, it eludes all efforts at simple categorization. Like warrior’s arrows, definitions that attempt to pin the bakemono down to a single function or meaning— however sharp they may be—will strike only shadows; the archer finds that his target has gone before the arrow is even released. Capturing the meanings of the shapeshifter thus calls, not for a single comprehensive category but rather for a net, an interwoven pattern of “family resemblances” that


constitutes the semantic and symbolic field of shapeshifting.3 This field of signification—the wide-ranging implications and applications of which will be explored in the rest of the book— is coordinated along two interrelated axes that I take to be characteristic of shapeshifter behavior in general, namely metamorphosis and duplicity. Like the Japanese term “bakemono” (the characters of which can be taken literally to mean “a thing that transforms”), the phrase “shapeshifter” denotes the alteration of physical form, the shifting of shape. In its manifold transformations, the shapeshifter shares a great deal with other forms of ), a theme whose striking metamorphosis (henshin ontological repercussions make it a fundamental element in mythic discourse the world over (O’Flaherty 1984:3). As Caroline Walker Bynum suggests, metamorphosis represents a kind of “ontological scandal,” a grotesque challenge to the taken-for-granted boundaries (natural and social) that constitute our sense of cosmic order (2001:179). The transformations of the bakemono make it an object of both titillation and horror, a manifestation of the monstrous ), the mysterious (fushigi ) and the (kaibutsu ) that stand at the limits of ordinary uncanny (yōkai human experience.4 Unfettered by the pigeonholes of quotidian existence, the metamorph asserts an undifferentiated continuity behind the distinctions we take

3. The terms “bakemono” and “shapeshifter” express a complex body of fluid semantic fields (both in common parlance and scholarly usage) whose boundaries nevertheless overlap substantially, and for the purposes of this study I will use them interchangeably. The connotations and associations of the term bakemono are perhaps best elaborated in scholarly taxonomies of the strange elaborated by such Japanese folklorists as Ema Tsutomu (1977) and Abe Kazue (1992). Regarding the English term “shapeshifter,” perhaps the best overall discussion remains R.D.Jameson’s 1949 entry on “Shapeshifting” (1972:1004–1005). 4. In this sense, the term bakemono (along with the related term obake ) is often translated as “apparition,” “goblin,” or even “monster,” a set of connotations that might best be rendered, in the words of the old Cornish prayer, as “ghoulies and ghosties and longleggety beasties and things that go bump in the night” (Bartlett and Kaplan 1992:779).


for granted, an experience of transgression that poses both the threat of chaos and the promise of liberation. At the same time, however, the very strangeness of the metamorph often mitigates against any absolute challenge to the order of things. As the anomalous exception that makes the rule, the metamorph’s (b)order-crossing frequently works to highlight, even reinforce, the very boundaries it transgresses. The ambivalence of the metamorph is an important theme in Japanese reflections on the cosmic and social order, among which the figure of the shapeshifter fox plays a prominent part. Thus, for example, Lady Tamamo’s insinuation into the life of the retired emperor’s court is presented as a profound and dangerous transgression. As both a nonhuman in human guise and as a social unknown in courtly robes, her multifaceted interloping is presented as the work of a malevolent force, out to undermine the order of things and leave chaos in her wake. As Karen Smyers has argued, however, the boundary-crossing transformations of the fox can also serve as the stuff of cultural fantasy, reflecting a “desire ) that escapes the for metamorphosis” (henshin ganbō rigid confines of societal roles (1999:179–183). Indeed, before she is revealed to be a monster, the Jewel Maiden’s life can also be read as the stuff of fairy-tales, the romantic story of a beautiful and mysterious outsider who, like Cinderella, wins the heart of royalty. Metamorphosis is also a recurring motif in Buddhist ), dramatizing didactic literature (setsuwa bungaku the continual process of transformation at the heart of all ). Expounding a rebirth in the Six Realms (rokudō message that is as much ontological as it is moral, these expositions of karmic cause-and-effect present a world in which physical form is in constant flux, shifting in accordance with sentient beings’ actions, desires, and dispositions. It is a world where the greedy become snakes and debtors take the form of oxen to labor for those they failed to repay, where animals, humans, gods and demons constitute, not distinct orders of being, but transitory moments in an unending cycle of rebirth.5 In this context, the power of shapeshifting vixens like the Jewel Maiden to cross the boundaries between animal and human realms is emblematic of our own contentious passage from life to life, and from shape to shape. At the same


time, the shapeshifter’s influence over its victims can be taken as emblematic of the insidious powers of lust and delusion over the unenlightened more generally, and the struggle against this power reflects the tortuous struggle of all sentient beings for liberation. Just as Lady Tamamo’s malevolent exploits are brought to an end by the intervention of Gennō, this larger struggle is one that culminates in the saving power of the Buddhist Dharma. The challenges posed by the manifold transformations of bakemono are not only moral and ontological, but epistemological, as well—an aspect of the shapeshifter motif that I see as crucial to its signifying power. Like the Jewel Maiden’s pleasing feminine form, the shapes assumed by shapeshifters appear first and foremost as dissimulations, cunning disguises masking their true forms. As the folklorist Komatsu Kazuhiko notes (1992a:40), the themes of metamorphosis and duplicity are bound up in the connotations of the term bakemono itself: the defining act of a bakemono may be to transform (bakeru ), but its defining purpose ); a creature with the power to is to deceive (bakasu metamorphose not only itself but its surroundings, the shapeshifter typically does not transform its victims, except perhaps to make fools of them (baka ni suru).6 One of the classic examples of such exploits are the “Great Fox Banquets,” described by the twelfth-century literatus Ōe no Masafusa in his brief account of supernatural foxes entitled Kobiki . According to Masafusa, large public feasts took place in a particular section of the capital, attended by many people. In reality, however, these banquets were the work of foxes in human form, and the “food” inevitably turned out to be refuse—leaves, dung and old bones (GR 6:462). Similar tales abound in both setsuwa and folk tales, describing the

5. These examples of transformation are drawn from the early ninthcentury setsuwa collection Nihon ryōiki (the metamorphosis of debtors into cattle seems a particular favorite of the author, appearing in the collection no less than four times). The importance of metamorphosis as a theme in popular accounts of rebirth has been noted by folklorists such as Abe (1992), but perhaps the most perceptive reading of the philosophical nuances inherent in this theme is Heine (1999).


travails of men and women invited as guests in prosperous homes, only to discover later that those homes were really dilapidated old ruins or even empty land. Alternatively, the deceptions wrought by some foxes eschew magical transformations altogether, in favor of more prosaic forms of dissemblance, like the fox described in one folk tale, who simply played dead along the side of the road in order to steal some fish: It was a cold winter’s day. A fisherman had caught a number of fish through a hole in the ice. He had loaded them on his sled and was returning home. A fox saw them, and since he liked fish so much, and was also very hungry, he determined to get some of the fish. He ran ahead of the sled a short way, then lay down in the road as though he were dead. The fisherman came along and, wanting a fox skin to make a cap with, picked up the fox, supposing it to be dead. He threw it on the sled and drove on home with his load of fish. When the fisherman wasn’t looking, the fox took one of the fish and replaced it with a stone so that the fisherman would not notice the load’s becoming lighter. He then jumped off and ran into the forest (Seki 1963:3). In a great many of these tales, however, the deceptive powers of the shapeshifter are pitted against protagonists who strive (not always successfully) to unmask them, a drama of disguise

6. In elaborating the significance of shapeshifter duplicity, I occasionally make use of the word “trickster,” a term I intend in its most straightforward denotation as “one who plays tricks,” rather than in the ideal-typical sense developed by generations of anthropologists and folklorists. While this ideal-typical trickster is usually associated closely with both transformation and deceit (associations that would make the term quite apt for describing the actions of the shapeshifter fox), it has also been closely linked to a number of other attributes (such as culture-heroism and clownishness) much less applicable to the shapeshifter fox (see Hynes 1993:33–45). For the purposes of this study, I have chosen to view the shapeshifter as a complex constellation of meanings in its own right— with its own implications and uses—rather than as an atypical example of another ideal type.


and discovery that constitutes a recurring—even definitive— element of the shapeshifter motif in Japanese folklore. The story of Tamamo no mae, for example, presents a string of such moments—not only does Yasunari expose the malevolent fox-spirit posing as a beautiful maiden, but the imperial kami also reveal her hiding place in Nasu moor to her warrior pursuers. Even Gennō’s exorcism of the Murder Stone has been presented in at least one version as a discourse revealing, in Buddhist terms, the evil spirit’s true identity. In this rendition of the tale—reminiscent of an earlier Chinese story—Gennō raps three times on the stone with his clerical staff, and says, “You are after all just a stone. Whence comes your nature, whence your powers?” Freed from her delusion by the patriarch’s teaching, she is able to escape her evil state and achieve a more positive rebirth among the heavenly beings (Faure 1996:71–2). It is interesting to note, however, that in his efforts to expose Lady Tamamo’s designs to the imperial court, Yasunari was only able to prevail by engaging in his own brand of subterfuge, misrepresenting his intentions and his actions to beat the shapeshifter at her own game. In so doing, he exemplifies a common element of the shapeshifter motif, presenting the encounter between bakemono and protagonist as a contest of wits, where wisdom and wile, discernment and duplicity is demanded of both parties. Presenting a struggle in which the end is by no means clear, narratives of this sort feature a sometimes bewildering series of deceptions and counter-deceptions in which everything remains in doubt until the end. In the simplest of these tales, the protagonist realizes that trickery is at work and uses this knowledge to turn the tables on the shapeshifter. One tale, for example, tells the story of an old woman who became suspicious when her husband returned home much earlier than expected. She quickly noticed that while her husband was blind in his right eye, the man before her seemed to be blind in his left eye. She realized that this doppelganger must be a fox in disguise, and determined to be the beast’s undoing. Without revealing her suspicion, she suggested that he might like to take his customary nap wrapped up in an old sack, and when the foxman crawled into the sack, she tossed him into the fire.


Eventually, the genuine husband returned, presumably to enjoy an unexpected meal of roast fox (Seki 1953, 2:1349–51). A similar tale describes a young man who set out to capture a fox: He went to a place often visited by foxes and pretended to be waiting for somebody. He said aloud to himself, “Well, Granny should be coming along about now.” An old woman suddenly appeared. The young man seemed delighted and told her to get onto the horse. He tied the rope around her many times because he said the horse was wild and he wanted to make things safe. When he got home, he had the other young men gather around the horse while he unfastened the ropes. The old woman changed into her real form and ran as a fox into the house. They searched the house from corner to corner, but could not see the fox. The young man who had caught it sat calmly by the hearth smoking. He said to nobody in particular that there were two images of Buddha at his house and that they waved their hands at each other. Another image promptly appeared by the real one and waived its hand. That was what he wanted. He dragged the image that had waved its paw down from the altar and kicked it onto its side. It really was the fox. They made soup of it to eat together (Yanagita 1986:151–2). In both tales, the fox, unaware that it has been uncovered, does what it believes is expected of the role it has assumed, and is thereby caught and killed. Appearing in these tales as shapeshifters in their own right, the human protagonists insert a new level of illusion into the foxes’ tricks. Like Yasunari, they give the semblance of believing the foxes’ ruse, while in fact they are secretly arranging to trick the trickster. Meanwhile the fox, taking the human’s responses at face value, is fooled into its own trap. Expecting to be fed (as husband, grandmother, or even buddha image), the fox ultimately finds itself the main course. Nor is the duplicitous cunning of the human protagonists in these stories limited to their contests with the fox. In the story of the fox-buddha, for example, the hero of the tale also directs his wiles towards the friends that had helped him. After making the captured fox


into soup, he frightens them away by pretending to become terribly ill with his first taste. Suspecting the curse of the fox, they flee, leaving him with the soup all to himself. Other tales add yet another level of deception to this pattern, telling of a fox who allows the protagonist to realize its identity only to set the stage for a more elaborate deception. setsuwa collection Konjaku The twelfth-century (27.41), for example, presents a monogatarishū story that is in many respects very similar to the tale of the fox-Buddha noted above, except that it is not the fox that is duped but the man. This story tells of “the fox-woman of Kōyagawa,” a creature whose favorite amusement consisted of appearing in the evening as a young girl and asking for rides from passing horsemen, only to leap from the horse after riding a few hundred yards, returning to fox form and running away. A guardsman bragged to his comrades that he would not be fooled by such tricks. Vowing to capture the fox, he rode out alone to the area where she had been reported to appear. When she appeared as usual and asked for a ride, he allowed her to mount, but quickly tied her to the saddle so that she could not escape. When she protested, he refused to release her, telling her not that he knew she was a fox, but that he intended to ravish her. As he rode back, the procession of some high-ranking dignitary (a common enough phenomenon in the streets of the capital) forced him to take a substantial detour, but he eventually arrived at the meeting point where his friends had been waiting for him. Forming a circle around her, they asked him to release her, so that they might have some sport shooting at her with their bows and arrows. He untied her, but when she immediately assumed the shape of a fox and ran away, he was stunned to see the other guards and even his horse vanish, as well. Looking around, he realized that he was not in the city where he thought he was, but rather in the cremation ground outside the capital. The procession, the long detour, the other guardsmen and somehow even his own horse were all illusions produced by the fox (NKBZ 24:140–7). Still other tales engage in a sort of reversal that plays upon the basic uncertainty between reality and illusion that lies at the heart of the shapeshifting motif. Expected to transform itself, the fox does nothing, causing the humans that would trap it to respond to reality as if it were an illusion. In one


story, for example, a villager happened to see a fox transform itself into the image of a local mountain ascetic known as Kongō-in. He rushed back to the village to tell the others of what he saw, and when a figure appearing to be Kongō-in entered the village, they set upon him. This “false” Kongō-in was nearly beaten to death before the villagers realized that it wasn’t a fox at all but the real Kongō-in himself—the fox had planned the entire charade in retaliation for a prior wrong (Seki 1953, 2:1326–7). The complexity and number of such reversals are, in the end, limited only by the creativity of the story-teller. Another tale, for example, tells the story of the “the head-shaving fox” ), in which a man traveling in the (kamisori kitsune mountains happened to spy a fox transforming itself into a woman carrying a child. He followed the fox-woman into a village, and when she was welcomed by one of the families as a long-departed daughter, he interceded, accusing her of being a fox. The family members, however, didn’t believe him, so to prove his charge, he assaulted the fox-woman and threw her “baby” to the ground. Not only didn’t she revert to fox form as he expected, but the baby was killed, and he found himself arrested for murder. Given the choice between capital punishment or renouncing the world as a monk, he chose the latter. A monk was brought in to receive the young man as his disciple, but as he shaved the man’s head, the pain became so intense that he suddenly came to his senses. He realized that not only the woman and her baby, but the village, the villagers and the monk were all illusions created by foxes. Only the shaving of his head had been real—lacking a real razor, the fox had pulled his hair out by the roots (Seki 1953, 2:1313–8). Caught up in this web of duplicity, it isn’t only the protagonists of such tales who can find themselves taken in. Like the shapeshifter fox, the tellers of these tales use an array of feints and misdirections to present what at first appear to be relatively straightforward tales of fox trickery or of a trickster tricked, only to reveal an ending in which characters and readers alike find themselves in a very different place than they had been led to expect. The story of the fox of Kōyagawa, for example, starts off in a manner very similar to the tale of the fox-buddha, with the protagonist capturing a fox by posing as its gullible victim. Even after the


fox has been captured, the young guardsman gives no hint that he knows the fox-woman’s true identity, maintaining his ruse by acting the part of rapist rather than hunter. Only when the fox appears about to be killed does the story suddenly reverse itself, and the readers—who had until then been led to think of themselves as in on the protagonist’s ruse —find themselves tricked every bit as much as he was. Like the fox, who allowed the guardsman to think he had the final trick up his sleeve, these tales (and their tellers) incline the reader/audience to take things at face value, when in fact they are sharing in the guardsman’s deluded perceptions. This almost endless potential for misdirection inherent in shapeshifter narratives is exploited by certain classical authors to create an atmosphere of tense uncertainty that affects character and reader alike, a shared hesitation about the very nature of reality and perception that might be described, following the literary scholar Tzvetan Todorov (1973), as “fantastic.” In one episode from the eleventh, for example, a Buddhist century Genji monogatari bishop and his entourage encounter a mysterious apparition in an unused mansion. Thinking it to be the work of foxes or some other spirit, they approach it warily—protective mantras and mūdras at the ready—only to discover that it is nothing more than the runaway girl Ukifune, using the villa as sanctuary from romantic troubles into which she had become embroiled earlier in the tale. If this revelation makes the precautions taken by the monks seem foolish in retrospect, the reader can claim no more privileged position—not only does a caretaker inform the monks (and thus the reader) that the gardens are known to be frequented by fox-spirits, but the surroundings also hearken back to a similarly mysterious and disused villa from an earlier chapter, one whose haunting by dangerous spirits resulted in the death of a young woman. Indeed, even should the reader guess that the apparition may in fact be Ukifune, it remains unclear whether she is appearing “in the flesh” or not, as the grief-stricken girl had last appeared in the story contemplating suicide.7 Indeed, shapeshifter narratives as a whole reveal a number of marked similarities to the literary genre elaborated by Todorov. As in the fantastic, the various reversals and tensions created by shapeshifter tales are characteristically


resolved in the end; like a punch line, the trap is sprung and the “truth” is revealed to characters and readers alike. In the process, such tales both create and depend upon “an integration of the reader into the world of the characters” (1973:31), a compelling device for engaging the audience that no doubt goes a long way towards explaining the continued popularity of this motif in Japanese literature. At the same time, this integration implies a close and complex interplay between the world-within-the-text and the commonplace world (s) of the reader, one which gives shapeshifters like the fox a capacity for reflecting and shaping reality that escapes the confines of literature to bear upon the Japanese imagination of religion, society, and the nature of imagination itself. Imagined Foxes, Imagined Worlds: The Structures of Signification In common parlance, literature, and now in motion pictures, the fox appears as a recurring figure both in East Asia and in the West, from Lady Tamamo to Reynard, and from the cinematic hero El Zorro to the nefarious “Jade Fox” of the popular film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The distribution of fox symbolism in human culture generally follows the distribution of real foxes in nature, and common patterns in the fox’s meaning across cultures can no doubt be attributed in some degree to its ubiquitous presence in the wild.8 As “predators of the edge,” foxes favor transition zones, where different kinds of habitat (such as forest and meadow) intersect. These include the margins of land cleared for agriculture and settlement, and the fox seems to have taken advantage of the habitat-creating powers of human beings from their earliest meetings in Eurasia (Henry 1996:35–41). Cunning and adaptable, they possess both an uncanny ability to escape detection and a capacity for duplicity seldom found 7. The incident between Ukifune and the monks appears in Chapter 53 (“Tenarai,” translated by Seidensticker 1976:1044–1046), her previous appearance not having been since Chapter 51 (“Ukifune”). The spiritual dangers of deserted manors had been established long before, when Genji’s young lover Yūgao met with a terrifying end in Chapter 4 (“Yūgao”).


outside the order of primates (Rüppell 1986). At the same time, their omnivorous feeding habits have afforded nearly every culture with the “opportunity” to experience their infuriating abilities at first hand.9 Familiar with human domestic space yet never domesticated, the fox serves as an emblem of the world’s disregard for our efforts to control it, whether physically or cognitively. As Paul Shepard writes, the fox appears as “a wild denial of the ordering of the world in which Adam, Orpheus, and Linnaeus, each in the major myth of their time, named the animals” (1996:61). The fact that Lady Tamamo is revealed to be a fox with nine tails, however, should be sufficient warning that the links between zoology and symbolic meaning are seldom entirely straightforward. The semantic space of the Japanese term kitsune has been shaped by a complex body of influences and associations, of which natural history is only one. Like the career of Lady Tamamo herself, the fox’s ability to magically 8. Many of the characteristics attributed to foxes in Japanese literature—including their clever trickiness, wildness, and even their offensive odor—can also be found in Western literature (Yamamoto 2000). The red fox is only one of 22 species of fox spanning four genera (MacDonald 1984:68–75), but its distribution and characteristics make it in many respects the archetypal fox, the animal most commonly represented by the term “fox.” As J.David Henry argues (1996:31), it is not for nothing that Linnaean nomenclature designates the red fox as Vulpes vulpes, “the fox’s fox.” 9. The fox’s opportunism has placed it in direct competition with many forms of human livelihood, including hunting, fishing, animal husbandry, and even some forms of agriculture. They are also among the most energetic and industrious animals with which humans must contend, and will continue to hunt (and kill) even after they have satisfied their hunger (Henry 1996:97). These two features combine to make foxes one of the most commonly resented nuisance animals in human history. As Henry notes, “Hunters believe that foxes live mainly on grouse, quail, pheasants, and perhaps an occasional young deer. Chicken farmers believe foxes eat mainly chickens, and sheep ranchers contend that they eat lambs,” (28). While Henry notes that such accusations may exaggerate the breadth of the fox’s accomplishments (for example, they are less than entirely effective bird killers, and the size of their prey is largely limited to animals smaller than a rabbit), the primary error of such lay beliefs seems to lie more in each group’s assertion that theirs is the group most afflicted.


assume human form (especially the form of human women) can be traced back to the continent, particularly to the , which Chinese genre of marvel tales known as zhiguai appear to have been read in Japan as early as the eighth century (Nakamura 1997:34–40). Moreover, while the term kitsune seems in contemporary common parlance to be largely coterminous with the red fox (Vulpes vulpes ), it appears in Japanese religious discourse, folklore and marvel literature associated with a number of other animal categories, some of foreign origin, some altogether preternatural. In Japanese Buddhist texts, for example, the fox appears to have been identified with other wild canines (especially the jackal) mentioned in Indian texts but unknown in Japan (de Visser 1908:56–8). In other contexts, the term kitsune has been used to describe creatures better characterized as weasels or rodents than canines, and the fox often appears closely associated with racoon-dogs (tanuki , frequently translated into English as “badger”), as well as the avian therianthropic .10 Thus, while the parallels goblins known as tengu between fox symbolism around the world are suggestive of the links between natural phenomena and cultural significance, in the end Lady Tamamo is not Reynard, and neither of them are the wild animals that hunt along the edges of our fields or raid our chicken coops. Existing at the intersection of complex patterns of literary influence and experience, the significance of the fox as a cultural entity should be pursued first and foremost in its cultural context, enmeshed as much with other cultural entities as with natural phenomena (Douglas 1996:xxxi). In focusing on its role as a shapeshifter, I am thus concerned primarily with the place of the fox in what might be called the history of Japanese collective imagination, drawing on that repertoire of shared mental images described by Jacques Le Goff as “l’ imaginaire” (1988:1–7; c.f. Faure 1996:3– 29). As Le Goff suggests, this notion of collective imagination is immersed in a confluence of theoretical currents (reflecting a long history of scholarly discourse on the nature of imagery and the imagination, not to mention symbolism, representation and ideology), deep and turbulent waters that I will not attempt to chart in any comprehensive fashion within this work. Yet it is precisely its wealth of theoretical


entailments that renders this approach a productive one, and so merit—if only by way of introduction—a brief discussion. Following Clifford Geertz’s characterization of humanity as “an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun” (1973:5), I understand imaginaires to function as constituent elements in the shared world(s) of meaning in which humans live their lives. These worlds are at once both absolutely real and absolutely constructed, simultaneously shaping and shaped by human action and experience.11 The term collective imagination thus applies not just to fabulous 10. In this regard, Carmen Blacker notes that creatures like the fox are characterized by a “peculiar separation of name from thing” (1975:52). Like the fox, the racoon-dog (Nyctereutes procyonoides) is a member of the canine family, with a range that extends from Japan to Eastern Europe. The tengu, on the other hand, is a marvelous creature that is essentially unique to Japan, a frequently troublesome and deceptive bird-man associated with ancient cryptomeria (sugi ) groves and remote mountains. The imagery of kitsune, tanuki and tengu is in many respects distinct, and each has its own particular symbolic associations and characteristic narrative themes, the analysis of which extends well beyond the purview of this work. At the same time, however, these associations and themes also share important elements, particularly as shapeshifters. It is thus often impossible to separate the fox from a larger complex of shapeshifter imagery involving all three figures. For example, in the Jomei chapter of the Nihon shoki —earliest mention of tengu in a Japanese text—the pronunciation gloss for the characters is given not as “tengu” but as “ama-tsu-kitsune,” the celestial fox (NKBT 68:231). Similarly, the seventeenth-century encyclopedia Honchō shokkan (NKZ 150:956) explicitly links tanuki and foxes as creators of apparitions (yōkai). The term kori (“foxes and badgers,” Ch. huli) appears as a classic synonym for guile, not only in such medieval texts as the Gukanshō (Brown and Ishida 1979:170) but in such modern cultural products as the Chinese film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, where it is translated into English as the epithet “Jade Fox.” In the Konjaku monogatarishū, the triad of kitsune, tanuki and tengu is joined by a fourth, namely the wild boar (yacho ). In 27.24, 27.35 and 27.44, in the midst of similar tales about foxes, boars are depicted as responsible for strange phenomena (flying lights, etc.), assuming the demonic form of an oni , and haunting a house. Moreover, in 20.13, immediately following similar tales attributed to tengu, a wild boar is presented as the culprit in a haunting described in virtually identical terms in the Uji shūi monogatari (8.6), except that the creature responsible is depicted in that text as a tanuki.


beasts, miracle stories or the other-worldly geographies of heavens and hells, but also to the images and figures that form the basis of everyday life, from religion to economy and from society to biology. To describe the shapeshifter fox as an imaginary creature, in other words, is to place it alongside such other imaginary creatures as currency and work, family and state, nature and humanity. Together these entities form the broad ideational landscape by which the members of a culture make sense of themselves and their world. Just as the human experience of foxes in nature is never completely absent from the Japanese imagery of the fox as a marvelous shapeshifter, the edifices of collective imagination are never far removed from the “brute facts” of empirical reality. Yet the experience of that reality as significant—what, in the words of Marshall Sahlins, enables a simple meaningless “happening,” arbitrary and absurd, to be perceived as a meaningful “event” that can be understood, shared and addressed—depends on its placement within a larger field of meaning (1985:xiv). This shared field of significance, however, is by no means simply a realm of disembodied ideas (such as “power,” “love” or “beauty”) waiting to be given substance through contact with the “real world.” It is also a realm populated by concrete images—some more elaborate than others, some more worn or encrusted by convention than others—whose intersecting patterns of identity and association give shape to the lived worlds of human culture. By imaginaire, I mean these shared patterns of imagery, especially those constellations of images and meanings that take on the aura of commonplace truth. Rather than a single, all-encompassing edifice, these templates of collective imagination can be seen as a kind of patchwork. an assortment of numerous imaginaires that provide the basic

11. This paradoxical nature of cultural constructs—appearing as both product and producer of human agency—has been the subject of considerable discussion in the social sciences. The formulation which has most strongly influenced my own approach is Anthony Giddens’ notion of “the duality of structure,” in which “structure is both constituted by human agency and yet is at the same time the very medium of this constitution” (1993:128–9).


categories, relationships and roles that characterize the manifold registers of human social life. It may thus be possible to speak, for example, of a Buddhist imaginaire (but also a Zen or a Pure Land imaginaire), a patriarchal imaginaire, a social imaginaire or an economic imaginaire. These manifold fields of meaning—each with its own core images and its own internal armatures of association—in turn form a shifting body of intersecting, overlapping and opposing orientations that constitute the shared life-worlds of a culture. In this patchwork of significance, a figure like the shapeshifter fox— an image with its own body of shifting meanings, bound up with a host of others in a mutually constitutive web of allusion —provides a vantage from which to explore, not only the internal logics of individual imaginaires but also the relationships between them. As a study in the history of collective imagination, this work will be concerned in part with charting the role of the shapeshifter fox in the shifting orientations and articulations of these imaginaires over time. Foremost among these is the history of Japanese religious imaginaires, constellations of ideas, images and authorities whose changing configurations are reflected in the changing exploits of the shapeshifter fox. Like the Lady Tamamo—whose malevolent designs are resisted in turn by a Daoist in ‘yōshi, Shinto kami and a Buddhist patriarch—the figure of the shapeshifter fox reflects a recurring pattern of concerns expressed within the range of religious logics at work in Japanese history.12 Juxtaposed within the tale of the Jewel Maiden as episodes in a single story, for example, the encounters between this single malignant spirit and three different forms of spiritual 12. While it would be inappropriate to ignore the ideological and institutional machinations by which sectarian identities were forged in Japanese religious history, those identities cannot be reduced to a simplistic image of mutually exclusive, “hermetically-sealed” entities (Indian Buddhism, Chinese Daoism, indigenous Shinto). As I will argue in the chapters that follow, the shapeshifter fox appears in the imagery associated with each of these traditions, providing not only a nodal point for the complex interactions and interpenetrations of these traditions over the course of Japanese history, but also a figure of consider able contention, standing at the interstices where various scholars have attempted to construct enduring sectarian boundaries.


authority not only present different modes of transformation and duplicity, but also suggest the different kinds of power and insight necessary to penetrate them. Thus, as a master of the transformations that give shape to the myriad things of the world, the success of the in ‘yōshi Yasunari lies in his ability to disrupt the preternatural forces behind Lady Tamamo’s pleasing dissimulation, but it is left to the imperial kami—indigenous spirits and sovereigns of the land—to uncover the remote wastes in which she subsequently concealed herself. Gennō, meanwhile, uses his spiritual cultivation and wisdom to cut through the deceptions Tamamo had wrought—as much on herself as on others—revealing her true nature as a sentient, suffering being in need of salvation. Indeed, Gennō’s final pacification of Tamamo’s angry spirit can be taken as emblematic of a larger movement in Japanese religious history, a transformation of the spiritual landscape of Japan whereby the imagery of both indigenous and continental religious traditions were increasingly subordinated within a framework that was predominantly Buddhist in orientation (LaFleur 1983:26–59; cf. Marra 1993: 3–4). As I will suggest in the chapters that follow, however, these historical transformations involved less the supplanting of one imaginaire by another than their assimilation, a reorientation of imaginaires that lay the groundwork for a range of new configurations of meaning, a creative confluence in which figures like the shapeshifter fox were deeply and productively implicated. At the same time, the religious imagery of the shapeshifter fox appears to engage a variety of more prosaic registers of human experience, as well. Thus, for example, the shapeshifting of the fox as a spirit—whether benevolent or dangerous, venerated or exorcised—is seldom far removed from the imagery of the fox as an animal, an imaginaire reflecting the troubled intersections of wild and domestic, beast and humanity. Similarly, the imagery governing relations between wilderness and domesticity, or between the human world and spirits, informed (and were themselves informed by) the imagery of human relations, from the connubial relations of husband and wife to the realpolitik of kinship and family alliances, aristocratic and commoner alike. Not only did these patterns of mutual influence tend to


shift as the imaginaires themselves shifted, but the imagery of the fox as shapeshifter—with all its attendant transformations and trickery—was closely bound up with the imagery of social, political and economic transformation more generally. Like the Jewel Maiden, whose predations are said to have resulted in the epochal decline of imperial power at the end of the Heian period, the figure of the shapeshifter fox often appears as both a symbol and a supernatural agent of historical change, embodying both its perils and its promise.13 In much of what follows, my approach to the shapeshifter fox can be understood as a kind of structural history, tracing the intersections of images and meanings over time. The popular literary sources on which much of this work depends (from the setsuwa collections of the classical and medieval periods to the compilations of modern folklorists) are notorious for the anonymity of their authors, and while it may be possible to find various groups suspended—even ensnared— within the “webs of significance” they present, there is often little trace of the identity or the intentions of the historical 13. The periodization by which such change is registered in Japanese historiography is typically framed according to the turning points of political history, according to the location of the seat of power, from the imperial courts at Nara (645–794) and Heian (794–1185) to the warrior regimes of Kamakura (1185–1333), Muromachi (1333–1568), Momoyama (1568–1600) and Edo (1600–1868) to the modern period, usually held to begin with the reign of the emperor Meiji (1868– 1912). These political periods are commonly (if not always identically) mapped onto a larger-scale narrative of historical epochs, in which the classical age of the Nara and Heian periods gives way to the medieval age of the Kamakura, Muromachi and Momoyama periods, followed in turn by a transitional early modern age (identified with the Edo period) that finally sets the stage for the modem age properly so-called. In certain instances, the history of the shapeshifter fox can be seen to fall relatively neatly into this periodization. Indeed, the imagery of the shapeshifter fox—especially as it manifests itself in such figures as Tamamo no mae—could be said to have participated in the imagination of at least some of the turning points from which the standard periods of Japanese historiography are derived. In other contexts, however, the phenomena with which the shapeshifter fox has been associated have developed according to very different historical trajectories, rendering references to politically-oriented historiography a rough approximation at best.


agents who wove them. Ultimately, however, the edifices of collective imagination exist only in and through the creative efforts of those who employ them. Just as, in linguistic terms, langue cannot exist outside of parole, no structures of meaning exist outside of the continual (and often contentious) processes by which they are reproduced in history. For this reason, I have endeavored (whenever the available materials have permitted) to take into account, not simply the structural articulation of these fields of meaning over time, but also the complex negotiations by which these meanings were constructed, imposed and resisted in practice. If, as I have suggested above, the significance of any particular set of circumstances is derived from its location within particular field(s) of meaning, that significance is generated in part by the efforts of interested parties to signify those circumstances within one field of meaning rather than another. This practice of signification can be understood as a matter of strategic placement (and, sometimes, of counter-placement), orienting experience by selecting the field of meaning on which it is to be understood (and acted upon) from a shared repertoire of such fields. Insofar as an imaginaire can be paralleled to a kind of cultural game—a shared field of meanings and strategic moves where a given state of affairs can be “played out” by those involved—the practice of signification can be seen as a kind of “meta-game,” negotiating the field of play that lends events and actions their significance.14 As Charles Long has noted, “one has to be adept in the verbal arts either to signify or to keep from being signified upon” (1986:1), and in the chapters that follow, I will chart some of the characteristic techniques of this art, particularly as it is played out through the imagery of the shapeshifter fox. Shapeshifting and Signification: The Metasemiotic Imagination Appearing in virtually every genre of Japanese discourse for more than a millennium, the very ubiquity of the shapeshifter fox provides ample testimony to its utility as a signifying figure. Implicated in a broad array of different imaginaires— religious, social, and economic—the imagery of the shapeshifter fox reflects a recurring constellation of tensions


and concerns associated with each of the registers of human experience in which it appears. As both a metamorph and a trickster, the shapeshifter fox personifies the challenges— ontological as well as epistemic—posed by transformation and duplicity in virtually every arena of human experience, and provides those skilled in the arts of signification with an idiom through which to represent, and thus respond, to those challenges. Foremost among these are the challenges inherent in the cultural enterprise itself, and the shapeshifter fox often appears to function as what might be called a “metasemiotic figure,” a sign used to signify signification itself (Bal 1988:137, 148). The figure of the shapeshifter fox, in other words,

14. Of course, the likening of culture to the rules of a game has a number of important limitations (Giddens 1993:53–7, 130–1). As a competition within a common set of rules, as self-interested action limited to a mutually-accepted body of strategic possibilities, games represent what is in many respects an ideal form of cultural activity. Nevertheless, while play may constitute a utopian model for human interactions in other spheres, it tends to be a less-than-accurate model of such interactions. Precisely because the “rules” themselves are subject to contestation—indeed, because not all the parties will even agree that they are playing the same game—the idea of a culture as a single shared game fails to provide an adequate account of the complexities of cultural practice. in this work, however, I explore the possibility of viewing the history of a culture as a shifting constellation of multiple “games,” numerous frameworks of significance and obligation that are constantly negotiated in the course of play. In such a meta-game, victory may be attained, not by out-competing your adversary, but by imposing a field of play in which you have already won. Following Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, I understand these fields of meaning as entailing not simply prescriptions for action but interwoven bodies of values and world views, shaping agents’ understanding of their own best interests every bit as much as they impose limits on how they might pursue those interests (1990:118). At the same time, however, I would suggest that cultures are composed of many of these “structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures” (1990: 53). By negotiating in which of these fields of significance a given practice will take place, one is in essence choosing (admittedly, in conjunction with other concerned parties and from a limited number of possibilities) the nature of the game to be played, and along with it the “structuring structures” that shape and limit the interests and actions of those involved.


provides a self-referential image through which to imagine the social-semiotic play of significance at the heart of collective imagination. As Roman Jakobson has argued, this kind of selfreferential, metasemiotic discourse is by no means restricted to the work of scholars (1985; 1987:103). Rather, it is a feature of communication at all levels, whenever meaning and its creation becomes an object of clarification or dispute. While the scholarly metalanguages of rhetoric or semiotic theory may employ their own specialist jargons, replete with ancient Greek vocabulary and contemporary neologisms, these theoretical frameworks ultimately share a common recursive project with more popular forms of understanding, forms that are by no means limited to such prosaic devices as paraphrase. Indeed, just as the scholarly analyses of Western semioticians depend on a host of images to make sense of their data,15 the imagery of a figure like the shapeshifter fox reveals a number of striking semiological insights. In the analyses that follow, I have endeavored to take these insights seriously, not only as an object of my own scholarly inquiry but as a participant in that inquiry, a repertoire of second-order thinking on the nature of significance and signification that might be productively paralleled with Western scholarly discourse on similar phenomena.16 A recurring theme in this metasemiotic commentary of the shapeshifter fox appears to reflect a pervasive apprehension regarding the troubling indeterminacies at work in human

15. Roland Barthes, following Saussure, describes the fundamental relationship between signifier and signified by making recourse to a series of images, characterizing signification as “an act of simultaneously cutting out two amorphous masses,” an articulation of “two floating kingdoms” analogous to the recto and verso sides of a piece of paper into which one has cut shapes. Alternatively, he describes signifier and signified as being like air and water, each responding instantaneously to changes in the pressure of the other (1967:56–7). On a somewhat more prosaic level, structural analyses are well-known for their reliance on concrete images in the form of charts and tables, intended to highlight in a spatial idiom the latent patterns of meaning at work within mythic narratives, third-order “bundles” of significance that Levi-Strauss compares to harmony within a musical score and to the arrangement of suits within a deck of cards (1963:211–3).


constructions of identity, knowledge and value. Just as the Jewel Maiden had worked to destabilize political regimes across Asia, the figure of the shapeshifter fox frequently serves to represent those forces at work in undermining the integrity of human regimes of significance more generally. In the most basic form of the shapeshifter tale discussed earlier in this chapter, for example, the fox appears as a kind of Cartesian evil demon, suggesting the limitations of simple empiricism, that what we see, hear and touch may not always be what it seems. In a similar fashion, the transformations and duplicities of the shapeshifter fox often manifest themselves at the margins of various economies of meaning, those regulated patterns of exchange and substitution at the What appears to us as the greatest difference and the most extreme contrast possible—the difference, namely, between ourselves and the “other”, our neighbor, whether close by or in distant China, of yesterday or of four thousand years ago—all that is a mere triviality when measured against the colossal aporia, the insoluble dilemma, in which we find ourselves as soon as we wish to approach life itself… [E]very historian knows that he may commence anywhere at all, but in any case he ends with himself’ (1986:672).

16. In spite of its profound influence on the development of the history of religions as a discipline, the term “phenomenology” seems to have fallen out of use in recent years, perhaps in part because of the parochialism of the taxonomies often associated with it. I would suggest, however, that this is primarily a matter of implementation rather than a sign of the morbidity of the theory itself. While this is not the place to delve too deeply into these matters, I would suggest that the formative principle of phenomenology is the fundamental isomorphism between all efforts at human signifying and conceptualizing. Although differences in purpose, genre and the criteria of valid argumentation exist between the second order discourses of modern scholarship and the discourses they study, they nevertheless share certain basic characteristics as signifying, meaning-making practices (c.f.Giddens 1993:58–9). Despite its romantic formulation, I think the following words of Gerardus van der Leeuw continue to represent something of a first principle:


heart of the regimes of significance in which human beings live their ordinary lives.17 In each of the chapters that follow, the shapeshifter fox appears closely associated with what might be described as a subordinate form of meaning—reflecting the role of maternal identity in the maintenance of a patriline, for example, or the place of demonic deception in the interpretation of divine revelation, or even the function of commodities in the ethics of reciprocal exchange. In each case, the transgressive exploits of the fox provides an idiom through which to present these forms of meaning not only as peripheral but as potentially corrosive, capable of working at cross-purposes to the larger signifying enterprises with which they are associated. For all the uncertainties they introduce, however, the relations signified by the shapeshifter fox are ultimately essential to those larger enterprises. In this sense, the repeated efforts to domesticate, subordinate or pacify the fox—indeed, the very marginality of the fox itself—can be understood as intimately linked with the effort to subject these forms of meaning to the larger cultural projects of which they are a part. At the same time, the metasemiotic imagery of the shapeshifter fox also serves to reflect the contentious dynamics by which such enterprises were negotiated in practice. Like the teller of shapeshifter stories—who conjures 17. In this context, my use of the terms “economy of meaning” and “regime of significance” reflects the idea (influenced in part by Goux 1990) that certain patterns of exchange and substitution (e.g. the patrilineal transfer of identity from father to son) are frequently privileged within a particular time and place as uniquely legitimate, the cornerstone on which the stability of the life-world depends. Of course, the essential affinities between economics and semiotics has long been recognized by semiotic and linguistic theory (e.g. Saussure 1983:79–80), particularly the idea that economic exchange, like the semiotic relation between signifier and signified, operates on more than one axis. As Barthes writes, “the sign is like a coin which has the value of a certain amount of goods which it allows one to buy, but also has value in relation to other coins” (1967:14). It is this feature that gives both signs and coins their marvelous power to encompass an entire life-world, but for all their utility, the inherent fluidity of both signs and coins necessarily renders them ambivalent, an object of considerable trepidation that in Japanese discourse has been frequently embodied in the figure of the shapeshifter fox.


a shifting world of perceptions and expectations for his or her audience that is strikingly similar to the worlds created by the shapeshifter for its victims—the cultural practice of imagination (that is. the shared work of rendering the world significant through images) is an inherently shifty enterprise, one appositely characterized by the trans formation and duplicity of the shapeshifter fox. Moreover, like the fox, whose marvelous transformations are typically guided by ulterior (and often less-than-wholesome) motives, the practice of signification is itself a strategic enterprise, whose underlying interests are seldom entirely clear. In a few cases, the parallels between the exploits of the shapeshifter fox and human signifying practice are expressed in quite explicit terms. In his eighteenth-century allegory Hōsei monogatari , for example, the antiestablishment thinker Ando Shoeki described a village ) attended by birds, fish, animals and meeting (yoriai insects, convened to discuss the perversions of human society (Yasunaga 1992:118–196). Each creature speaks in turn, describing how human beings have departed from their inherent nature as productive, cooperative beings, engaging in behaviors more fitting to the world of beasts. The crow speaks of the exploitation of the small by the great, the horse of enslavement, and the serpent of violence, each contrasting their own innate natures with the bestial degradation of a humanity that has adopted their ways. When the fox comes forward to speak, he decries the corrupting influence of all ideology, those illusory worlds concocted by merchants, warriors and kings (as well as by scholars, saints and sages) for no other purpose but to deprive the masses of the fruits of their labors. Once created, these imagined worlds take on a life of their own, creating a prison (however gilded) for the elites ultimately as inescapable as the laws and social institutions that oppress the lower classes. At the culmination of his speech, the fox summarizes his point with the statement that forms the epigraph to this chapter—” I do not change into a human,” he declares, reversing the standard image of vulpine deception, “human beings transform themselves into foxes!” Of course, such explicit uses of the metasemiotic potential of shapeshifter fox imagery are relatively rare. Indeed, Shoeki


himself was prevented from disseminating his writings by the feudal authorities of his day, and his work was only rediscovered by scholars more than a century after his death. Yet the capacity for shapeshifter imagery to signify signification appears woven into the very fabric of shapeshifter narratives, presenting an image of signifying practice in which subtlety and brute power are often intertwined. Like the in ‘yōshi Yasunari, who ultimately calls upon the Lord of Mount Tai to prove his case regarding the true identity of Lady Tamamo—or Gennō, who accomplishes his pacification of the Murder stone by striking it with the symbol of his clerical office—the imagery of shapeshifting frequently portrays signification as an act of authority, even violence (see Figures 3 and 4). Like the imagery of the shapeshifting “contest,” however, the shared world(s) of meanings forged in the signifying practices of l‘imaginaire are subject to a constant play of reversals, in which the hegemonic force of authority can be appropriated and redirected in unexpected ways. In this constantly shifting field of significations and counter-significations, all agents have the potential to appear as both shapeshifter and victim, scholars no less than the people they study. The motif of the shapeshifter fox can thus be seen, not only as a narrative theme manifesting a number of associations and entailments, but also as a recurring cultural logic, employed in a set of cultural operations which can themselves be seen as shapeshifting. They are, moreover, ultimately without conclusion—like the characters in tales of shapeshifting trickery, the world signified within one imaginaire may provide the material for another’s reversal. These multiple imaginaires, imposed in shifting variations and subject to polyvalent (and frequently subversive) interpretations, present a cultural life-world every bit as fantastic as the world of the shapeshifter narrative. In such a world, we are each of us potential shapeshifters, playing as much on (and with) the expectations of others as with the objects of the material world.


Figures 3 and 4. Encounters between Lady Tamamo and her exorcists, as portrayed in the Sangoku yōfu-den. In Figure 3 (above, Kakubari 1888:111) Yasunari prepares to expose the Jewel Maiden’s true form by striking her with the purificatory gohei wand. In a parallel fashion, Gennō’s exorcism of the Murder Stone is rendered as Figure 4 (left, Kakubari 1888:139). Raising his fly-whisk wand (hossu )—a symbol of his clerical office and of his exorcistic power—he appears ready to strike the spirit of Lady Tamamo (replete with fox’s tail), as she rises out of the poisonous stone.

CHAPTER 2 Foxes, Wives and Spirits

Shapeshifting and the Languages of Marriage

Now, these results can be achieved only by treating marriage regulations and kinship systems as a kind of language, a set of processes permitting the establishment, between individuals and groups, of a certain type of communication. Claude Levi-Strauss (1963:61) The oldest recorded account of shapeshifting foxes in Japan , a collection can be found in the Nihon ryōiki compiled in the early ninth century by a Buddhist monk affiliated with the Yakushiji in Nara. Entitled “On Taking a Fox as a Wife and Bringing Forth a Child” (1.2), the tale is translated by Kyoko Nakamura as follows: In the reign of Emperor Kimmei…a man from Ōno district of Mino province set out on horseback in search of a good wife. In a field he came across a pretty and responsive girl. He winked at her and asked, “Where are you going, Miss?” “I am looking for a good husband,” she answered. So he asked, “Will you be my wife?” and, when she agreed, he took her to his house and married her. Before long she became pregnant and gave birth to a boy. At the same time their dog also gave birth to a puppy, it being the fifteenth of the twelfth month. The puppy constantly barked at the mistress and seemed fierce and ready to bite. She became so frightened that she asked her husband to beat the dog to death. But he felt sorry for the dog and could not bear to kill it.


In the second or third month, when the annual quota of rice was hulled, she went to the place where the female servants were pounding rice in a mortar to give them some refreshments. The dog, seeing her, ran after her barking and almost bit her. Startled and terrified, she ] and suddenly changed into a wild fox [yakan jumped on the top of the hedge. Having seen this, the man said, “Since a child was born between us, I cannot forget you. Please come always and sleep with me.” She acted in accordance with her husband’s words and came and slept with him. For this reason she was named “Kitsune” meaning “come and sleep.” Slender and beautiful in her red skirt…she would rustle away from her husband, whereupon he sang of his love for his wife: Love fills me completely After a moment of reunion. Alas! She is gone. The man named his child Kitsune, which became the . The child, famous child’s surname—Kitsune no atae for his enormous strength, could run as fast as a bird flies. He is the ancestor of the Kitsune-no-atae family in Mino province (1997:104–5). In its basic outlines, this story presents the prototype of a recurring motif in Japanese literature, drama and folklore— ).1 The tale of the theme of the “fox wife” (kitsune nyōbō a man who marries a beautiful woman only to discover that she is really a fox in disguise, this motif constitutes one of the central elements of shapeshifter fox imagery. As a poignant tale of love, the story of the Fox Wife of Mino may differ markedly from the demonic seduction of the Jewel Maiden, yet these two figures share a common literary pattern, a modus operandi that involves commoners as well as kings, from sixthcentury Mino in the West to sixteenth-century Mito in the East.2 The ubiquity of this motif is the product of a complex pattern of transmission and influence, as difficult to track as the fox

FOXES, WIVES AND SPIRITS 35

itself. Setsuwa collections like the Nihon ryōiki, for example, were closely linked to the efforts of Buddhist proselytizers—some seem to have been compiled by priests as a sourcebook for sermons, while others were collected by their audiences largely for their entertainment value (Kelsey 1982: 34–45). At the same time, these proselytizers relied heavily on oral tradition, and while some setsuwa collections appear to have drawn stories directly from other tale collections, the influence of many other sources (including Buddhist scripture

1. Japanese folklorists have placed the fox wife motif within the panoply of popular narratives in various ways. Seki Keigo (1953, 2: 161–71), for example, labels tales of the fox wife as Tale Type 116, dividing them into three basic subtypes: (1) a “single wife variant” like that presented in the Nihon ryōiki; (2) a “double wife variant,” where the fox appears as doppelganger to a real woman; and (3) a “kikimimi variant,” where the fox bestows magical gifts like the power to understand animal languages on her son. In her effort to integrate Seki’s system into a broader comparative framework based on the Aarne-Thompson folklore typology, Hiroko Ikeda designates the fox wife as Tale Type 413D, a subset of tales in which men marry nonhuman creatures that have assumed the form of human women (1971:107–8). In so doing, she recategorizes elements combined by Seki into different Tale Types altogether, especially the gift bestowal of the kikimimi variant, which she separates as a sequel into a Tale Type of its own. Differences of this sort point to a basic methodological difficulty associated with Tale Type categorization. As Vladimir Propp has argued (1968), the multiple, overlapping criteria employed in thematic analysis provides a poor basis for comprehensive typology. Nevertheless, when placing these tales in the context of the larger world in which they appear, thematic analysis provides the opportunity for complex analyses of roles, motives and institutions. For Proppian morphology, these elements are considered accidental or supplementary to the essential core of dramatic plot function, “defined from the point of view of its significance for the course of the action” (1968:21). Such details do more than simply add color, however; they also act as part of the connective tissue joining the world-of-the-text with the larger world beyond, providing the medium by which the one can reflect the other. In this respect, I see attention to these elements as central to the analysis of tales like the fox wife. 2. In her summary of the early modern folk tales compiled by Seki Keigo, Ikeda cites 24 versions of the basic fox wife theme, drawn from 13 different prefectures in Kyūshū, Shikoku and across Honshū (1971: 107).


as well as local legend) seem to have been mediated through oral transmission (Kelsey 1982:18–21). In a similar fashion, the idea at the center of the “Fox Wife of Mino” story—that transformed foxes may assume female form to marry human men—suggests the influence of a similar motif in T’ang dynasty Chinese tale collections, one that appears to have become a part of Japanese oral tradition prior to its appearance in the Nihon ryōiki.3 Later the tales disseminated by these setsuwa preachers—and by the popular storytellers they inspired—provided one of the sources for the dramatic and print genres of later periods. Drawing on pre-existing oral narratives, but also providing a medium for their further dissemination, each of these genres in turn provided the inspiration for tales that continued to be retold until they were again transcribed by modern folklorists.4 The publications of these scholars, too, have continued to shape contemporary Japanese popular culture, even as they themselves are influenced by the conventions of Western academic disciplines.

3. The image of the transformed fox woman seems to have left its mark both on the writings of literati and on popular oral tradition. It is interesting to note, for example, that the scholar of Chinese learning Ōe no Masafusa entitled his twelfth-century work on foxes Kobiki (“A record of seductive vixen”), using a term which, while common enough in Chinese sources, nevertheless bears little relation to the Japanese apparitions on which he writes (Smits 1996: 80). Similarly, the author of the Nihon ryōiki credits the inspiration of more than one T’ang dynasty tale collection in the preface to his work, but also declares the stories in his collection to be of local origin. While the story of the Fox Wife of Mino may bear marked similarities to Chinese motifs, the way in which the story has been interwoven into a larger narrative cycle (revolving around the hero known as “the Venerable Dōjō;” see Nakamura 1997:73) suggests that the tale’s immediate source lies in the local traditions of Mino and Owari provinces, whatever its ultimate debt to continental traditions. Nakamura, citing the work of Uematsu Shigeru, suggests that as much as 90 percent of the Nihon ryōiki material can be traced to Japanese oral traditions (1997:42). 4. Thus, for example, Ikeda points to an eighteenth-century puppet play as a potential source for the dissemination of fox wife stories in modern folklore (1971:108).


The history of the fox wife motif, in other words, is bound up in a veritable Gordian knot of literary influence and oral transmission, one in which distinctions between “folk” and “elite” or “indigenous” and “foreign” quickly become untenable. Untangling this knot, however, is less important for the purposes of this work than exploring the interaction be tween these tales and the world(s) of their tellers. As the folklorist Bengt Holbek has argued, narratives are not like migratory birds; they cannot be tracked independently of the people who tell them (1987:159). Textual questions of source, influence and intermediate forms ultimately reveal little about the real mechanism behind the transmission of narratives from one group to another and from generation to generation. Rather, the continued survival and dissemination of a story like the fox wife is subject to its continued significance over time, both for their authors and their audiences (Levi-Strauss 1963:245–68). The history of the fox wife motif thus depends, not only on the changing morphology of narrative themes, but also on the shifting relationship between those themes and the circumstances in which they were told. Insofar as the imagery of the fox wife can be explored as a coherent entity, its meaning(s) must be sought, not only in the sum of its variants—what Stith Thompson described as the “almost kaleidoscopic variation” of the tale in all its narrative forms (1977:92)—but also in the complex interactions between the content of tales and the larger world (s) of which they are a part (see Komatsu 1985). As a tale both of foxes and of wives, the story of the fox wife is implicated in a much larger constellation of imagery, involving the marvelous interaction of humanity with the realm of non-human spirits, as well as the more prosaic dealings of husbands with their wives. It is precisely in this intersection that I understand much of the enduring popularity and significance of the fox wife tale to reside. Juxtaposed in the story of the fox wife, the imagery and logics of spirits and of wives each provides an idiom for expressing the other, while the imagery of the shapeshifter fox provides a means to reflect the tensions inherent in both. If, following Claude Levi-Strauss, a culture’s marriage patterns can be understood as “a kind of language,” it is a language whose


terms and whose grammar is bound up in a number of other kinds of language, as well. Vampires, Lovers and Ancestors: Fox Wives and the Cosmographic Enterprise At first blush, the purpose and significance of the fox wife motif is seldom entirely clear, especially in setsuwa collections like the Nihon ryōiki. Unlike many other stories in the collection, the tale of the Fox Wife of Mino does not conclude with an explicit lesson, nor does it seem to present any clear moral example, a lapse that is particularly striking given the stated aim of the work: By editing these stories of wondrous events I want to pull the people forward by the ears, offer my hand to lead them to good, and show them how to cleanse their feet of evil (Nakamura 1997:222).5 This question of editorial selection is a recurring issue in the study of setsuwa literature. The lack of clear criteria or explicit organizing principles—or, in the case of the Nihon ryōiki, an apparent failure to adhere to its own stated principles—might easily be attributed to a lack of editorial discipline. I would suggest, however, that the omnivorous nature of most setsuwa collections is the direct result of their essentially cosmographic orientation, an enterprise that takes the entire life-world of the audience as its object.6 Reflecting an assumption that moral cultivation is dependent on a deeper understanding of the world, these tales seek to shape behavior by addressing the world views that inform it (LaFleur 1983:32–3).

5. Following William LaFleur (1983:32–4), I have modified Nakamura’s rendering of ryōi to “wondrous” rather than “miraculous.” 6. My use of the term “cosmography” is drawn from Robert Campany’s study of the zhiguai genre in early medieval China (1996), a genre which, as I noted in Chapter One, is closely linked with the Japanese genre of setsuwa bungaku.


It is important to note, for example, that the work of collecting setsuwa narratives was dominated not simply by men but by monks, and the inclusion of fox wife tales may have been motivated by a characteristically negative Buddhist outlook on family life. According to his own autobiographical statements, for example, the author of the Nihon ryōiki was a monk who may have entered the priesthood relatively late in life, having first lived as a husband and father. He describes his lay life as one of frustration, hunger and penury, and he lived to see the death of at least one son. Although he does not explicitly give this as his reason for including the tale in his collection, the figure of the fox wife may have appealed to his allegorical sensibilities. Representing a means to portray the temptations as well as the anguish that inevitably attends relations with women, it would have justified his own rejection of the householder’s life and offered an implicit object lesson for others to do the same.7 The didacticism of setsuwa literature, however, is also implicated within a larger world view, a six-fold realm of eavenly beings, demons and animal spirits linked together by h dynamics of moral causation and rebirth. By charting the the contours of this larger cosmos (and the beings that inhabit it), texts like the Nihon ryōiki were intended to provide the reader/audience with both a model of the world and models for navigating within it. In this context, the figure of the fox wife

7. As Liz Wilson has noted, marvelous reflections on the tempting power and ultimate perilousness of the female form is a basic trope in Buddhist didacticism (1996:93–5). Insofar as both the compilation of setsuwa and the early collection of folk tales was an enterprise dominated primarily by men, it should not be surprising that these texts tend to emphasize the perspectives and anxieties of male experience. That is not to say, however, that female voices and perspectives are entirely absent from these tales. As Wendy Doniger has suggested, “much-retold narratives” like the fox wife tale are always multivocal entities, a kind of oral palimpsest that continue to retain the traces of previous voices beneath the surface of later renditions. Moreover, while folklore research suggests that women are more likely to assume a male voice than vice versa, there remains the possibility that male authors might demonstrate a pronounced empathy for women’s perspectives in their tales (1998:80, 115–125).


appears in a number of different guises, from demonic vixen to dutiful wife and divine mother. Attributed a range of different motivations, the figure of the fox wife engages a number of fundamental systems of thought—both indigenous and continental—making it a recurring motif in the moralontological program of the setsuwa genre, a paradigm whose legacy continues to shape popular narrative well into the modern period. The most sinister form of the fox wife appears in association with the continental cosmological imagery of onmyōdō (“the way of yin and yang”). In a number of setsuwa stories, the , an animal characterized by fox wife appears as injū (Ch.yin) energy and attracted to beings “female” in (Ch.yang) energy such as human males (de dominated by yō Visser 1908:101). The influence of such a creature on a human male is essentially vampiric, drawing vital energy from the victim to bal ance her own. As a consequence, the man can be weakened or even killed, or the injū herself might be overwhelmed by too much male energy—the seventeenthreports that century encyclopedia Honchō shokkan “some say that if a fox changes into a woman and has illicit relations with a man, then this man will die. If he does not die, then the fox herself will die” (NKZ 150:953).8 As in the case of Lady Tamamo, encounters with fox-women were often reported to result in a man’s physical or mental illness—in one twelfth-century nobleman’s diary, a fox-woman is even blamed for a young man contracting a venereal disease (Taiki 1144/5/30, ZST 23:123). It is likely for this reason that the Konjaku monogatarishū advises men to show caution if they should meet a beautiful woman they have not seen before, lest she turn out to be a fox in disguise (27.38). The fox wife is seldom an altogether unsympathetic figure, however, and many tales describe her as a creature governed by love rather than malevolence. A tale that appears in more

8. This understanding appears to be supported by setsuwa tales involving other injū such as the Konjaku monogatarishū story of a snake that attempts to perform fellatio on a sleeping monk. The monk awakens to find the snake killed, overwhelmed by the monk’s male energy (29.40).


than one setsuwa collection, for example, tells of a fox who sacrifices herself for the love of a man.9 Begun in the style of a courtly romance between a handsome gentleman and the flawless beauty he chances to encounter, the tale takes on an ominous tone when the woman resists her paramour’s sexual advances on the grounds that it would mean one or the other’s death. Undaunted by her incredible statement, the man’s declarations of love only grow more insistent. Finally, the woman relents, telling him that she will die in his stead, if only he promises to copy the Lotus Sūtra in her memory. After their lovemaking, she again repeats her dire prediction to her incredulous paramour, and tearfully asks him to meet her the following day. His curiosity now aroused, the man goes to the spot she had named, and is amazed to find, not his lover, but a dead fox, its face covered by the fan she had taken from him the night before. Awestruck by this fantastic turn of events, yet deeply moved by her devotion and self-sacrifice, he imme diately begins the work of copying the Sūtra, and thus enables her spirit to attain rebirth in heaven.10 As the story of the Fox Wife of Mino suggests, however, many fox wife tales reveal no sign of onmyōdō thought. 11Rather than presenting the fox wife as a dangerous injū many variants portray her as an assiduous domestic laborer, whose tireless efforts enables her household to thrive. In some stories, the fox wife also uses her powers of transformation to shield a bumper rice crop from the tax-assessor’s gaze, or provide her family with magical gifts.12At the outset, these helpful fox wives often appear to be motivated first and

9. In relating this tale, I rely on the version told in Konjaku monogatarishū 14.5, though the tale can also be found in the Hokke genki and Kokon-chōmonjū . 10. She takes his fan “as a sign” (shirushi ), suggesting that it was to serve both as a token of his affection and as the sign by which he would learn the truth of her statements (NKBZ 21:495). 11. The onmyōdō imagery of the fox as sort of injū succubus should not be taken as the consensus by any means. Indeed, the Honchō shokkan is quick to dismiss the idea it reports of the deadly effects of intimate relations between human men and transformed foxes (NKZ 150:953).


foremost by a sense of duty—in a number of tales, the fox wife first takes on human form to repay her debt to the man who saved her life (Seki 1953, 2:161–2). Indeed, the gratitude of foxes is a common theme in both folk tales and setsuwa collections; one tale from the Konjaku monogatarishū (27.40) concludes with the moral message that, if foxes are capable of genuine demonstrations of gratitude, then surely human beings can do the same.13 In many versions, however, this sense of obligation gives way to more intimate human feelings, and the fox wife continues to look after her family long after her original debt has been repaid. In a seventeenthcentury tale from Ryūgasaki, for example, the fox wife leaves her husband Chūgorō after her identity has been discovered, but not before pinning a note to her infant son’s clothing that reads: In the body of an animal without compassion, I assumed human form to repay my obligation to Chūgorō for his assistance. With the shallow reasoning of a fox, I forgot that it was time to leave when further affection was extended to me (Ryūgasaki-shi Rekishi Minzoku Shiryōkan 1997:9). Regardless of her motivations, however, the revelation of the fox wife’s true form inevitably spells the end of their life

12. A version of the “hide the rice ears” variant from Aichi prefecture is translated by Dorson (1962:132–4). In other variants, the husband and child go out in pursuit of the departed fox wife, and receive from her a gift that enables her child to understand the languages of animals, a tale Seki describes as the kikimimi-variant (1953, 2:161–6). 13. The theme of the fox wife repaying her obligations may be seen as part of a larger idea concerning the moral reciprocity exacted by foxes more generally. Not only are foxes understood to return a favor, they are also known to wreak a terrible vengeance on those who wrong them. The Nihon ryōiki (2.40), for example, tells the story of a malicious hunter who captures a litter of baby foxes, only to leave them skewered on stakes outside their den. In retaliation, the mother fox transforms herself into the form of the hunter’s mother, so that she might steal the hunter’s own son. When the hunter goes out in search of his kid napped child, he finds him beside the fox’s hole, impaled with a skewer just as the fox kits had been.


together, a turn of events no one appears able to avert. Husbands in many tales seem remarkably willing to ignore their wives’ animal nature, begging them to continue on as they had before. For her part, too, the fox wife in these stories appears every bit as sad to leave as her husband is to lose her. 14 More than one fox wife tale concludes with a pathos-ridden description of the husband begging for his wife’s return, tears in the eyes of both as the children wail for their mother. A nineteenth-century print by the artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi, for example, portrays the moment of the fox wife’s departure, her human form evaporating as the husband looks on in shock and her child clutches frantically at the vanishing hem of her robe. At the same time, the fox herself can be seen within the fading female form, her paw drawn poignantly over her muzzle in the conventional sign of weeping (see Figure 5). The fact that the fox wife typically leaves behind children as well as a husband in these tales, however, does more than simply magnify the pathos of the narrative. It also marks the tale’s affinity with another, equally important theme in the Japanese religious milieu. Starting in the earliest Japanese sources, certain families have been set apart from others by tales of mysterious ancestral figures, spirits who married human beings before being exposed as animals. These divine animal ancestors include, for example, the grandmother of the legendary first emperor Jimmu, who revealed herself to be a

14. In this respect, the Japanese fox wife motif seems to be incompatible with one of the predominant approaches to animal wife tales in the West, one that takes the theme of the Swan Maiden (categorized in the Aarne-Thompson taxonomy as Tale Type 400) as normative. Unlike the Swan Maiden—which A.T. Hatto insightfully described as expressing “the pitiable lot of a girl from another tribe and territory who has been trapped into an unsuitable union through the guile and strength of a man” (1961:333)—the fox wife is an almost exclusively willing participant in marriage. Consequently, my approach to the figure of the fox wife will largely avoid the issues of compulsion, rape and escape, themes that have predominated in recent interpretations of the Swan Maiden (e.g. Doniger 2000:107). Nevertheless, like Barbara Fass Leavy, I still take fox wife tales to represent “virtual allegories of gender relations” under patriarchy (1994:1), if relations of a different sort than those engaged by the Swan Maiden.


giant sea-monster (wani) while giving birth.15 Unable to remain with her human family as before, she left her son with 45. her husband and returned to her ocean home (Kojiki 7). In the case of the Fox Wife of Mino, the tale ends with an account of the fox wife’s son, a person endowed with superhuman strength and speed. These qualities, moreover, are shown to continue in his heirs. Later in the work, the Nihon ryōiki (2.4) relates the story of the fox wife’s fourthgeneration descendant, a woman known only as “the Fox of ), whose marvelous strength Mino” (Mino no kitsune enabled her to rob local merchants and terrorize the populace (c.f.Konjaku monogatarishū 23.17). Not only do numerous tales of this kind identify the fox wife as the ancestress of families known for some exceptional quality (strength, wealth or even an extra set of teats), but in some cases this ancestress also acts as a tutelary figure, providing guidance and support over the course of generations, enabling her descendants to achieve success and prosperity. In addition to explaining the power or prestige of particular families, therefore, these tales may also work to glorify the spirit of their vulpine ancestress. More than one fox wife story can be found in shrine foundation narratives, casting the spirit of the fox wife as a being from whom benefits might be obtained, not only by her own fam ily, but by any worshipper with the proper devotion (Ryūgasakishi Rekishi Minzoku Shiryōkan 1997). As dangerous succubus, moral agent or divine ancestress, the immersion of the fox wife into the domestic world of human relationships thus provides a compelling idiom for a range of different messages about the nature of the cosmos and our proper behavior within it. While the motivations that govern the fox wife may vary, however, the narrative structure of these tales remains strikingly similar. Whether it takes the form of the husband’s tragic loss or his narrow escape, every tale culminates with the fox-woman’s exposure, a turn of events that inevitably results in an end to her previous role as wife and mother to her family.16 This recurring sequence of

15. On the uncertain meanings of the term wani, see Philippi (1968: 406–7).


Figure 5. Tsumagome: Abe no Yasuna Watching His Wife Change Into a Fox Spirit and Disappear (from Kuniyoshi’s 1852 series “69 Stations of the Kisokaidō Road”). Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio; Mary A.Ainsworth Bequest, 1950.


events—which, for all its inevitability, remains largely unexplained within the tales themselves—appears to be driven by an underlying cultural logic, a fault line at the heart of human social institutions. It is a logic, moreover, that can be found mirrored in the anxious and ambivalent relations of human beings with the sacred. “A World Never Quite Her Own”: The Wild Other of Patrilineal Exogamy In addition to a work of genealogy, the Nihon ryōiki tale of the Fox Wife of Mino also represents an exercise in etymology, one that fits the figure of the fox into a larger world of associations. When the fox wife first reveals her true form, she , a term is described, not as a fox (kitsune), but as a yakan of Chinese origin associated not only with foxes, but with wild canines more generally (NKZ 150:952; see also de Visser 1908: 56–8). In a similar fashion, the protagonist first encounters his future wife, not in a town or even on the road, but in an ), a location that prefigures her uncultivated moor (hirono later revelation as a creature of the wilderness (the character , pronounced both as ya and no, connotes distance from civilization, referring not only to wild animals but also to the rustic life of the unlettered countryside). Only later is she given the name Kitsune, a name that puns on the similarity between the common designation for foxes and the two (“come and sleep”) and ki-tsune phrases kitsu-ne (“come always”) by which the husband of the tale begs for his wife’s return. More than an evocation of their new 16. This change in relationship takes many forms. At one extreme is an ending of the sort envisioned by the tale of Tamamo no mae or the Konjaku monogatarishū story of the fox maiden and the fan, with the death of either husband or wife. Most commonly, it ends simply with her exile or departure—in one case, the fox wife is even described as entering cloistered life as a nun (NKBT 38:148–160). In other variants, the fox wife’s relation to her family may simply be attenuated—the fox wife of Mino, for example, continues on as a nocturnal visitor to her husband, and the Fox Wife of Ryūgasaki continues to secretly provide assistance to her descendants in the guise of mysterious strangers (Ryūgasaki-shi Rekishi Minzoku Shiryōkan 1997:11).


relationship, this play on words serves as an act of categorization, refining the place of the fox from the larger grouping of wild canines designated by the term yakan to a creature identified with her movement into and out of human domestic space. This etymology, though unique among variants of the fox wife story, nevertheless serves to highlight a common framework shared by fox wife narratives more generally. A narrative pattern framed primarily by its domestic setting, it presents the figure of the fox wife as fundamentally out of place, a wild animal at the center of the human world. In this respect, stories of fox wives point to a body of associations and oppositions surrounding the role of women in Japanese society, especially in their role as wives and mothers. An orientation with parallels in other marvelous marriage tales—in Japan and throughout the world—it has been identified by a number of interpreters with a pervasive patriarchal orientation, one that links women with the forces of the wild, against which the (male) work of cultural production is in large part defined. 17 As Barbara Fass Leavy has argued, the endurance of narrative themes like the fox wife, with its imagery of wildness at the heart of culture, can be attributed to the persistence of a larger social and categorical order in which “woman was a symbolic outsider, was the other, and marriage demanded an intimate involvement in a world never quite her own” (1994:2). In this context, the domestic space of the fox wife tale can be seen to exist at the intersection of two not altogether compatible projects, the biological continuation of the species, and the socio-cultural maintenance of the family-unit as a 17. A number of recent works have come to emphasize the importance of gender-perspectives in the folklore of marriage, including not only Leavy (1994) but also Taggart (1990), Warner (1994), and Doniger (2000). The gendered inflection of the natureculture distinction reflected in these tales is perhaps best elaborated by Sherry B.Ortner (1996), in which she sees Simone de Beauvoir’s (1989) distinction between Life and Existence prefigured in the selfunderstandings of many cultures, a distinction which tends to associate women (whom de Beauvoir saw as enslaved to the life of the species) much more strongly with the realm of Nature, while men tend to be seen as the representatives of Culture.


corporate entity. This uneasy juxtaposition can be seen expressed in the Nihon ryōiki in terms of the fox wife’s interaction with the family dog. In a number of Japanese tales, foxes are often contrasted with domestic canines, an antipathy that rises to the level of a symbolic opposition in many contexts.18 In the Nihon ryōiki (NKBT 70:68), this opposition plays out explicitly against the backdrop of the household (ie the woman of the house (ietoji and family dog (ie no inu )—both of which interact in relation to a third, the ). The husband who acts as master of the house (iegimi puppy, as a domestic animal born within the household, appears as the natural antagonist to the fox wife, a creature of the field posing as a creature of the house. In such a formulation, there isn’t room enough in the household for the two of them, and in the final analysis, the puppy (a symbol of the domestic sphere) belongs while the fox wife does not. And it is precisely at the moment when she is furthest from her proper element, overseeing the preparation of the household taxes—what may be the epitome of the family’s identity as a socio-cultural rather than biological entity—that the dog attacks and exposes her. Indeed, a recurring feature of fox wife tales is that the fox wife is exposed, not in the course of her sexual (or reproductive) relationship to her husband, but rather as she participates in the cultural or economic life of the household. In many tales, for example, the fox wife is exposed in the course of caring for her children, the very moment when a wife may have her greatest influence in the cultural development of the next generation. In a similar fashion, other tales tell of the fox wife exposed while working

18. Japanese folk tales and literature are replete with stories of faithful dogs that uncover magical forces threatening their masters (e.g. Uji shūi monogatari 14.10, Konjaku monogatarishū 29.32). More specifically, the dog is commonly understood to be the blood enemy of the fox (de Visser 1908:31, 51, 72, 79, 80). In Konjaku monogatarishū 27.31, dogs are recommended as a means for detecting and expelling transformed foxes. Similarly, the Honchō shokkan states that “if you release a hunting dog that is ferocious and quick, the dog will know the smell of the fox and will bark incessantly and try to bite, and thus chase it away” (NKZ 150:953).


at her loom, a characteristically female contribution to the family’s economic livelihood. In this conflict, the husband seems caught in the middle, between the wildness of his wife and the domestic demands of his household. The solution to this interplay of culture and nature seems to play out according to an implicit understanding of the proper place of nature in the domestic sphere, particularly as expressed in the relations of husband and wife. Her wildness exposed, the fox wife can no longer serve in her former capacity as mistress of the house, although in the Nihon ryōiki she continues to come to her husband at night. This seems to reflect the continued centrality of the natural order within the erotic and reproductive life of the household, as well as the need to segregate that wildness from the most public aspects of the domestic sphere. The juxtaposition of these images of nature and culture with the marital theme of the fox wife tale also informs the story’s implications as a theological narrative. As a story of a divine ancestress, the fox wife’s marriage to a human male reflects a recurring pattern in Japanese religion, a mythological mediation between humanity and the realm of the spirits, between the profane and the sacred. Yet at the same time, this union with the superhuman also represents a threat to the human significance of the world, an infusion of non-human power that must be carefully controlled. Like other wild spirits, who are invited into human domestic space as a source of power and benefits, and then invited again to depart, the inevitable flight of the fox wife can be seen to follow a basic theological necessity.19 However temporary the union of these two realms might be, it nevertheless results in a child that represents a kind of hybrid of its parents, a spirit-person ) that continues to serve as a bridge between (hitogami their respective realms. Entering the human world, revealing herself and then departing again, the fox wife leaves behind a 19. The classic example of this dynamic is the ritual treatment of the spirit of the mountain (yama no kami ), who each spring is escorted down to bestow his fertility as the god of the rice paddies (ta no kami ), and each autumn is escorted back again. Indeed, the figure of the fox is often closely associated with this process through the idiom of Inari worship (see Smyers 1999:75–6).


powerful trace of her presence in the form of her son, a continuing contribution to the human world (c.f.Miller 1987: 72–75). For all the power of her gift and the necessity of her departure, however, there remains a sense of loss, of longing or even nostalgia for that brief moment in which it was possible to be in direct contact with the sacred. In this sense, the husband’s song in the Nihon ryōiki, “Yearning [ren ] fills me completely after a moment of reunion. Alas! She is gone” can be read as an expression of religious, as well as romantic, devotion. Visiting Husbands, Visiting Wives: Text and Context in the Heian Period These anxieties surrounding the otherness of foxes, spirits and wives, however, always take place against the backdrop of particular historical institutions. Far from remaining constant, the rules of residence and descent which shaped Japanese understandings of marriage and the place of women within it have themselves transformed considerably over the centuries since the Nihon ryōiki tale of the Fox Wife of Mino. 20 A juxtaposition of fox wife variants from various periods with the assumptions and conventions they engaged reveals a number of insights into the significance—social and theological —these tales have held for those who told (and retold) them over time. It is a significance, moreover, in which the shapeshifting embodied by fox imagery figured predominantly. During the period when the Nihon ryōiki was compiled (and for some centuries thereafter), marriage of the kind described

20. While, as Leavy suggests, “patriarchy” in the general sense of “male-dominated societies” may represent something of a historical universal (1994:13), the specific institutions by which that power is expressed can differ dramatically in both space and time. As James Taggart has argued with regard to the marriage tales of Spain and Latin America, these institutional differences are often paralleled by illustrative variations in the tales those people tell, expressing the particular perils and possibilities inherent in their own marriage practices (1990:200–218).


in the story of the Fox Wife of Mino was only one of a variety of possible arrange ments. Described in terms of residency, the marriage practices of the Heian period can be delineated into three basic types: uxorilocal (in which the husband takes up residence in his wife’s natal home), duolocal (where the husband maintains a separate residence and “visits” his wife, usually at the home of her parents), and neolocal (involving husband and wife setting up housekeeping together but independent of either’s parents). In the course of their married life, a couple might make use of each of these arrangements in turn, and a man married to more than one woman might enter into a different kind of housekeeping with each of his wives (McCullough 1967:105; Wakita 1984:73–99).21 These diverse forms of residence were linked together by a shared understanding of marriage, one based on a fundamental distinction between household (ie ) and lineage (uji ).22 On the one hand, the uji was primarily a political and religious institution, a group identified by a shared patrilineal descent and surname, as well as by the divinities and ancestors they venerated. Membership in a particular uji often conferred hereditary rights and religious functions, and was the primary criterion establishing one’s position in civil society. The ie, on the other hand, corresponded to the domestic unit itself, a residential entity reckoned independently from lineage. Though it often led to a change in residence for either husband or wife, marriage did not affect

21. Insofar as the vast majority of historical records tend to reflect the experience of elites, it is often difficult to ascertain the extent to which these marriage patterns were shared by other classes. Similarly, in considering the relationship between texts like the Nihon ryōiki and the experience of their audiences, it is important to keep in mind that setsuwa collections were very much caught up in the world of the upper class (and upper class patronage)—the descendants of the fox wife of Mino, after all, are described as the Kitsune no atae , a designation marking them as titled elites rather than part of “the masses” in any usual sense of that term. 22. In contrasting uji and ie, I have in mind McCullough’s relatively narrow uses of the terms (1967:141), rather than the grand historical sense of “uji society” and “ie society” put forward in Murakami (1984: 281–363).


either’s membership in the patrilineal uji of their birth— regardless of the form her marriage might take, a wife remained a member of her father’s uji, and her children, in turn, would be reckoned as members of her husband’s lineage rather than her own (McCullough 1967:146). An individual household, in other words, routinely had living within it the members of at least two lineages, the wife’s clan as well as the husband’s. These lineages, however, were each associated with different functions within the household. While relations through the husband’s side largely determined the public identity and status of any children born to the union, it was matrilateral relations that tended to provide the economic and social support necessary for a family’s upkeep and success.23 Whereas children’s connections to their paternal grandparents might be limited to such public events as coming-of-age ceremonies, their relations with maternal grandparents were often marked by a warmth and intimacy that may at times have rivaled even their connection to their parents (McCullough 1967:142). This dual system of matrilateral and patrilineal functions within the household also served as the motivating force behind the ways in which husbands and wives came to live together. Surveys of court documents and the popular literature of the period have noted that, while husbands often came to live with their wives’ families, the reverse was only rarely the case—virilocal marriage, in the sense of a wife coming to live within the extended family of her husband, appears to have been virtually unknown.24 While this may be attributable at least in part to the benefits to be had from a husband’s close relations with his wife’s family, it also seems to have been related to a deep-seated aversion, a taboo against

23. The tokoro arawashi ceremony—by which a man was accepted by a woman’s parents as their daughter’s husband in uxorilocal marriage—can be seen as an emblematic reflection of the type of support expected from the wife’s family in her husband’s upkeep. After the woman’s parents ritually “discover” their new sonin-law in their daughter’s bed, he is given food from his new wife’s family hearth and provided with new clothing before being formally introduced to the rest of the family (Nickerson 1993:438–9).


women of different lineages (each with her own domestic spirits) sharing the same hearth. Unlike uxorilocality or duolocal “visiting marriage,” which allowed for the complementary interaction of matrilateral and patrilineal functions within the same household, virilocal marriage brought competing matrilateral influences (in the form of wife and mother-in-law) into the same domestic space, threatening the continued integrity of both the household and the patriline.25 As Peter Nickerson has argued, the complementarity of matrilateral and patrilineal functions laid the groundwork for the social and political order that characterized the period. If the patriline could be said to “ritually own” its rights and offices (and even its members), the matrilateral household “physically possessed” them, acting as a kind of caretaker or executor to the patriline (1993:429–465). At the same time, however, there remained very real tensions between these two forms of identity, tensions that often focused on the wife as a

24. Married couples often appear in these sources as living together “independently,” but their households tended to be either established for them by the wife’s family (making it, as McCullough argues, a variation on the basic pattern of uxorilocal residence), by the husband constructing a new home on his own (a less common occurrence, though still possible), or perhaps by the wife moving into her husband’s home after the death or retirement of his parents (1967:105–18). As Wakita notes, “two generations on the man’s side living together—i.e., an older couple with their son and his wife” seems to have been so uncommon as to be essentially unheard of (Wakita 1984:86–7). 25. Citing the work of Takamure Itsue, Hitomi Tonomura states that “The taboo against the sharing of the hearth is based on the concept of matriliny, not patriliny.” (1997:415n44). As Wakita argues, however, this taboo also “puts in doubt the common view of wifevisiting marriage as a manifestation of matriarchal authority” (1984: 87). I would suggest that this taboo arises from the conjuncture of these two principles, a recognition both of the power of matrilateral influence and of the need to protect the husband’s patriline from dissolution or fragmentation at the hands of multiple outside influences. Governed by this taboo, matrilateral alliances with another patriline would only be permitted when previous alliances had been severed.


mediating figure. Compared to the uji (an enduring entity that joined ancestors and descendants over the course of generations), the household was an ephemeral thing, yet it was largely within the context of the household that each generation lived its life, a concrete nexus of intimate relationships that often served to undermine the abstract loyalties of clan membership, even as the perpetuation of the patriline depended on those relationships.26 Seen against the backdrop of these institutions and conventions, a great many details in a story like “the Fox Wife of Mino” come into clearer focus, suggesting unsuspected levels of nuance within the tale, both as a social and as a theological narrative. It is interesting to note, for example, that the story makes no reference to parents or siblings on either side of the marriage. Meeting his new bride in the midst of the wilderness, he brings her back to what appears to be an already established household. While it is unclear whether these holdings came to him through his own labor (making their marriage a kind of neolocal residence) or by inheriting it from departed parents (a single-generation virilocal arrangement), it seems quite clear that he neither receives nor seeks any support from the family of his mysterious wife. Rather than the wealth, prestige or power of his prospective in-laws, the protagonist in this tale seems more concerned with the charms of the woman herself. As William McCullough suggests, marriage arrangements of this sort—eschewing the uxorilocal model of matrilateral

26. As McCullough notes, the property of households was often inherited from mother to daughter during the Heian period (there seems to have been no sense of “community property” in marriage, and inheritance passed through husbands and wives independently), and provided the husbands who came to live there with a kind of matrilineal “residence name” by which they were often known in their public lives. Reflecting the concrete exigencies of the household rather than the more enduring abstractions of the patriline, however, the inheritance of these households seldom extended in a straight female line for more than one or two generations (1967:119). Nevertheless, as Jeffrey Mass suggests, the more intimate and immediate relations of the household may have proved more dependable in practice than loyalty to one’s clan (1989:16, 26).


support and influence in favor of a residence provided solely by the husband—may have represented a kind of romantic ideal in the literature of this period (1967:114–5). By ignoring the myriad practical benefits to be had from marital ties to a prominent family, a man who brought a wife into a household that he himself maintained would be making a powerful statement about the nature of their marriage. Instead of an alliance between families, a marriage like that of the Fox Wife of Mino would reflect the personal bonds between two individuals. Instead of a matter of social or professional advancement, it could be read, first and foremost, as a love match. If, as Levi-Strauss has suggested, “marriage is an arbitration between two loves, parental and conjugal” (1969: 489), the romantic ideal of virilocality during this period virtually ignored the former in favor of the latter. It is an emphasis, moreover, which takes its most radical form in the tale of the Fox Wife of Mino, a mysterious woman whose natal family is completely unknown. Far from embracing such a romantic, individualist perspective, however, the story of the Fox Wife of Mino should rather be read as a form of cautionary allegory, using the imagery of the shapeshifter fox to suggest the dangers hidden in such socially headless forms of romantic love. In particular, the fox wife’s transformation from fox to woman and then back again suggests the enduring power of matrilateral identity, and the continuing influence it exerts even (perhaps especially) in marriages that seek to ignore it. From the moment of their first meeting in the wilderness to her final exposure by the family dog, the husband of this story is repeatedly presented with clues to his bride’s natal identity. If he failed to notice them, it was likely due less to the efficacy of the fox wife’s powers than his own wish to remain ignorant, to see her only in terms of her conjugal identity as his wife, and not in terms of the foxy wildness and otherness of her origins. While the fox’s original assumption of human form can be seen as a kind of deception, it was one in which her husband was largely complicit, a blinkered attempt to create and maintain a household based purely on the intimate relations of its residents, without regard to the patrilines (both hers and his own) whose larger interests converge especially on the product of their union.


Rather than indicating surprise, the husband’s reaction when his wife reverts to animal form reveals only an expression of longing, and a continued commitment to their personal intimacy. The exposure of her true form, however, marks a turning point in their relationship. The nocturnal visits for which she comes to be known suggest, not simply the retrenchment of their life together (from the public to the private aspects of the household), but an actual inversion of the gender roles in contemporary marital relations. Where he had once chosen to install his wife in his own household rather than following the more common practice of visiting her in the care of her natal family, he now becomes the object of his wife’s visits. Ensconced in the household with his child, pining for another visit from his lover, he assumes a role usually (even stereotypically) associated with the wife rather than the husband. More troubling still, the visiting fox wife’s assumption of traditionally male roles appears to imply her claim to an even more central male prerogative, namely the identity of the next generation. Taking his mother’s name rather than his father’s, their child establishes a new human lineage, dooming the husband (and all his ancestors, whose name never appears within the tale) to anonymity. Previously suppressed by her husband’s concern for his wife’s person rather than her family, the in terests of the fox wife’s natal lineage assert themselves with a vengeance, leading to a usurpation of her husband’s patrilineal rights that spells the end of his family line altogether. Seen in these terms, the implicit moral of the story could hardly be more grim—entering a union without regard for the status or standing of one’s in-laws, however romantic it may at first appear, constitutes a dereliction of duty, both to one’s ancestors and descendants. As a negotiation between two lineages, marriage demands the interests of both parties be taken into account; failure to do so could compromise (or even forfeit) the continued existence of the patriline itself. The tale of the Fox Wife of Mino should be read, however, not simply as social commentary but also as a theological narrative, the myth-historical account of a family’s spirit ancestress. Mapped onto the conventions of contemporary marriage practices, the tale presents the relations between the


spirit realm and humanity as a particular kind of hierogamy, a dysfunctional divine marriage whose dire consequences on the social level are paralleled by the tale’s disturbing theological ramifications. In this regard, the husband’s enduring (and socially heedless) desire for his wife can be taken as emblematic of an equally enduring (and equally disastrous) longing for a constant and direct contact with the other world. Just as the household depends on the complementary functions of husbands’ and wives’ families within it, the productive interaction of humanity with the spirits depends ultimately on the distinction drawn between them. Just as disregard for the social separation between family interests may ultimately lead to the loss of patrilineal identity, the disregard for the religious separation of spirits and humanity (and the rituals by which that separation is maintained, inviting the former into the world of the latter only to expel them again) may lead to the disruption of human identity and perhaps even the human world itself. In this context, the identification of the couple’s descendants with the fox wife rather than her husband represents, not simply the eclipse of the husband’s lineage, but also the unrestrained intrusion of non-human powers into the human world. Unhindered by any regard for human law, the fox wife’s descendants are not merely powerful; they are a force of nature, beings who use their fantastic strength to wreak havoc on human lives and livelihoods. Known only as the Fox of Mino, her fourth-generation descendant appears later in the Nihon ryōiki as a brigand and a bully, whose terrorism of the populace is only ended by another woman of superhuman strength, whose origins stand in stark contrast to her op ponent. A descendant of the thunder spirit, whose momentary infusion of divine power into the human world was ritually bounded with prohibitions and protections (in contradistinction to the undifferentiated and extended union of the fox wife), this other woman appears as a being of both virtue and human feeling, a figure of order rather than chaos.27 Read in this way, the Nihon ryōiki story of the Fox Wife of Mino reveals a number of parallels with another story that appears more than once in the literature of this period. Though folklorists do not commonly list it among subtypes of


the Fox Wife tale, it also tells the tale of a marriage between a human male and a fox, one that ultimately ends with the revelation of the fox wife’s true form.28 This motif first appears , a Chinese-style collection of in the Zenka hiki supernatural anecdotes compiled by a ninth-century governor of Bitchū province. Later, it provided the model for one of the many fox stories in the Konjaku monogatarishū (16.17). It tells the tale of Kaya no Yoshifuji, a prosperous man of Bitchū who encountered a beautiful young woman while his wife of many years was away in the capital. Overcome with desire, he asked her to come with him to his house, but she demurred on the grounds that it would be improper. Instead, she invited him to come with her, and led him to a wealthy home he had not seen before, where he was warmly welcomed by her father and invited to stay. She bore him a beautiful son, and he soon forgot his former wife and family. After thirteen years, however, his idyllic life with his new family was shattered, when a strange man wielding a staff suddenly appeared, frightening the entire household away and forcing Yoshifuji out of the house.

27. The story of thunder’s child appears immediately after the story of the fox wife in Nihon ryōiki 1.3. Rather than a romantic relationship between a spirit and a human, the thunder spirit is summoned and pacified with an iron rod, and ritually conducted back into the heavens quickly thereafter. The child later born to the man and his (human) wife—who comes to be known as the Venerable Dōjō— immediately reveals his superhuman origins—a preternaturally strong child, he uses his strength to quell evil spirits and defend Buddhist monks from overbearing nobles. His descendant, too, is presented as a benevolent figure, who not only defeats the Fox of Mino (2.4) but also confronts a number of other bullies, as well (2.27). Together, these tales, along with the story of the fox wife of Mino are described by Nakamura as the “Venerable Dōjō cycle” (1997:73). 28. Ikeda categorizes it as a variant of the “sakabettō no jōdo” Tale Type (number 681), centering on the image of a magical realm where moments are experienced as years (1971:163). The failure of this tale to be included among other fox wife tales is likely due to its explicitly uxorilocal framework, which places it outside the normal range of marriage tales in the early modern period when folklore collection began, a time when—as will be discussed later in this chapter—a form of patrilineal virilocality had long since become the norm.


The thirteen years he had experienced with his new family, however, had been in fact only thirteen days. His former family, thinking he had become the victim of foul play, had built a wooden statue of the bodhisattva Kannon and prayed for his body to be recovered and the mystery of his disappearance resolved. Thirteen days after his disappearance, he appeared, alive but so dirty and emaciated that he was almost unrecognizable, crawling out from beneath one of his own storehouses. Looking under the building, his family saw several foxes, who immediately ran away in all directions. After he had recovered his senses, his family was able to piece together what had happened: His new wife and family had been foxes, who had deluded his perception not only of them but of space and time, as well, such that thirteen days appeared to be thirteen years, and the cramped space beneath the building appeared to be a spacious dwelling. The man with the staff, on the other hand, had been a manifestation not of the foxes’ powers but of Kannon, sent by the prayers of his friends and family to save him. Like the tale of the Fox Wife of Mino, the story of the Fox Wife of Bitchū presents an account of a man who has allowed his lineage to be compromised by his intimate ties to a mysterious spirit-woman. An uxorilocal marriage tale, the husband of this story doesn’t disregard his wife’s family in the way that the Fox Wife of Mino’s husband had—rather, he embraces them wholeheartedly, abandoning his previous household as well as his children who reside there. His new household, however, is by no means a recapitulation of the home he left—whatever influence his role as pater familias had granted him over the identity and status of his former household fails to apply within his new family. Though the tale describes him as pondering the establishment of his new child as the primary heir to his lineage, for example, the boy’s ultimate exposure as a fox among foxes suggests that his true allegiance—body and soul, as it were—lay with his mother rather than with him. Indeed, pulled so completely into the domestic space of his new wife’s family that he feels no compulsion to interact with the outside world for thirteen years, his previous identity (and perhaps even his humanity itself) seems on the verge of dissolution. Even after his rescue, the influence of his new family has transformed him almost


beyond recovery, both in body and in spirit. Physically reduced to a near-bestial state (the Konjaku monogatarishū describes him as more like a monkey than a man, all but unrecognizable even to his children), he appears nearly insensate to the world beyond the fox-wrought illusions of his new life, and requires an extended convalescence (under the care of both Buddhist and Daoist exorcists) before he is able to regain his right mind. Set against the backdrop of contemporary marriage practices, the stories of the Fox Wife of Mino and the Fox Wife of Bitchū chart the tensions inherent in both the marital relations between families and the religious relations between the spirit and human realms. They suggest that the complementary roles that shaped the ideal relations between husbands’ and wives’ families during this period (as well as the complementarity it signified between humanity and the non-human Other) are in fact the product of careful negotiation. In these tales, overstepping the proper bounds of either of these relationships inevitably leads to catastrophe. Whether it takes the form of the dismissal of matrilateral influence (as in the case of the Fox Wife of Mino) or a disregard for patrilineal prerogatives (as with the Fox Wife of Bitchū), the unbalanced relations that result constitute a grave threat to the integrity of both the patriline and the human order with which it was symbolically identified. Good Sons and Wives on Probation: Text and Context in the Medieval And Early Modern Periods By the close of the thirteenth century, the era of setsuwa literature (which could be said to have begun with the Nihon ryōiki and reached its apogee in the monumental Konjaku monogatarishū) is usually reckoned to have reached its end. In the myriad genres that succeeded it (a range of sources that include popular print literature, drama, shrine and temple histories, and ultimately the folklore collections of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), tales of fox wives continued to appear, reflecting the enduring popularity of the theme over time. Even as the basic framework of these stories largely remained the same, however, the meanings im plicit in


these narratives can be seen to have undergone a pronounced shift, a reflection of the equally pronounced transformations that marked the marriage practices of the medieval and early modern periods.29 In contrast to the complementary identities of household and lineage that characterized the Heian period, medieval marriage practices became increasingly virilocal, reflecting a growing identification of household membership with the husband’s patriline.30 All those who lived within the confines of the household (including not only children but also such “fictive kin” as servants and employees) came to be construed as members of the same patriline, joined together in the worship of a shared body of ancestors (Nakane 1967:105–7).31 Most notably, this consolidation of the household around the husband’s patriline came to include the figure of the wife. The shift to virilocal residence (and, along with it, increasing limitations on women’s inheritance rights) implied a change in the nature of marriage and of women’s identity within it. Whereas it could be said of the Heian period that “women

29. My discussion of these tales will largely depend on the folk tale variants compiled by Seki Keigo (1953, 2:161–171), as well as the much narrower discussion of a group of tales in sixteenth—and seventeenth-century literature described as the “‘Shinoda Fox Wife” tale type by Ryūgasaki-shi Rekishi Minzoku Shiryōkan 1997:22–5). 30. The precise array of social, economic and governmental forces that created this transformation (as well as the speed of its infiltration among the various classes and regional divisions of Japanese society) remains a matter of debate. As Jeffrey Mass has argued, legal codes instituted along Chinese models took the virilocal, patrilineal household to be the norm as early as the eighth century, but this seems to have had little enduring effect on the marriage practices of the populace, even at court (1997:9–13). Rather, the consolidation of property and inheritance rights into the virilocal, patrilineal household that came to characterize the family by the pre-modern period seems to have taken place only slowly, in fits and starts, over the course of centuries, from the sōryō system instituted by the Kamakura bakufu in the late twelfth century to the regulations imposed by the Tokugawa regime in the seventeenth century. This process, moreover, seems to have involved both pressures from governing authorities and local adaptations (at all levels of society) to changing economic conditions (see Wakita 1984 and Tonomura 1997).


were daughters and sisters before they were wives, mothers, and widows” (Mass 1989:17), marriage in the medieval period increasingly entailed a shift in the wife’s identity from the family of her father to that of her husband. As Keith Brown notes, by the seventeenth century marriage had become hardly distinguishable from adoption, at least insofar as it involved a woman’s status in the household of her husband (1966:1144; see also Wakita 1984:91). The incorporation of the wife into the lineage of her husband also entailed her separation, at least symbolically, from the family of her birth, a concern reflected in a number of marriage customs. As Hitomi Tonomura has suggested, the developing virilocal drive to assimilate the wife into her husband’s patrilineal household first had to overcome the enduring power of matrilateral ideology, expressed in part through the hearth-sharing taboo of the Heian period. In one early fourteenth-century case, for example, Tonomura describes a new bride who is first established, not in her husband’s home but in a temporary dwelling adjacent to it, an intermediate location that seems to have been intended to enact her ritual separation from her native hearth before she could be installed in the home of her husband (1997:149). Indeed, a number of similar marriage customs suggest the power of matrilateral influence through the symbolic efforts taken to sever it. In addition to the oft-noted white of the bridal gown—variously taken to signify her symbolic death to her natal home, or alternatively her readiness to be “dyed in the ways” of her husband’s family—other customs included the new wife stepping over burnt straw as she leaves her

31. As Nakane notes, this shared patrilineal identity not only shapes relations within the same household, but also provides the basic idiom for the cooperation of households understood to be part of a “common family” (dōzoku ), an assortment of households established by younger sons and valued hands which continue to identify themselves as “branch families” (bunke ) of the original lineage. These branch families not only worship the ancestors and tutelary divinities of the “main family” (honke ), they also participated in its livelihood, owing the main family labor in exchange for the use of its land, livestock or equipment (see Chapter Four).


parent’s home, an act which may have signified the symbolic exorcism of her household spirits.32 As Jonathan Smith has suggested, however, the persistence of a ritual ideal may be prompted precisely by its failure in practice (1982:64–5). While the assimilation of the wife into her husband’s household may have demanded the symbolic dissolution of ties with her natal home, Japanese women seem historically to have preserved strong ties with the families of their birth. Anne Walthall notes, for example, that the strength of the wife’s ties to her natal household were such that she typically continued to visit (and receive visitors from) her parent’s home, even when such visits required travel over considerable distances. Moreover, wives might return to their natal ie upon the death of their husbands, and a clever woman could play her ties with both families against one another in order to arrange the best circumstances for her own retirement (1991:65,67). These personal ties established by wives in their movement between families—usually distinguished from the patrilineal or “kindred”— relations of this period by the term shinrui continued to play an important part in the economic cooperation between households. Like the matrilateral ties of the Heian period, the links forged between a woman’s natal family and the family of her husband seldom continued beyond the lifetime of the individuals involved, but they represented a powerful source of practical influence and identity. Indeed, the enduring strength of the wife’s natal identity may have worked at cross purposes to virilocal ideology, potentially undermining the forces within the husband’s lineage that worked to assimilate her (Befu 1963:1328–41). Among those virilocal marriages that dissolved (a frequent enough occurrence, at least within the first year), Nakane Chie notes

32. Nakane Chie describes both customs, interpreting them as various signs of the wife’s commitment never to return to her parent’s home, “just as burnt ashes can never become straw again” (1967:29). More than just a symbol of the new wife’s obligation, Obayashi Taryo interpreted this action as essentially exorcistic, the use of fire and smoke to expel the new bride’s household spirits before she enters her new home (1985:14). On the textile symbolism of bridal white, see Cherry (1987:60).


that, next to infertility, the most common grounds for divorce was “that the wife did not fit into the traditional ‘ways’ of the husband’s household,” a phrase which, more than anything else, seems to have referred to conflicts between the new wife and her mother-in-law (1967:23; c.f.Walthall 1991a:59). Despite her symbolic declarations of readiness to leave behind her former family and assume her husband’s household ways ), many new wives seem to have found the transition (kafu simply too demanding in practice. Indeed, Yamakawa Kikue reports that the influence of the wife’s natal family was such that, in times of tension between a new wife and her husband’s family, it was often the wife’s parents who initiated her divorce. This offer to “take back” a daughter who was not fitting in may have been intended either to spare their daughter from having to admit to failure herself or perhaps to rescue her from an unreasonably harsh environment (2001: 110, 113), but it clearly indicates the continued importance of the wife’s natal family in her new life. In this context, the shapeshifting of the fox wife appears to take on a new significance, related to the movement and exchange of women in virilocal marriage. In concert with the change in marriage practices within society at large, tales of fox wives increasingly took the virilocal household as their norm—rather than a romantic denial of convention, the fox wife who comes to live in the home of her husband (and, in some tales, to live with her mother-in-law, as well) adhered to the common practice of wives more generally.33 At the same time, however, her transformations into and out of human form point to striking parallels to the transformations expected of all wives during this period, an assumption of another’s identity and an adaptation to another’s ways of which not all women were capable. Like the fox wife, who assumes human form only to lose it again in a moment of weakness or crisis, the wife’s ritual willingness to become a tabula rasa for her new family to write upon often may have flown in the face of her strong attachment to her original identity and the customs with which she had grown up. And if, like the fox wife, she was unable to maintain her role within her husband’s family, she, too, would have to depart, however she or her husband may feel about each other.


In addition to reflecting the alienation and oppressive constraints virilocal marriage often may have inflicted on young brides, it also may have reflected husbands’ anxieties, especially during the critical first year of marriage, a “probationary period” that was no doubt frequently a source of pronounced tension for all involved. In addition to reflecting a potential fear of abandonment (after all, the same power that enables wives—fox or human—to transform themselves also allows them to return again to their original form), the foxy transformations associated with all wives may incline a husband to question their sincerity. The inevitable reversion of the fox wife to fox suggests concerns that her domestication (and that of her human counterparts, as well) might not “take,” that she might never fully identify with her husband’s family. Like the symbolic white of the bridal gown, the transformations of the fox wife are revealed to be essentially superficial, and her ultimate return to fox form suggests that, in her heart, she has not truly transformed at all. In this respect, a husband may be subject to doubts that his wife’s commitment to his world (and the socialization of his children within that world) has been a ruse. Moreover, he must acknowledge the possibility that in her intimate involvement with him, as well, she may have only been faking. Even as the fox wife’s inevitable departure marks it as a personal tragedy for those involved, other elements of the “virilocal fox wife motif’ present it as an institutional triumph, a preservation of the patriline at the center of the medieval and early modern household. This can perhaps best be seen in the

33. In this respect, virilocal fox wife tales seem to eclipse uxorilocal tales like “the Fox Wife of Bitchū” in the medieval and pre-modern periods. Influence from the latter story form can be found in a medieval novella (otogi zōshi ) entitled Kitsune zoshi , but the changes in the tale suggest the changing conventions of the period. Rather than an ordinary householder, the protagonist of the Kitsune zōshi is a Buddhist monk (who, by definition, has no household of his own into which a wife might be brought), and his relationship to the mysterious woman he meets smacks less of matrimony than simple sensual indulgence. The story ends not with his near madness but with his simple humiliation—stripped of his monastic robes by the foxes, he is exposed in public and mocked for his worldly weakness (Hagino 1901).


relationship portrayed in these tales between the fox wife and her child. Although some variants describe the husband as the first to see the fox wife’s true form, by and large the figure most commonly responsible for the fox wife’s departure in these later variants is her own child. In these stories, it is commonly in the midst of domestic tranquility (often when the husband is out of the house) that the child, after dozing with his mother or playing with his siblings, looks to his mother only to see a fox’s tail protruding from beneath her robes or, worse still, the face of a fox staring down at him with his mother’s eyes. Traumatized and terrified, the child refuses to be consoled, even after his mother corrects the slip in her disguise. Like the puppy in the story of the Fox Wife of Mino, it is this child who alerts the rest of the family to his mother’s true identity and ultimately precipitates her departure. Despite the prior connection between them as mother and child, once her true form is revealed, their relationship becomes virtually antithetical. This unfolding drama between fox wife and child seems to reflect a fundamental set of affinities and oppositions in the symbolic constitution of patriarchal kinship relations, by which, as Dorothy Dinnerstein argues, fathers “affirm and tighten by cultural inventions their unsatisfactorily loose mammalian connection with children” (1976:80). Moreover, as Jonathan Culler has suggested, the connections established by these cultural inventions would tend to affirm “what are generally termed metaphorical relations—relations of resemblance between separate items” as opposed to the “metonymical, maternal relationships based on contiguity” (1982:60). In the moment of his mother’s exposure as a fox, in other words, the child finds himself faced with a basic choice, one between the strong physical connection to his vulpine mother and his shared cultural identity—his resemblance—to his human father. In stark contradistinction to the child of the Fox Wife of Mino, the children in these fox wife tales turn their back on their maternal heritage, and fully embrace their patrilineal identities as members of their fathers’ households. This choice—of paternal over maternal identity, culture over nature, resemblance over contiguity—might also help to explain the pronounced difference in tone by which many of these stories unfold as tales of divine ancestry. Whereas the


descendants of the Fox Wife of Mino are presented as agents of chaos, the children of these other fox wives are often presented as forces for order, using the powers of their nonhuman ancestry for the benefit of the human communities with which they have chosen to identify. Indeed, one variant of the tale purports to relay the ancestry of Abe no Yasunari, the in ‘yōshi who would eventually thwart the plans of what may be the most notorious variant on the fox wife figure—the “Jewel Maiden” Tamamo no mae.34 At the same time, by relinquishing her claim to her child’s identity and granting him support in a spiritual rather than a maternal idiom, these fox wives may succeed in attaining a kind of domestication that they never achieved as wife and mother: a place in the tutelary pantheon of her husband’s lineage. Shapeshifting, Marriage and the Sacred: The Metalanguages of Transformation and Identity In the essay from which the epigraph to this chapter was drawn, Claude Levi-Strauss refers to his work in The Elementary Structures of Kinship to make the case— fundamental to structural anthropology—that diverse elements of social and cultural life share a basic affinity with language. As enduring patterns of behavior whose deep structures frequently remain outside conscious awareness, he argues that marriage conventions (but not only marriage conventions—Levi-Strauss sets his sights on all cultural forms, “including even art and religion”) can best be understood as forms of communication, part of an allencompassing system of reciprocal exchange, one that includes objects, ideas and people (1963:62). Historians of Japanese marriage institutions—many relying on the distinctions developed by Levi-Strauss and his methodological descendants—continue to refine our understanding of the changing forms that this communication 34. Ikeda (1971:108) reports that some variants of the fox wife tale identify the child of the fox wife as the famous Heian-period exorcist Abe no Seimei (whose exploits will be discussed in Chapter Five), a figure who is in turn identified in other sources as the ancestor of Abe no Yasunari (see Smyers 1999: 232n18).


has assumed over time, as well as the changing roles and values it has assigned to women as the primary media of that exchange. In this chapter, however, my primary concern has been to explore the ways in which this shifting language of Japanese marriage has interacted with other kinds of language, how marvelous tales of spirit ancestry and animal brides intersect with the conventional grammar of marriage to create the enduring imagery and the changing meanings of the shapeshifting fox wife. In this context, it may be worthwhile to consider the languages of marriage and the languages of legends, not simply as languages, but as “metalanguages,” the linguistic expression, not only of objects and events but of the meanings and contours of language itself (Jakobson 1985). Appearing simultaneously as a wife, an animal and a spirit, the figure of the fox wife engages an array of different registers of significance, a reflection of the complex relationships at work, not only in marriage and kinship, but also in the imagination of wildness and domesticity, of the spirit-realm and humanity. Juxtaposed in the story of the fox wife, these different languages—social, ecological, and religious—form a kind of recursive hall of mirrors, in which the various logics at work within the story serve to illuminate one another. Each level of the story, in other words, can be taken as a kind of “paraphrase” for the other, elaborating with one field of meaning the assumptions and implications of another. The social logics of marriage and kinship, for example, can be seen reflected in the ecological language of wild and domestic, while at the same time, the religious relations between spirits and humanity are presented using the social languages of marriage. Just as human beings can be said to live their lives in more than one register (and imaginaire) at once, the imagery of tales like those of the fox wife suggest the ways in which they may also think in much the same way, as well as the kinds of insights such thinking can produce. The figure of the fox, however, appears in these stories not only as a wife, an animal and a spirit, but also as a shapeshifter, a being whose metamorphoses and duplicities serve to reflect the shapeshifting inherent in other registers of meaning, as well. Like Levi-Strauss’ structuralist application of linguistics to the social dynamics of kinship, the folkloric


imagery of the shapeshifter fox works within the story of the fox wife to highlight the transformations and exchanges underlying marriage and the patrilineal enterprise more generally. If, as Levi-Strauss suggests, the (patriarchal) languages of marriage and kinship tend to consider women first and foremost as signs (1969:496), the imagery of the shapeshifting fox-woman brings to the forefront the fundamental duplicity of such signs—not only their double identity (as the daughter of one patriline and the mother of another) but their capacity, as signifying agents themselves, to play on these shifting identities.35 As I have suggested in this chapter, the imagery of the wife as shapeshifter may express a basic anxiety regarding the fluidity of female identity and influence in a patrilineal economy of meaning. Nevertheless, it is an anxiety that is frequently resolved in her descendants. Like the brigand Fox of Mino (who is ultimately defeated by a grand-daughter of the thunder kami), or like the “good son” of early modern fox wife tales (who asserts his patrilineal resemblance to his father over his biological connection to his mother), the coherence of the patriline as a meaningful system of exchange is ultimately affirmed. For all its marvels, stories of fox wives thus appear less as fantasies than as correctives to a more basic fantasy— an image of the patriline as an enduring, self-sufficient entity, free from the shapeshifting transformations of what LeviStrauss describes as “the law of exchange” (1969:497). In this respect, the social imagery of the fox-wife-as-wife appears illuminated by what might be called the semiotic imagery of the fox-wife-as-shapeshifter, highlighting the transformations inherent in marriage and kinship as forms of

35. As Levi-Strauss suggests, “words do not speak, while women do; as producers of signs, women can never be reduced to the status of symbols or tokens” (1963:61). In this context, Levi-Strauss seems primarily concerned with preserving the personhood of women, in response to those who would see his approach as an misogynist objectification of women. As I have suggested in this chapter, the story of the fox wife seems to assume this perspective, less as an affirmation of female personhood than as an illustration of women’s capacity to make use of their double significance to undermine the patrilineal enterprise as a coherent economy of meaning.


communication. Marriage, however, is not the only form of communication encompassed by the tale of the fox wife. In this recursive hall of mirrors, the semiotic imagery of the shapeshifter fox also serves to illuminate the religious imagery of the fox-wife-as-spirit. In her transformation from non-human other to human (and back again), for example, the shapeshifter fox wife embodies the transformations of spirits more generally, an embodiment of the complex and uncertain dynamics inherent in what Mircea Eliade (1958) has described as “hierophany,” the revelation of transcendent realities in immanent forms. At the same time, the imagery of the shapeshifter fox wife is often juxtaposed with images of other spirits, as well. Like the figure of Kannon, who enters the delusion wrought by the Fox Wife of Bitchū in order to save Kaya no Yoshifuji, the presence of these other spirits serves to illuminate the shapeshifting logics inherent in both figures, a concern for the fragility of religious knowledge that provides the subject of Chapter Three.

CHAPTER 3 To Whom Am I Speaking?

Shapeshifting and the Semiotics of Revelation

A sign is everything which can be taken as significantly substituting for something else. This something else does not necessarily have to exist or to actually be somewhere at the moment in which a sign stands for it…If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used ‘to tell’ at all. Umberto Eco (1979a:7) In many respects, Lady Tamamo might be described as the most dangerous fox wife in Japanese myth-history, exploiting the always uncertain social politics of the bedchamber and the family at a time and place calculated to wreak the most havoc over the nation as a whole. It was her malevolent influence, after all, which laid the groundwork for the epochal conflicts that marked the end of the Heian period and brought about the rise of warrior rule. But this is not the only episode in which the figure of the fox can be found closely associated with the civil discord and political conflicts of this period. According —a polemic history and memoir to the Gukanshō composed by the prominent Tendai priest Jien (1155–1225)— foxes were also to blame for troubling signs of spirit-possession that began to manifest themselves at the impe rial court in the years after the death of the Retired Emperor Go-Shirakawa. On two separate occasions—in 1196 and 1206—women with close ties to Go-Shirakawa’s widow claimed to be possessed by ) of the deceased ruler, exclaiming the angry spirit (onryō “Build a shrine in my honor! Have the income of a province set aside for its upkeep!” (Brown and Ishida 1979:169).


The idea that those who had been embroiled in court intrigues might reach out from the grave to demand satisfaction was hardly new, however. Throughout the Nara and Heian periods, the onryō of emperors and prominent courtiers had frequently made themselves known to the court, manifesting a drive for vengeance that had been assuaged only by their ritual pacification and veneration as tutelary spirits known as goryōshin .1 Indeed, Go-Shirakawa’s own half-brother, the emperor Sutoku, had been established as a goryōshin only a few years before in a shrine along the Kamo River. It was there in 1156 that his attempt to prevent the young GoShirakawa’s ascent to the throne (known as the Hōgen Rebellion) had met with defeat, and his frustrated spirit was said to have been responsible for a series of natural and political disasters (Brown and Ishida 1979:95–104, 141). The imagery and practices associated with goryōshin thus provided an important idiom by which the court was able to come to grips with the spiritual and political legacy of powerful figures and events. And few had been a more powerful or contentious figure in imperial politics than Go-Shirakawa. In the course of a nearly 40-year reign (from the throne, from retirement, and more than once from under house arrest), he had been closely involved in some of the most turbulent events in Japanese history. If there was ever a figure whose spirit and legacy demanded address, it was surely Go-Shirakawa. Except, as Jien argued, the spirit of Go-Shirakawa was making no such demands. In a report to the Retired Emperor Go-Toba, Jien explained that these women were not possessed by the vengeful spirit of the deceased emperor but by demonic deceivers—probably a fox, or perhaps a tengu or a tanuki— intent on misleading the Emperor and the populace in order to sow confusion and discord in the world. In making this argument—one which appears to have succeeded in derailing

1. The folklorist Hori Ichirō has described the Nara and Heian periods as the “goryō-shin age” (1968:72; see also Plutschow 1990: 203–216). In his Gukanshō, Jien describes the catastrophic effect of such beings (Brown and Ishida 1979: 219–221). Among these, the spirit of the courtier Sugawara no Michizane is perhaps the most famous of the goryōshin, and continues to be venerated as the popular divinity Tenjin (Borgen 1994:307–336).

TO WHOM AM I SPEAKING? 73

Go-Shirakawa’s enshrinement—Jien draws on a theme that also appears at the center of the story of the Jewel Maiden: Like Lady Tamamo, who leads the emperor to interpret her signs of supernatural power as indications of spiritual cultivation, Jien suggests that foxes and other shapeshifting spirits can use their powers to misrepresent themselves as objects of worship. In a wide range of sources, the imagery of shapeshifters like the fox played a central role in the larger imaginaire of the superhuman in Japan, highlighting the transformations (and the inherent indeterminacy) that mark all manifestations of spiritual powers, a matter with profound implications for human efforts to negotiate their significance. The place of the shapeshifter fox in this larger imaginaire can perhaps best be seen at work in two broad theological paradigms.2 The first of these is that constellation of beliefs and images, frequently categorized as “shamanistic,” centering on what Komatsu (“belief in Kazuhiko has described as hyōrei shinkō possessing spirits”), a means of understanding and responding to spiritual beings through the complementary practices of exorcism and mediumship (1994a; c.f. Eliade 1964:462).3 The second is closely associated with the multifarious religious (“the movement commonly known as shinbutsu shūgo reconciliation of kami and buddhas”), a progressive assimilation of saviors and celestial beings—both indigenous

2. Leo Tak-hung Chan notes that yin-yang theory (Jpn. onmyōdō) provides a fundamental paradigm for presenting foxes in at least some Chinese zhiguai texts (1998:142–145). Similarly, Yoshino Hiroko presents it as a central feature of Japanese fox beliefs (1980). As I noted in my discussion of the fox as a vampiric injū in the previous chapter, onmyōdō cosmology had an undeniable impact on Japanese understandings of the nature and interaction of beings in the world— including the fox—long before attempts were made by Tokugawa literati to systematize these ideas. Nevertheless, while these ideas represented an important complement to both indigenous and Buddhist understandings of the sacred, they do not appear to have presented a specific alternative to the semiotics of revelation that will be discussed in this chapter. 3. On the theoretical distinction and frequent conflation (by scholars and practitioners alike) of the terms “spirit-possession” and “shamanism,” see Paper 1995:85–124.


and continental—founded on the Mahāyāna Buddhist principle of expedient devices (also translated as “skillful means,” Jpn. hōben Skt.upāya). In the world envisioned by setsuwa and related genres, these two paradigms were seldom distinct, and interacted with one another in increasingly interdependent ways over the course of Japanese history. In large part, this interaction was facilitated by the striking parallels in their understandings of the signs by which superhuman forces reveal themselves, an implicit “semiotics of revelation” in which the capacity for miscommunication and even deceit was embodied by shapeshifters like the fox. “Is it really you?” Possession, Negotiation and Deception Spirit-possession, exorcism and mediumship are often identified with the “little tradition” of Japanese popular religion, a tradition frequently linked to those indigenous (e.g. ideas and practices designated by the term Shinto Hori 1968). Nevertheless, like the word shintō itself—a phrase of foreign origin used to identify and distinguish indigenous traditions—accounts of possessing spirits should be viewed as the product of a complex interaction of continental and indigenous influences.4 Buddhist ascetic and esoteric techniques had a pronounced impact on such dealings with spirits by the Heian period, if not well before, and it was in part through their role as exorcists (often accompanied by that Buddhist proselytizers female mediums or miko made their inroads among the Japanese. The question of its ultimate origins, however, is less important to this study than the basic coherence of hyōrei imagery. In a range of various source materials, this imagery is bound up with a basic taxonomy of spirits, as well as a common set of problems with which those who interact with these spirits must deal. At the center of this theological paradigm is the figure of the kami . According to the still-classic formulation by the eighteenth-century nativist Motoori Norinaga, “any being whatsoever which possesses some eminent quality out of the ordinary, and is awe-inspiring, is called kami” (Matsumoto 1970:84). According to this definition (which explicitly includes the fox among its many examples of wondrous beings


worthy of the name), kami may manifest any number of other qualities, but these are secondary to their primary capacity to inspire reverence: Thus, kami are manifold; some kami are noble, while some others are lowly; some are strong, whereas others are weak; again, some kami are good, while some kami are evil. Corresponding to this variety, the will and actions of kami are also diverse… Even good kami are not always in accordance with right reason, though in various degrees; they behave roughly at times when they get angry…[and] there are occasions when evil kami, pleased and placated, would give blessings (Matsumoto 1970:85). As Komatsu Kazuhiko has argued, however, this collapse of everything awe-inspiring into the category of kami tends to ignore an important distinction that appears in the earliest Japanese texts, between kami and those marginal, dangerous or ma spirits known variously as mono , mononoke (1994b: 154–164). According to Komatsu, the division between kami and mononoke is not predicated on an absolute difference between two kinds of spirits (of the sort usually

4. Aston traces the expression shintō (Ch.shendao) to the Yijing (1972, 2:106). The term shintō first appears in Japanese sources in the Nihon shoki (21), in reference to Emperor Yomei (r. 585– 587), who both “believed in the Dharma (buppō ) and venerated the Way of the Gods” (NKBT 68:155). Earlier in the same text, the opponents of Buddhism retained the linguistic high ground by characterizing the Buddha in their own terms, as a “foreign kami” (Nihon shoki 19, NKBT 68:103). By employing the word shintō to describe indigenous religion, however, the semantic tables could be said to have been essentially turned. While the implicit identification of indigenous religion with a dao (Jpn. to or michi ) raises interesting issues about the history of Shinto theological reflection and its use of Chinese categories, it is perhaps going too far to identify Shinto with Daoism (c.f.Kuroda 1993:7–30). Rather, it seems more accurate to argue, with Alan Miller, that such Chinese categories represented an “independent element [that] had infiltrated other religious traditions, both Buddhist and Shinto, and had thereby contributed to the folk as well as the elite modality at an early period” (1968:119).


implied by the English terms “divinity” and “demon”). Rather, it is the product of a de veloping relationship, a negotiation between the demands of the spirit and the needs of human beings. In the most basic terms, a being too powerful to ritually dismiss or control, one whose powers would make a quid pro quo arrangement profitable, or alternatively a being (like an ancestral spirit) to whom human beings are already obliged, demands appeasement and respect, a response which itself constitutes a spirit as kami. Other spirits, whose demands are unreasonable and whose powers are not sufficient to resist ritual expulsion, are disposed of as mononoke. In this context, foxes can appear as both kami and mononoke, providing a useful illustration of the logic by which this sort of negotiation took place. The twelfth-century diary of Fujiwara no Yorinaga, for example, describes the sudden appearance of numerous foxes at a nobleman’s compound in the capital. The first response to these events was to deal with the foxes as mononoke, and a bow and arrow were placed out as an exorcistic talisman. When this talisman had no effect, food was laid out for the foxes, an offering which they did not eat but seemed to accept. since they no longer showed themselves thereafter. The author concludes from this that these foxes were neither spooks nor vermin but “divine spirits” ), perhaps associated with a venerable little (shinrei shrine on the premises (Taiki 1144/5/30, ZST 23:123). The account suggests that the shrine had been erected long ago in connection with an earlier outbreak of fox-sightings, and since that time the manor had managed to avoid damage from the fires that routinely ravaged its neighbors. In this respect, the return of foxes to the compound could be taken as an expression of the enshrined spirit’s will, animal messengers ) declaring the spirit’s presence and (tsukawashime its desire to renew the cultic relationship that had been established with the household’s earlier inhabitants. In this religious paradigm, perhaps the most dramatic means by which spirits (both living and dead, human and nonhuman) make their presence and their will known to humanity is through spirit-possession. Possession constitutes one of the basic idioms of spiritual affliction, in which or tatari no fearsome and malevolent spirits (onryō ) inflict illness, madness and death on mononoke


those that have angered them. Alternatively, however, possession may also represent the opening gambit by a spirit in an ongoing dialogue between the human and spirit realms. With the assistance of professional ritualists, communication with these possessing spirits (hyōrei) can be established, and some kind of settlement may be negotiated. By honoring the wishes of these spirits, what began as the assault of a vengeful spirit on its victim can be transformed into a tutelary relationship, where the spirit offers protection in return for human expressions of respect and devotion. Indeed, as Carmen Blacker notes, many of the so-called “new religions” ) were founded by individuals whose (shinkō shūkyō encounter with an afflicting spirit ended with that spirit’s enshrinement as a divinity, the power of which was then used to assist others in coming to grips with their own possessing spirits (1975:129). ) present a Accounts of fox possession (kitsune-tsuki similar gamut of permutations, from the exorcism of dangerous spirits to their appeasement and the creation of tutelary relationships. Foxes are renown as both mischievous and vengeful creatures, and possession is understood as a basic mechanism by which they wreak havoc on the lives of human beings. A particularly dramatic account appears in the , describing the twelfth-century Fusō ryakki possession of an empress some 250 years before. According to the text, the venerable abbot Sō-ō was summoned to perform an exorcism, a ceremony that lasted for three days straight: On the morning of the fourth day the Empress cried aloud, bent her body and rolled on the floor so violently that the bedroom nearly collapsed. In the meantime there appeared from the north-west corner of the bed ) which anxiously ran to curtain a fox-spirit (reiko and fro in all directions. The Prime Minister and all the others who were present trembled with fear and quite lost their presence of mind. Then the abbot read the ), at which point Salvation Mantra (gedatsu no ju the house stopped shaking and the fox disappeared (de Visser 1908:35).


In this account the fox-spirit is ascribed no explicit motive for its attack on the imperial family, nor is it entirely clear whether it was expelled by the ritual power of the exorcist, or whether, pacified by the soul-salving power of the mantra, it had simply departed on its own. In a manner characteristic of exorcism in the Buddhist idiom, it might be understood to be both at once—relying on his own virtue and calling on the host of protective divinities pledged to protect the faithful, Sō-ō separated the two spirits at war within the empress’ body, and, addressing the intruder with the soothing words of the Dharma, sent it off to do no more harm. In so doing, Sō-ō could be said to have combined into one episode the kind of two-fold exorcism seen in the tale of Tamamo no mae—her exposure by the supernatural powers of the in ‘yōshi Yasunari and her later conversion by the Buddhist patriarch Gennō. In a number of other accounts, however, episodes of foxpossession conclude in an almost prosaic negotiation, a process that may result in the fox assuming the role of a protective spirit. The Konjaku monogatarishū (27.40), for example, presents a tale that begins as a case of sickness caused by ) but which demonic possession (mononoke yamisu ends with the spirit assuming the role of a sort of protective kami. According to the story, an exorcist succeeded in transferring the possessing spirit to a female medium, who then identified itself as a fox, saying, “I didn’t come here out of vengeance or malevolence (tatari), but rather because I am hungry and I thought there might be some food here for me to eat” (NKBZ 24:137).5 The medium then pulled a small white tama (meaning both “ball” and “jewel” but also “spirit”) from her robe and began playing with it. Turning the tables on the fox-spirit, a brave young samurai snatched the tama from her, and she began to beg for its return. “If you don’t return it,” she told the man, “I’ll be your enemy forever. If you do return it, however, I’ll stay with you and protect you as a kami” (NKBZ 24:137–8). Exacting a promise to that effect, the samurai returned the tama to the medium, and she placed it in her robes. After the exorcist cast out the fox, the tama was nowhere to be found, which the author declares to be proof that the possession had been genuine. More to the point, the foxspirit is said to have been every bit as good as its word, and later came to the samurai’s aid to save him from highwaymen.


These negotiations between the demands of spirits and the needs of humanity, however, are frequently complicated by negotiations of another sort. Even as spirits may be differentiated by their motives or by the forms they assume, the manifestation of spirits in the human world all share a common mechanism—whether articulated through animal messengers, possession, omens, divination or a host of other means, the presence and desires of spirits are always expressed indirectly. Episodes of spirit-possession, for example, typically begin without any clear indi cation of who the spirit is or why it has taken possession of this particular individual at this particular time. Nor is it known how the possession will end. Will the spirit be expelled? Will a settlement be reached? Will the victim die? All that is clear is that the spirit will convey its message through a body other than its own, afflicting it with illness or speaking through its lips. The revelation of spirits, in other words, constitutes a particular sort of sign, one in which the tenuous connection between signifier and signified, medium and message is frequently exemplified by the shapeshifting of figures like the fox. In another story from the Konjaku monogatarishū, for example, the mistress of a wealthy and prominent household becomes possessed, sending the house into an uproar. When exorcists are summoned, the possessing spirit quickly reveals itself to be a fox, claiming that it had not come on its own business but on that of the woman’s husband. It turns out that the man had invited an important guest to stay at his home, and captured the fox in order to send word ahead so that everything would be ready (26.17; see also Uji shūi monogatari 1.18). Instead of the already disjoined message of a spirit expressed through the words of a human medium, this story describes a communication that is doubly removed, the words of a human transmitted by a spirit to another human being.

5. A similar tale can be found in Uji shūi monogatari 53, in which the possessing spirit demands rice cakes (a common offering to the kami). Similarly, Winston Davis describes a modern case of foxpossession where the possessing spirit demands offerings of sake (1980:173–8).


Since any number of different hyōrei can communicate through the same human medium (sometimes at the same time), perhaps the foremost issue in any case of spiritpossession is to identify the being responsible (Blacker 1975: 111). Although they often prove reluctant at first, this identification is usually accomplished by a simple declaration, in which the spirit states who it is and why it has come. The indeterminacy of all spirit-possession, however, ultimately raises the possibility that a possessing spirit may misrepresent itself, a possibility realized in a number of different narratives. A particularly poignant example can be found in an episode from the eleventh-century Genji monogatari, in which the hero’s wife Lady Murasaki is laid low by a possessing spirit. Transferred to the body of a medium, the spirit demands a private audience with Genji, and only then reveals its identity as the spirit of a woman known as Lady Rokujō.6 Having been seduced and abandoned by Genji years before, the resentment and jealousy of Rokujō had reached out more than once to afflict Genji’s lovers. But Genji, even as he is overcome with horror, is at first disinclined to believe the spirit’s claims, responding: “Is it really you? I have heard that foxes and other evil creatures sometimes go mad and seek to defame the dead. Tell me who you are, quite plainly. Or give me a sign, something that will be meaningless to others but unmistakable to me. Then I will believe you.” (Seidensticker 1976: 617–618) Nor were the spirits of the dead the only ones whom fox-spirits might attempt to defame. Roughly contemporary with the author of the Genji monogatari, the nobleman Fujiwara no

6. The hesitation of spirits to reveal themselves may be related to the ancient belief in kotodama the power of words (particularly names) over things (Plutschow 1990:75–87). In this context, the revelation of a spirit’s name would implicitly grant those who to whom it was revealed a certain degree of ritual efficacy. In the case of Lady Rokujō, however, this reticence may have more to do with shame, an unwillingness to be exposed in an act of petty malice that should be beneath her.


Sanesuke linked the propensity for foxes to misrepresent themselves with the disturbing cultic irregularities that erupted at the Great Shrine of Ise in 1031. According to his ) of the Great Shrine began diary, the shrine virgin (saigū to make outrageous declarations in the name of the divine ancestress of the Imperial family: The Saigū’s voice was wild and loud, not to be compared with anything … She wanted small treasure houses built, and called them the Inner and the Outer Shrine. She also summoned all kinds of people, and for days and nights on end had them perform kagura and crazy dances. In the capital mediums began to worship foxes, madly declaring them to be the Great Deity of Ise (Smits 1996:84). Not only during this period, but for centuries afterwards, the imagery of vulpine duplicity continues to appear, closely linked to the threat of miscommunication. Even at the end of the nineteenth century, this imagery can be seen to persist in modern urban legends, anecdotes that tell of telegrams delivered by foxes (Yanagita 1957:311). Like the fox who possessed a woman to deliver a message from her husband, the author of a telegram always speaks through the lips of another, raising doubts about his or her true identity, as well as the veracity of the message itself.7 Similarly, more than one folklorist has seen fox-imagery at the heart of contemporary Japanese telephone etiquette: the “moshi moshi” by which both parties begin a telephone conversation even today is said to be impossible for foxes to pronounce (Casal 1959:7). Like spirit possession, telephone conversations are such that it is impossible to be certain who it is at the other end of the line, demanding some means by which to guard against deception.

7. Irokawa (1985:28) sees these anecdotes as “hallucinations,” a sign of the strains created by the rapid influx of new technologies in the Meiji period. As Yanagita has argued, however, it is also important to recognize the continuities linking these manifestations of the fox (and the tanuki, with which it is closely associated in this context) with earlier discourse, an application of customary images to changing circumstances.


Shifty Means and Hidden Ends: Duplicity in the Discourse of Expediency Even as the figure of the fox can be seen hovering at the edges of human interactions with hyōrei, it is the figure of the Buddhist priest and exorcist that typically appears at the center of that imagery, indicative of the larger religious world into which spirit-possession had already become assimilated in some of the earliest recorded sources. As Steven Heine (1999: 29) has suggested, “the process of assimilation is inseparable from—can even be considered to necessitate—the practice of its apparent opposite: exorcism.” Alicia Matsunaga notes that the earliest stages of the shinbutsu shūgo movement took place largely in the context of shamanic negotiations with spirits, in which possessing spirits (kami and mononoke alike) were evaluated in Buddhist terms as entities on an overall level of spiritual advancement analogous to the Indian ), yaksa (Jpn.yasha ) celestial beings—deva (Jpn.ten )—who had entered the and dākinī (Jpn. dakini Japanese religious imaginaire as protectors of the Buddhist Dharma. Worthy of veneration for their power, they nevertheless remain unenlightened beings, and thus depend on Buddhist teachings and savior-figures for their own ultimate salvation. Access to the Dharma (ranging from Sō-ō’s exorcistic recitation of the Salvation Mantra to the commencement of regular Buddhist services in a deity’s honor) thus became a prominent theme in the pacification and worship of indigenous divinities. It was through a possessed medium, for example, that Hachiman became one of the first indigenous divinities to become assimilated into the Buddhist pantheon, declaring in 749 his desire to attend upon the Buddha Dainichi (Skt. Mahāvairocana) newly enshrined at Tōdaiji (Matsunaga 1969:216–224). This assimilative movement can be said to have reached its apogee in an understanding of Buddhist and indigenous honji suijaku , an divinities known as interpenetration of religious practices and identities that would eventually prove nigh-impossible for later religious and political authorities to disentangle (see Ketelaar 1990:46–77). Drawing on Mahāyāna ideas about the many and varied


expedient devices (Jpn. hōben, Skt.upāya) by which Buddhist saviors appear in the phenomenal world, indigenous religious figures came to be described as the “trace manifestations” (suijaku) of an “original ground” (honji) represented by the various buddhas, bodhisattvas, and divinities incorporated into the continental Buddhist tradition.8 In this context, the history of religions across Asia came to be recast as a history of expedient adaptations by the Dharma and its messengers. The thirteenth-century author of the setsuwa collection Shasekishū (1.3), for example, declares that bodhisattvas took human form in China as Confucius, Laozi and Yanhui in order to teach righteousness and prepare the way for Buddhism. In Japan, meanwhile, the true essence of “softens Its the Buddha (the dharmakāya or hosshin light and identifies with the dust” (Morrell 1985:80), in order to appear among the unenlightened in the form of kami.9 The imagery and implications of this religious framework is perhaps best demonstrated in the first tale of the Shasekishū, a narrative that can be read as a sort of charter myth for honji suijaku thought.10 The passage begins by noting the seeming antagonism expressed towards Buddhism by the Great Shrine at Ise, within whose grounds the trappings of Buddhism are not permitted. Using an adaptation of the imperial creation 8. The complex history by which these ideas evolved—which, as Matsunaga (1969) argues, can be traced back at least to the time of Kumarajiva’s fifth-century translation of the Lotus Sūtra into classical Chinese, if not to the very earliest moments of the tradition, and which depends upon a number of Japanese developments in iconography and esoteric practice—is beyond the purview of this work. It is important to note, however, that the development and expression of this tradition was by no means limited to systematic doctrinal treatises. In this sense, honji suijaku should be understood less as the doctrine of a particular school (thought it was often expressed in different ways according to the doctrinal emphases of those schools) and more as a pervasive body of ideas and images that transcended sectarian boundaries. 9. It is a phrase that Morrell suggests is drawn from the Laozi (or Daodejing ; 1985:305nl24). As Royall Tyler notes, however, it’s more immediate source appears to be the Chinese Tendai patriarch Zhiyi (Jpn. Chigi), who adapted this Daoist imagery to serve as a metaphor for the expedient manifestation of the Buddha (1990:213n 14).


myth, however, the author argues that this antipathy is only apparent, an expedient device by which the sun-goddess Amaterasu actually supported the introduction of Buddhism to Japan: In antiquity, when this country did not yet exist, the deity of the Great Shrine [the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu], guided by a seal of the Great Sun Buddha [Dainichi, Skt. Mahāvairocana] inscribed on the ocean floor, thrust down her august spear. Brine from the spear coagulated like drops of dew, and this was seen from afar by Māra, the Evil One, in the Sixth Heaven of Desire. “It appears that these drops are forming into a land where Buddhism will be propagated and people will escape from the round of birth-and-death,” he said, and came down to prevent it. Then the deity of the Great Shrine met with the demon king. “I promise not to utter the names of the Three Treasures, nor will I permit them near my person. So return quickly back to the heavens.” Being thus mollified, he withdrew. Monks to this very day, not wishing to violate that august promise, do not approach the sacred shrine, and the sutras are not carried openly in its precincts… Outwardly the deity is estranged from the Law, but inwardly she profoundly supports the Three Treasures… Since all this arose by virtue of the seal of the Great Sun Buddha on the ocean floor, we have come to identify the deities of the Inner and Outer Shrines with the Great Sun Buddha…. (Morrell 1985:73–4) A revision of earlier cosmogonic accounts found in the Kojiki (1.3) and Nihon shoki (1.5), this tale not only replaces the kami Izanami and Izanagi with the Imperial ancestress Amaterasu as the creator of the world, but it also reveals that creative activity to be informed by deeper meanings and motivations not present (or hidden) in earlier versions. As in

10. The tale also appears in the Shintōshū , an influential collection of honji suijaku tales compiled in the fourteenth century.


earlier versions of the tale, the Shasekishū describes the earth being created by kami churning the primordial brine with a spear. Amaterasu’s actions, however, represent not the tentative “groping” (kyū , see Aston 1972:11) of Izanami and Izanagi, but purposive action, tracing the contours of the seal ) of Dainichi hidden beneath the water. Not only (inmon does the added detail of Dainichi’s hidden seal direct the reader to identify the Sun Goddess with the Sun Buddha, but those aspects of the Nihon shoki account preserved in the Shasekishū become retroactively infused with new significance —it appears to have been no accident, for instance, that sui , the term describing the drops of brine “flowing down” the spear in both the Nihon shoki and the Shasekishū, happens to be the same term used to describe the manifestation of ).11 This rereading of buddhas and bodhisattvas (suijaku the creation narrative, in other words, casts it first and foremost as the disclosure of the dharmakāya in history, and its significance as the origin of the Land of the Kami is pushed to secondary importance. Rather than displacing the veneration of local spirit-powers in favor of Buddhist practices, honji suijaku thought worked to reinscribe those beings and the cultic practices with which they were associated. The possibility of a deeper level of significance lurking beneath the manifest form of local religion depended on a basic semiological division between appearance and meaning, signifier and signified, a gap that provided a fertile ground for interpretation. By tracing (or perhaps forging) the bonds of meaning across this divide, even the most striking of religious differences could be reinterpreted and reconciled in the name of a common salvific

11. The revelatory implications of the imperial cosmogonic myth are certainly not new to the Shasekishū, however, appearing already in the Kojiki account of these events. Prior to the stirring of the ocean, the heavenly kami are all said to “hide their bodies” (Kojiki, 1.1, 1.2, 2.1; Philippi 1968:47–48). Only afterwards, when Izanami and Izanagi descend to the island they have created, are they described as embodied beings, and their first words to one another are to ask, “How is your body formed?” (Kojiki 4.2; Philippi 1968:50). Their descent into the world, in other words, appears in these passages as a making manifest, a literal embodiment of the divine.


enterprise. Regarding the practice of offering fish to the kami of the Itsukushima Shrine, for example, the Shasekishū (1.8) states that, although animal sacrifice appears to contradict the Buddhist injunction against taking life, the practice is in fact an expedient device that ultimately benefits sentient beings. Not only does it represent an act of devotion by the worshippers (the negative karmic effects of which are assumed by the kami, who as suijaku are the provisional manifestations of bodhisattvas), but it also provides a means by which the fish themselves are able to pursue the path to enlightenment, showing disregard for their own lives by sacrificing themselves for the sake of the Dharma. Even as it provided a profound degree of interpretive flexibility, this incorporation of new levels of meaning into existing practices also worked to exacerbate what were already radically indeterminate forms of divine revelation. Thus, for example, numerous spirits continued to make themselves known through spirit-possession, but they increasingly did so in order to declare their ultimately Buddhist identity and associations. A human medium relaying the words of a kami identifying itself as a bodhisattva (which was itself usually understood to be a manifestation of a celestial buddha, and ultimately of the dharmakāya itself), the manifold layers of honji suijaku significance and the tortuous links between them provided all the more opportunities for misrecognition and misrepresentation, a duplicity embodied by shapeshifters like the fox. More importantly, the emphasis of honji suijaku thought on the doctrine of expedient devices introduced an entirely new mode of dissimulation to the Japanese semiotics of revelation. Amaterasu’s pledge to Māra—a pledge maintained in letter but subverted in intent—establishes the relationship between Buddhism and indigenous celestial beings as essentially duplicitous. The meeting between Amaterasu and Māra presents a disturbing juxtaposition of the two figures, in which Amaterasu takes on an external appearance that succeeds in out-deceiving the Master of Deceit himself. While Amaterasu’s external form is that of a kami exerting her worldly sovereignty, her (hidden) intentions and identity are described as fundamentally Buddhist, working to free sentient beings from that world.


The apparent (and uncomfortable) proximity of hōben to outright deception is a recurring issue in Buddhist discussions of expediency. As the Lotus Sūtra takes pains to indicate, the various forms assumed by the Buddha and his teachings should not be understood as deceitful, since their ultimate result is to deliver sentient beings to the Truth (Watson 1993: 56–62). This distinction, however, is not between semblance and dissemblance in the ordinary sense. As the Lotus Sūtra suggests, the Buddha “is capable of giving to all living beings the Law of the Great Vehicle. But not all of them are capable of receiving it” (Watson 1993:62). Weak-willed, vicious and stupid, most sentient beings are incapable of understanding the nature of the Buddha or the Dharma directly, leading the Buddha and the Dharma to assume various forms to address the immediate needs and abilities of different people at different times and places. Since the truth as it is known by the enlightened is beyond the ability of the unenlightened to perceive, it cannot be represented to them in its actuality, rendering moot any notion of misrepresentation as it is usually understood. Rather than being distinguished in terms of truth or falsehood, accuracy or inaccuracy, expedient devices should be judged by their effects, the capacity of a given representation to lead sentient beings away from their immersion in delusion and suffering—in other words, to lead them away from their reliance on such representations at all. In this context, the powers employed by Buddhist savior figures are frequently described in much the same terms as those employed by less wholesome beings, as well. Shapeshifting thus provides the modus operandi for a host of different entities, from teachers and saviors to sorcerers and deceivers.12 Like the story of Amaterasu’s encounter with Māra, didactic literature is replete with narratives juxtaposing the expedient transformations of those acting in , literally “within the accordance with the Dharma (naihō Law”) with the deluding powers of those who act against it , iterally “outside the Law”).13 Returning to the (gehō story of the Fox Wife of Bitchū described in the last chapter, for example, it is a bodhisattva who rescues Kaya no Yoshifuji from the fox-wrought illusion of his married life. Rather than simply abolishing their illusory world, however, the bodhisattva manifests himself within it, as a staff-wielding


figure who drives away the members of Yoshifuji’s phantom household and drags him from its confines into the light of day. Like the celestial buddha Dainichi, who manifested himself as the kami Amaterasu in order to forestall Māra’s interference in the dissemination of the Dharma, bodhisattvas appear in these texts first and foremost as shapeshifters—an apparition among apparitions, an illusion within an illusion, they are accomplished in the same techniques of transformation by which beings like the fox work to ensnare humans.

12. The terms by which these transformations are described— including jinzū ,jinpen hengen , and henge — correspond to the Sanskrit term prātihārya. The capacity for this power (Skt.abijñā is frequently designated by adding the character riki to the original term, although a term such as jinzū may represent both prātihārya and abijñā (Nakafuka, et al. 1995:472). Even as the use of the character hen (“transformation”) to translate these terms introduced new connotations strongly influenced by Daoist thought (Mair 1989:36–72), the power to produce these marvels appears to have been associated with Buddhist holy beings well before the composition of the Lotus Sūtra (68). Nor were these powers understood to be limited to Buddhist saints and saviors—the chapter on “Peaceful Practices” in the Lotus Sūtra, for example, forbids the bodhisattva from associating with “actors or others engaged in various kinds of illusory entertainments (hengen no ge ,” depicting both the salvific work of Buddhas and the frivolous techniques of entertainers under the common heading of prātihārya—T (263) 9.37a; see also Watson (1993:197). Earlier still, the Sampasādanīya Sutta explains that the power of marvelous transformation can be used for both pure and impure purposes, and the Kevaddha Sutta remarks that marvels are an inappropriate way to demonstrate the power of the Dharma precisely because they can also be obtained through non-dharmic means (Dīgha Nikāya 3.112–3 and 1.213 1.213–4 in Walshe 1995:423–4, 175– 6). 13. As Victor Mair notes (1989:52–55), the idea of a “transformation contest” between holy men and demons, using superhuman powers that are described in much the same terms, is a recurring feature of Buddhist popular narrative from the earliest introductions of Buddhism to East Asia. Japanese setsuwa collections, too, employ much the same terms to describe the actions of saviors and demonic deceivers alike—compare, for example, Konjaku monogatarishū 16.17 with 27. 37–39.


Not only are the saving powers of bodhisattvas described in much the same terms as the deluding shapeshifting of less wholesome figures, but the ways in which those powers are used often make it difficult to tell the one from the other. Indeed, a number of setsuwa tales describe the shapeshifting of bodhisattvas in ways that are strikingly similar to stories of fox-wrought illusion. The Shasekishū (1.9), for example, relates an account of divine revelation with disturbing parallels to the story of the Fox Wife of Bitchū.14 It tells of a young monk who found himself sorely tempted by the daughter of a visiting nobleman. Torn between continuing his commitment to monasticism and seeking out the beautiful young woman, he experienced a dream in which he was invited to visit the girl’s father. Upon his arrival, he again saw the young woman, and in the course of what quickly became an extended visit, the two grew increasingly (and improprietously) close, and she eventually became pregnant with his child. His life with the young woman—unlike the perfectly idyllic imaginary life described in the Fox Wife of Bitchū story—was difficult but by and large happy. After initial tensions with the woman’s parents, the couple was eventually accepted by her family, and the young man’s learning allowed him to serve as his father-in-law’s representative in business matters. After thirteen years, however, when he and his family set out on an ocean voyage, a storm arose, during which his eldest son was swept away. At that moment, the monk suddenly awoke, “heartbroken and in great distress.” “During the space of a short nap,” the author writes, “he had reviewed in detail the events of thirteen years.” Compressing a life’s worth of lessons on the futility of worldly existence, the dream renewed the young monk’s resolve to continue on the path to enlightenment. “Truly,” the tale concludes, “the dream was a skillful device of the gods who soften their light” (Morrell 1985:94–95).

14. The persistence of certain telling details of this story (such as the thirteen-year length of the illusory marriage) would seem to suggest that the Shasekishū tale may have drawn on these earlier variants of the fox wife story.


In more than one tale, these parallels lead the protagonist to suspect—at least momentarily—that he has been the victim of vulpine deception rather than a bodhisattva’s expedient teachings. Among the many tales of shapeshifting in the Konjaku monogatarishū (17.33), for example, can be found the story of a young monk of Mount Hiei, a man known for his prodigious capacity for procrastination and self-distraction. The monk often went on pilgrimage to Hōrinji, ostensibly to pray to the bodhisattva Kokūzō for scholarly success, but also (and more impor tantly) to visit with his friends in the capital. It was during one of these excursions, while looking for a friend’s house where he could stay, that he happened across a wealthy manor, where he was invited to spend the night. When ushered in to meet the lady of the house, he found himself stricken with her beauty and charm, and immediately resolved to break his vows of chastity. For her part, she claimed to be attracted to the young man, but complained that a woman of her social status had her reputation to think about. If he were a more distinguished monk, she said, she could consider his proposal. Rebuffed but inspired, he returned to the monastery, and in the weeks and months that followed the other monks were surprised by the young man’s sudden commitment to his monastic duties, and he was soon known far and wide for his passionate devotion to learning. Achieving renown throughout the capital, he finally received an invitation to the woman’s home, but instead of consummating their relationship as he had hoped, they ended up discussing doctrine and philosophy until late at night. The next morning. the young monk awoke to find himself not in a sumptuous mansion but in an abandoned field, and he began to suspect that he had been the victim of a trick by a shapeshifter. After all, the capital abounded with stories of unsuspecting men seduced and abandoned by foxes or ghosts. Confused and afraid, he ran to Hōrinji for sanctuary, where he received a vision from the bodhisattva Kokūzō. “It was no fox or tanuki that tricked you,” the bodhisattva explained, “but I.” To inspire the young man to proper diligence, the bodhisattva had appeared in the manner he judged most suitable to the purpose (NKBZ 22:421– 432).


As exercises in pedagogic expediency, episodes like the dream marriage of the Shasekishū or Kokūzō’s seduction of the young monk represent a savior’s efforts to make use of humanity’s worldly inclinations in order to lead them towards enlightenment. At the same time, they also express important lessons about the nature of unenlightened existence, its dreamlike qualities, for example, or the ephemerality of lust in the face of the world’s transformations. From the perspective of the unenlightened, however, the parallels between these lessons and the machinations of shapeshifters like the fox make it difficult to know whether such experiences represent a valuable lesson or a malicious deception—that is, of course, until they are over, at which point it may simply be too late. Just as the Dharma may assume non-dharmic forms to appeal to the worldly, so the minions of Māra might assume the guise of Buddhist savior figures to mislead and waylay the devout.15 In other words, if the techniques by which beings like the fox distort the truth are, from all outward appearances, the same as those by which the bodhisattva leads one to the truth, how is one to distinguish between them? In this respect, the imagery of shapeshifting represents an important aspect of the Buddhist understanding of revelation, a semiotic in which the shapeshifting of bodhisattvas and foxes alike can be seen as signs, the representation of one thing by means of another, of hidden meanings and purposes concealed in manifest forms. In this context, the deluding activities of foxes provide a complement to the “true” (i.e. soteriologically motivated) shapeshifting of bodhisattvas, giving concrete expression to Umberto Eco’s provocative formulation of the sign as “everything which can be used in order to lie” (1979a:7). In this regard, a number of setsuwa tales highlight the importance of being able to distinguish revelations of the hidden Truth, governed by hōben, from the deceitful transformations of beings like the fox. Variously described as

15. Although foxes themselves seldom appear to assume the form of Buddhist savior figures, setsuwa collections are replete with tales of tengu, tanuki and wild boars who assume the form of buddhas and bodhisattvas to mislead the unwise (e.g. Konjaku monogatarishū 20.3, 20.12, 20.13; c.f. Uji shūi monogatari 2.14,8.6).


wisdom (chi ), discernment (shiryō ) or penetration (tsū ), the ability to interpret the hidden import of revelations is closely linked to the imagery of honji suijaku thought itself. Like the brine that flowed (sui) from Amaterasu’s spear, expedient manifestations of the Dharma flow into the phenomenal world as suijaku. These signs may in turn be retraced back to their original ground, a progression from manifest forms (katachi ) towards the Absolute Essence (tai ) of the dharmakāya.16 The interpretation of these signs depends on close attention to the external details through which such manifestations are mediated. Like the interpretation of figurative language by which, ac cording to the Lotus Sūtra, “those who are wise can obtain understanding” (Watson 1993:56), the penetrating eyes ) of the wise use the surface details of trace (tsūgen manifestations to reach the hidden original ground (the Absolute Truth of the dharmakāya) that motivates those details.17 Revealing the truth at the same time that it conceals it, the expedient devices of bodhisattvas can be seen as a kind of code, expressing itself through various levels of resemblance, analogy and symbolization. In myth, the proper response to such manifestations of the truth are allegorical readings. As the author of the Shasekishū (1.1) argues, “Events which took place during the Age of the Gods all have their Buddhist interpretation” (Morrell 1985:74) —the High Plain of Heaven described in the Nihon shoki, for example, is in fact the Tusita Heaven of Buddhist cosmology. Similarly, he argues that, although the Great Shrine at Ise shuns the outward trappings of Buddhism, the shrine’s

16. As the abbot Kōken of Miidera is said to have argued when criticized by his fellows for his devotion to the kami, “As the occasion dictates, the Law Body creates the various forms in the ten-fold world of the Four-Enclosure Mandala. If we ignore the forms and hold to the essential substance, then what is there that does not participate in the benefits of the Law Body?” (Morrell 1985:78–9). 17. On the distinction between ordinary and penetrating eyes, the Nihon ryōiki (1.4) states that “the penetrating eyes of a holy man see the hidden essence” (NKBT 70:78). In a similar context, the Shasekishū (1.4) exhorts, “You should not evaluate sentient beings with your stupid cow—and goat-like eyes.” (Morrell 1985:83).


architecture carries implicit Buddhist meanings: Not only do the straight beams and cross-pieces of the shrine roof teach the rectification of human hearts, but the roof construction and shrine fences are meant to correspond to symbolic elements of the Four-Enclosure Mandala and the Matrix World. Such interpretations are based on a reading of these details as metaphors, taking noticeable analogies between the frame (the Buddhist world view) and the narrative as significant, as a message intended to spark recognition on the basis of those analogies. The shared imagery of the sun by which both Amaterasu and Dainichi are marked, the metaphorical equivalents of geometrical and moral rectitude as presented in Shrine architecture, even the parallels between the dripping of water (sui) from the heavenly spear and the descent of expedient manifestation (suijaku)—each represents an analogy between the outward form of the message and the inner (Buddhist) nature behind it. In contrast, the deceptive shapeshifting of foxes is marked by its fundamental lack of content. Instead of the hidden truth signified by expedient manifestations, in deceptive shapeshifting there is only another outward form. Rather than the shift in register from provisional to absolute truth characteristic of hōben, misleading shapeshifting represents a shift from one form to another on the same level of reality, never referring beyond the delusional world of lust, ignorance and hatred. In contradistinction to the language of inner and outer that characterizes manifestations of the dharmakāya in honji suijaku thought, depictions of deceptive shapeshifters tend to suggest that their transformations are strictly limited to the level of surface appearance. This can be seen, for example, in a tale of false revelation involving a fox that had possessed a young girl. According to the tale, the spirit identified itself as a renown and venerated monk who had died a century before. His reputation for sanctity and marvelous powers (he was said to have saved a woman from hell) made the girl an instant sensation, and pilgrims began to arrive in droves to receive talismans (the invocation of featuring inscriptions of the nenbutsu Amida Buddha). The talismans, however, were inscribed with the wrong characters, rendering them essentially meaningless. Rather than providing a conduit between one level of reality


and another, these talismans constituted mere marks on a page, a signifier without a signified, a fetish for the ignorant, empty of deeper significance (de Visser 1908:88–9). In this context, numerous setsuwa tales describe the response of the wise to marvels in ways that seem more like the investigations of a detective than the adoration of the faithful, an attention to clues by which outward manifestations might be tested for their hidden content. The Shasekishū (1.4), for example, describes the case of the priest Eshin, who while visiting a shrine witnessed what appeared to ) of one of the be the divine possession (kamigakari shrine’s female mediums. Realizing that such spirit-possession might be the work of a deceptive spirit, he set about trying to ascertain the spirit’s true identity, by interrogating the purported kami about the complexities of Buddhist doctrine. The assumption underlying such a tactic appears to have been that, if the possessing spirit is indeed a kami then it must also be a manifestation of a Buddhist original ground. Since the purpose of such a manifestation is to lead sentient beings to enlightenment, the kami must have the ability to elaborate and debate even the most profound Buddhist teachings. Foxes and the Politics of Revelation At the same time, however, these links between inner substance and outer form are subject to a variety of complexities, slippages and even outright contradictions. The inherent indeterminacy separating origin and manifestation gave the interpretive process recourse to a virtually endless capacity for rationalization and justification. Eshin’s interrogation of the shrine medium, for example, at first seems to suggest that she is not genuinely possessed by a kami, since the spirit proves unable to address the profundities of Tendai philosophy. She justifies herself, however, by suggesting that her long manifestation in the form of a kami, “identified with the dust” in the Final Age of the ), had caused her to lose her grasp of the Dharma (mappō more complex Buddhist doctrines. In a similar fashion, the Shasekishū (1.4) describes the close interrogation of a monk ) of Kannon. who claimed to be a manifestation (keshin ) of a Challenged to demonstrate the powers (jinzū


bodhisattva, he declared, “I have not assumed the form of Kannon for a very long time, and now I have forgotten even how to employ the miraculous powers” (Morrell 1985:82–3). This indeterminacy and complexity provided the basic discursive field upon which Buddhist and indigenous images, practices and institutions were contested and negotiated in historical practice. The hierarchical nature of honji-suijaku relations—in which all suijaku are identified as manifestations of particular honji, which were themselves ranked as higher or lower manifestations of the dharmakāya itself—provided a rich ground for the creation and negotiation of status distinctions between different divinities and the institutions with which they were associated (Matsunaga 1969:233). In this sense, the exercise of attributing specific deities and individuals to specific honji not only served as a means by which local cults were assimilated into a larger Buddhist framework, but also an avenue by which those same cults could appropriate the symbolic associations and prestige of specific Buddhist savior-figures, as well as the institutional rank and patronage with which they were linked. The stakes—symbolic and material—for which those who negotiated these associations played can hardly be overestimated, and involved both clerical and political leadership in what were frequently bitter disputes. Even as divinities revealed their “original” Buddhist identities through possessed spirit-mediums, for example, the imperial court reserved for itself the right to bestow bodhisattva titles, and more than once issued decrees proclaiming authorized correspondences of honji and suijaku (Tyler 1990:115). Disputes over who had the ultimate authority to settle such matters of religious identity frequently placed court and shrine in competition, as reflected in the second anecdote of . According to the text, the Kasuga gongen genki the deity of the Kasuga Shrine declared itself to be a bodhisattva, with the name “Jihi Mangyō Bosatsu .” This declaration, however, earned the resentment of highranking ministers at court, who saw it as a usurpation of the court’s exclusive authority to grant such titles (Tyler 1990: 165). Nor should such disputes be surprising: The Kasuga Shrine (linked to the Buddhist temple Kōfukuji) was the tutelary religious institution of the politically powerful


Fujiwara clan, and its deities more than once led the way in demonstrations of force by monastic armies at the capital.18 Insofar as such deities served as almost totemic symbols of political identity, the negotiation of honji-suijaku associations by which their religious identity and status were established would have represented an important strategic tool in the contestation of both religious and social power. The ultimate implication of these ambiguities required that not all claims to divine revelation be accepted at face value. As accounts in both the Shasekishū (1.4) and Kasuga gongen genki (8.4) suggest, certain revelations were greeted with doubt, and had to be defended by those who would use them to establish doctrine or institutional status. That is, the interpretation of revelation must first identify which apparitions are to be interpreted as revelation, as signs of the Truth rather than as deceptions. In this context, the parallels between the expedient manifestations of bodhisattvas and the deluding transformations of other shapeshifters are fundamental to the process by which claims to divine revelation were established or rejected. The possibility that a particular marvel might be the product of foxes rather than a miraculous sign provided a means by which to account for all marvelous events as genuine marvels, without having to accept them all as miracles (that is, as genuine revelations of the divine). Furthermore, it allowed such distinctions without requiring recourse to outright fraud as an explanation (the corrosive effects of which could bring all claims of revelation into doubt).19 It is in this context that works like the Gukanshō and the episode of Go-Shirakawa’s alleged demand for veneration described at the beginning of this chapter might best be understood. As an influential member of the Tendai sect and brother to the Fujiwara regent Kujō Kanezane, Jien seems to have played a part in many of the disputes affecting the

18. In these, the deity manifested itself in the form of a sacred tree, carried in a palanquin to the capital like any general or nobleman intent on pressing his case before the emperor, whether that required recourse to reason, authority or sheer intimidation (see Grapard 1992:137–141).


religious and political climate of the capital, disputes which Jien frequently evaluated in terms of hidden supernatural forces at work in history (Brown and Ishida 1979:35–36). In the Gukanshō, Jien returns again and again to the power of ) to misrepresent what he calls “deceptive demons” (junma themselves in order to account for a number of the religious developments of his day. Thus, for example, he describes his religious rival Hōnen, the leader of the Pure Land movement that he had been instrumental in banishing from the capital, not (as some would have it) as the incarnation of the bodhisattva Kannon, but as a man possessed by evil spirits attempting to mislead the gullible. But it is in his account of Go-Shirakawa’s alleged possession of women at the imperial court that one might best see how these negotiations were worked out in practice. Jien notes, for example, that the legitimacy of these spirit-possessions were quickly supported by Go-Shirakawa’s widow, the Lady Jōdo-ji (also known as Takashina Eishi). Indeed, the second case involved the wife of a trusted servant of the Go-Shirakawa household named Nakakuni, whom Lady Jōdo-ji later took on as a personal escort. Beloved consort to Go-Shirakawa and mother to his favorite daughter, Lady Jōdo-ji, was an important figure in the late reign of the retired emperor. Brown and Ishida go so far as to suggest that from 1181 until GoShirakawa’s death in 1192, she “may well have been the most influential person at Go-Shirakawa’s palace” (Brown and Ishida 1979:151nl). After his death, as well, she and her daughter continued to hold considerable power. Although both women seem to have been sizable estate holders, their continued influence was based in no small part on the enduring prestige of the deceased Go-Shirakawa. In both respects, the

19. This seems to represent a departure from earlier indigenous responses to what were considered illegitimate manifestations of spiritual beings. Since any substantial demonstration of power along with expressions of a spirit’s desire to be worshipped would in theory qualified any being for kami status, these manifestations would have to be represented as human falsehoods if their legitimacy were to be challenged. This is precisely the strategy employed by the Nihon shoki, for example, in its rejection of the seventh-century millennial cult of To-koyo-no-kami (NKBT 68:258–9).


enshrinement of Go-Shirakawa’s spirit as a tutelary deity would have greatly enhanced their power, keeping the memory of their patron alive and creating a potentially influential, land-holding institution with which she and her daughter would no doubt have had close ties. Jien, however, seems to have regarded Lady Jōdo-ji as a hated rival, the mastermind behind a conspiracy against himself and his family. He describes her as organizing a deliberate campaign of misinformation against his brother Kujō Kanezane, sullying his good name in the eyes of the retired emperor Go-Toba and the Shōgun Minamoto Yoritomo. Not only did this result in Kanezane’s removal from the position of Chancellor, but it also forced Jien himself to resign his post as Tendai abbot. He was thus predisposed to act in direct opposition to the wishes and interests of Lady Jōdo-ji. As a result, while Lady Jōdo-ji seems to have immediately identified both cases of possession as the spirit of GoShirakawa (Jien notes that in the second case, “Lady Jōdo-ji Second Rank and others were constantly having meetings with this woman, crying over her, and then reporting to GoToba”), Jien was inclined to find a considerably different interpretation for these incidences. In the reports he addressed to Go-Toba (who, Jien writes, “really trusted” him), he argued against a divine interpretation of the women’s possession-experiences: Certainly there have been many such cases [of shrines being built to pacify a vengeful soul]. But has GoShirakawa’s soul become vengeful because of something done by Retired Emperor Go-Toba? And should the deceased Go-Shirakawa’s soul be considered a manifestation of the Great Hachiman Bodhisattva and honored as an ancestral Kami of the Imperial House? Have there been signs of miraculous power? Have not such things occurred because people have believed what persons—possessed only by foxes (yakan) and demons (tengu)—have said?… we should place Nakakuni and his wife in isolation and pay no attention to what they say. ) will soon remove itself Then the fox or tanuki (kori without a sound” (Brown and Ishida 1979:169–70).


In other words, Jien agreed with Lady Jōdo-ji that these phenomena were clearly the result of possession. He argued that the agent of that possession, however, was not the departed Go-Shirakawa, but demonic shapeshifters—foxes, tanuki or tengu—that had preyed on the unbalanced faculties of these women in order to incite the foolish to worship them as gods. Jien’s statement on these events represents a masterful example of both the logic of discernment and the practical ends to which it might be directed. On the one hand, in an interpretive reversal of the rationale understood to motivate “genuine” instances of onryō possession, he argued that there was no legitimate reason for Go-Shirakawa to resent those who now hold power, an argument that Go-Toba—as the reigning power behind the throne—would no doubt be predisposed to embrace. On the other hand, Jien turned to consider the outward form of this manifestation, arguing that the vengeance of onryō characteristically manifests itself in frightening acts of supernatural destruction—”signs of miraculous power” including storms, plagues and war—which were simply lacking in this case. In neither their inner motivations nor their outer signs, he suggested, did the claims of Lady Jōdo-ji, meet the necessary criteria for establishing this as a genuine case of onryō possession, deserving of enshrinement as a goryōshin. With that explanation eliminated from consideration, the likely alternative was that the possession was the work of a different sort of spirit altogether, a deceitful being to be ignored rather than humored. With Go-Toba’s support, Jien’s interpretation of these events ruled the day, and “Lady Jōdo-ji, Second Rank ceased, in embarrassment, to support the proposal to build a shrine.” Jien then concludes his reporting of the incident with the following note: It is really appalling to realize that if, in that situation, such an understanding man…had not been on hand, scandalous things would have occurred and, in a single day, this country would have been placed at the mercy of ,Brown and Ishida 1979:171). evil demons (jama


Jien’s account does not make the identity of this “understanding man” perfectly explicit, although as Brown and Ishida suggest, it is likely a less than self-effacing reference to himself. In a similar respect, it is also perhaps unclear exactly whose evil designs Jien is most pleased to have thwarted—those of deceptive beings like the fox, or the continued conspiracies of the Lady Jōdo-ji. Foxes in Semiotic Theory and Practice The epigraph to this chapter was drawn from the first pages of A Theory of Semiotics, in which Umberto Eco presents the program for a general semiotics as the development of a “theory of the lie” (1979a:7) This is particularly significant in Eco’s discussion of the relation between signs and referents (what he calls “the referential fallacy”). He argues that while the representation of things in the world is typically the stated purpose for a system of signification, it need not be “a necessary condition for its semiotic functioning” (1979a:58). In other words, the essence of a sign is that it is not that which is signified, but is rather what is used to stand in for it. It is thus precisely when a signifier re-presents something that is not the case that the sign best appears as distinct from the simple presentation of the thing itself. This distinction between representation and presentation that separates signifier from signified opens up the possibility of deception as a formal precondition for the operation of signs. As Eco argues, “The possibility of lying is the proprium of semiosis as (for the Schoolmen) the possibility of laughing was the proprium of Man as animal rationale” (1979a:58–9). In this chapter, I have traced a similar problematic running through Japanese marvel tales, an understanding of revelation which I have presented as not merely amenable to semiological inquiry, but as in fact constituting a semiotic metalanguage in its own right. Whether understood as possessing kami or as bodhisattvas manifesting themselves through expedient devices, revelation always appears in these sources as mediated through something else, signs that serve both to conceal and to reveal. It is precisely within this gap between signifier and signified that the imagery of duplicitous beings like the fox plays its most important role. In spite (or,


indeed, because) of their marginal status within Japanese taxonomies of the supernormal, deceptive shapeshifters like the fox represent a necessary feature of those taxonomies. The central purpose of this system may be the manifestation of the sacred, but the duplicity inherent in how these manifestations function formally requires the possibility of deception. Beings like the fox serve as the concrete expression of this possibility, and their marginality marks them not merely as an inversion but as a necessary supplement to revelation (c.f.Culler 1982: 103, 114). Moreover, the presence of deceptive shapeshifters represented an important element in the discursive field of medieval Japanese religious thought, the implications of which extended well beyond the world of the text. The contours of this discursive field provided a shared landscape on which revelations (and with it, relations of social and political power) were negotiated. Within this field, deceptive marvels like those produced by foxes represented a means (along with the implicit hierarchy of honji and suijaku itself) of opening and maintaining the distinctions upon which gradations of religious and social status were constructed. In other words, the deceptions of the shapeshifter fox provided one of the formative exceptions that literally made the rules of divine revelation at work in much of Japanese religious history. Like that portion of the rules of a game that determines the nature and penalties of foul play, the image of the deceptive shapeshifter provided a constitutive exception, the necessary obverse of legitimate play, by which certain strategic moves—like the efforts of Lady Jōdo-ji to enshrine her deceased husband Go-Shirakawa—could be excluded from the realm of the legitimate without being excluded from the rules of the game as a whole (and the systems of constraints and controls that it provides).

CHAPTER 4 The Gift of the Fox

Shapeshifting and the Power of Wealth

Of everything which we possess there are two uses: both belong to the thing as such, but not in the same manner, for one is the proper, and the other the improper or secondary use of it. For example, a shoe is used to wear, and is used for exchange; both are uses of the shoe. He who gives a shoe in exchange for money or food to him who wants one, does indeed use the shoe as a shoe, but this is not its proper or primary purpose, for a shoe is not made to be an object of barter. Aristotle, Politics (1257a.6–14) (McKeon 1941:1137–8) During the Edo period (1603–1867), the repertoires of popular ) printing houses and professional raconteurs (rakugoka alike regularly featured a story that would later be collected by the folklorist Seki Keigo under the title of “The Lucky ). It tells of a fox saved Teakettle” (bunbuku chagama from certain death by the mercy of a human being, and the marvelous exploits by which it repays that kindness. Using its shapeshifting powers, the fox assumes a variety of different forms, each of which the man is able to sell for a tidy sum. After each sale, the fox eventually returns to the man, to assume a new form and be sold again. Each transaction earns the man more than the one before, and he is soon able to take ) of village his place among the prosperous elites (chōja society.1 Even as the man grows ever more wealthy, however, it is the fox who pays the price. In the episode from which the tale

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takes its name, for example, the fox assumes the form of a teakettle, in order to be sold to a local priest. Not realizing the true nature of his new acquisition, the priest places the foxkettle over a fire. Badly burned, the fox reverts to its original form and races away, yelping in pain. In another episode, the fox assumes the form of a horse, a handsome animal that is sold to a nearby feudal lord. Once again, the buyer uses his purchase in a fashion appropriate to its outward form, but disastrous for the fox. Unable to bear a human rider like a genuine horse, the fox quickly succumbs to exhaustion and collapses under its load, and is unceremoniously dumped into a muddy ditch at the orders of its angry rider. In its basic outline, the story of the Lucky Teakettle can be read as part of an enduring theme in Japanese popular literature, of a man who is able to rise above the circumstances of his birth through a combination of goodheartedness, guile and supernatural assistance. The success of the human protagonist in this story, however, is intimately linked to the repeated punishment of the shapeshifter responsible—even as the reader is encouraged to view the wealth attained by the human protagonist as a happy ending, the tale remains ambivalent regarding the means by which that wealth was achieved. Indeed, the widespread popularity of this tale, from the Edo period to the modern era, might be attributed precisely to this basic sense of ambivalence, an attitude that reflects the changing nature of wealth and society during that time. In this context, the story of the Lucky Teakettle can be read as emblematic of a much larger body of

1. Seki (1953, 2:1081–1100) records 42 variants of the tale in folklore from across Japan. Most variants describe the shapeshifter as a fox, although a few portray it as a tanuki or even a cat. Seki (1963:106) notes that the tale continues to be a prominent theme in children’s literature, a fact which has no doubt played an important part in making it what Ikeda (1971:81) describes as one of the best known folk tales in modem Japan. Seki follows his predecessor Yanagita Kunio (1986:69–70) in categorizing the tale as a subtype of the larger theme in which an animal repays a kindness to a human being, though—as I will argue here—it is less the kindness itself than the way in which that kindness is expressed that lends the story its significance as well as its popularity in the pre- and early modern periods.


discourse, in which the imagery of the fox provided a means by which to negotiate the significance of monetary wealth, portraying both its marvelous powers and its painful consequences. Shifting Values and Shitty Wealth: Foxes, Inari and the New Wealth of the Edo Period It is a truism of Japanese historiography that, although the Edo period ushered in the end to more than a century of civil war, the so-called “pax Tokugawa” established by the bakufu was anything but tranquil. Rather, it was a period marked by profound shifts in the religious, socio-economic and physical landscapes of Japan (see Totman 1993). During this time, the population exploded, cities grew, and disparate regions became increasingly integrated within nationwide cultural and commercial networks. By the late seventeenth century, these networks had penetrated deep into rural economies, bringing new consumer goods that initially served to raise standards of living among peasants. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, some peasants were able to prosper by growing cash crops for trade on the national market, and the period saw a steady increase in the specialized cultivation of such commodities as tobacco, cotton and silk (Sansom 1961, 3: 120). “Perhaps,” as the historian Thomas C. Smith wrote of this period, “the peasant was less self-reliant than his grandfather had been, but life was manifestly easier for him, too” (1959:82). The same market forces that initially helped to raise standards of living, however, also introduced new possibilities for misery. Even as rice continued to be affirmed as both the primary staple and the central measure of value (OhnukiTierney 1993:63–80), it was in practice increasingly effaced by currency as the de facto “universal equivalent” by which all other commodities were measured.2 As a consequence, rice began to fluctuate in monetary value, subjecting those who depended on its cultivation to substantial financial pressures. Thus the warrior class, whose stipends continued to be paid in rice throughout the Edo period, saw their income fall steadily against the costs of consumer goods (Sansom 1961, 3: 128). Similarly, the monetary value of the rice crop left to

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peasants after they paid their taxes varied dramatically according to the going price of rice. Although their daily needs were not as dependent on currency as those of the urban samurai, the agricultural technologies that made increases in yields possible (including new types of tools and commercial fertilizers) cost money, and landholders frequently found themselves caught in a kind of “cost-price squeeze,” where the rising cost of consumer goods and the falling price of their crops made it difficult to make ends meet no matter how hard they worked or how good the harvest. In order to bridge the gap, peasants were routinely forced to go into debt to moneylenders and many lost their land (Smith 1959:159–61). The impact of nationwide market forces also created unsettling upheavals in the basic patterns of social distinction and cooperation governing village-level society.3 At the beginning of the Edo period, the elites of village society were ) in whose the so-called “titled peasants” (honbyakushō names land was registered by the feudal authorities and who were responsible not only for the payment of the village’s taxes but also for its day-to-day governance—important local offices (such as village headman) were typically restricted to people of this status. Other families were integrated into the ) of land-holding households, extended families (dōzoku worshipping the same divinities and interacting according to ) and “branch” (bunke traditional “main” (honke family relations. An extension of the mutual responsibilities of ) and child (kokata ), the relationship parent (oyakata between patron (titled peasants) and their client or cadet “branches” (including such “fictional kin” as hereditary

2. My use of economic terminology, including the idea of the “universal equivalent,” “use-value” and “exchange-value” is drawn from Marx 1976:131–7, 163. 3. Ooms summarizes the transformations that reshaped village life during the Edo period by suggesting that “a ‘village’ in the early seventeenth century, economically self-sufficient and consisting predominantly of, and ruled by, a few extended families, had little in common besides its name with the form it took two hundred and fifty years later, when it consisted predominantly of numerous small, often impoverished families tied into a wide regional administrative network and a national economy” (1996:75).


servants and tenants, as well as biological branch families descended from younger siblings) was one governed by a basic principle of hierarchical reciprocity. Branch-families offered their labor to assist in their patron’s holdings, and in return the main family loaned them small plots of land (and many of the tools and livestock to work it) by which to support themselves (Smith 1959:11; 1968a:265–275). The immersion of village society into national economic networks, however, had a corrosive influence on these traditional patterns of exchange. As Thomas C.Smith writes: Economic exchange, which had been merely an aspect of social relations, a necessary concomitant of kinship, became increasingly independent of social organization and created values of its own. Thereafter what goods and services men gave and received, on what occasions and in what amounts, was less a matter of obligation than whether the price was right (1959:x). Over the course of the Edo period, rent and wages replaced the exchange of labor, and as agriculture became increasingly competitive, large land-holders made greater use of short-term wage laborers. Eventually, many landholders devolved their agricultural responsibilities altogether, forcing tenant farmers to bear the costs of land management while retaining for themselves the profits of land ownership (Smith 1959:108– 139). At the same time, the costs of consumer goods, price fluctuations and obsolete tax assessments—especially when joined by crop failures exacerbated by market-dictated monoculture—drove substantial numbers of peasants into debt (Smith 1968b:291, 294). Those lucky or savvy enough to navigate the demands of agriculture in a nationwide market benefited from their neighbors’ distress, buying up their property and reducing many to the role of sharecropper on what had once been their own land (Ooms 1996:52–60). By the end of the period, a great deal of land had come into the hands . of a new class of agricultural magnates known as gōnō Nor was land the only thing for sale—successful “new” families without hereditary status (including branch families that had split from their main households, as well as families that moved into villages from elsewhere) used their new

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wealth to purchase titles from impoverished older families (Ooms 1996:54, 184). Similarly, feudal lords—who were left chronically strapped for cash by many of the same market forces—could bestow such prerogatives as a family name or the right to carry a sword on peasants who made contributions to their coffers. As one dis gruntled commentator of the period wrote, “This is an age when money buys anything” (Smith 1959:176). It is in this context that the story of the Lucky Teakettle might best be understood, as an allegory on the nature of wealth portrayed through the image of the fox and its ambivalent gift.4 In this story, the fox transforms itself into a variety of goods, not for the immediate use of the human protagonist, but for exchange as commodities. In other words, like the monetary wealth that increasingly shaped economic and social life in the Edo period, the value of the fox’s gift lay not in its inherent utility (in Marxian economic terms, its “usevalue”), but by the price it could bring in trade, an abstract “exchange-value” every bit as implicated in transformation and duplicity as the shapeshifter fox itself. Yet it is precisely this power that sets the stage for the fox’s downfall. Each time it is sold, the fox finds the tables turned, as the new owner unwittingly attempts to use his purchase, and in so doing shifts the criterion of value from exchange back to utility. When the fox-kettle or the fox-horse becomes something to be used rather than exchanged for cash, the illusory nature of exchange-value stands revealed. Like Aristotle’s ancient

4. The folkloric motif of the “fox gift” was coined by Smyers (1999:103– 105). In her discussion of this theme, she distinguishes between “payments” by the fox—usually with money, much or all of which is eventually revealed to be illusory—and gifts (or punishments) governed by an ethic of reciprocity. As the story of the Lucky Teakettle (in which the fox reciprocates the kindness of the human who saved it by means of a scheme to earn monetary wealth) suggests, however, the themes of gift and payment associated with the fox are seldom truly distinct. Indeed, the fundamental ambivalence of the fox’s gift (at least as it appears in the literature of the Edo and early modern periods) should be understood to rest precisely on the interconnections and oppositions of these two basic forms of exchange.


complaint that a pair of shoes should be seen first and foremost as something to be worn rather than as a commodity for exchange, the repeated failure of the fox to live up to its appearance in practice exemplifies the fundamental emptiness of exchange-value in the face of an object’s “proper and primary purpose.” Like money, the shifting shapes of the fox may provide a marvelous avenue for the accumulation of wealth, but that wealth cannot itself satisfy human needs. Like the fox-kettle or the fox-horse, money has no value outside of its capacity for exchange—just as you can’t ride a fox-horse or make tea with a fox-kettle, you can’t fill your stomach with currency, no matter how much it may supplant rice as the sole measure of value. Like the gold of starving King Midas (Politics 1257b.l5), the ever-changing fox represents the marvelous personification of commodified value, a source of virtually endless wealth that is at the same time incapable of satisfying a single human need. If, unlike the story of King Midas, the story of the Lucky Teakettle ends happily for its human protagonist, it is because the force of its allegory has been projected entirely onto the fox. The man is able to enjoy the benefits of wealth, while the commodity itself bears the consequences of its own contradictions.5 In this respect, the tale may be read as reflecting the sort of “eat-your-cake-and-have-it-too” fantasy that would have likely shaped the response of many to the changing nature of wealth during this period. On the one hand, the tale portrays the unmasking of exchange-value at the heart of commercial wealth, and gives the agent of that wealth a comeuppance that is both just and poetic. On the other hand, the protagonist who benefits from that wealth is left free from censure; his success is one that many would no doubt have wished to emulate. Like much of the discourse of this period, the tale’s critique of monetary wealth—as biting as it is insightful—is never far removed from the desire to possess that wealth for oneself. Even as the imagery of the shapeshifter fox provided a means by which to express these conflicting perceptions and desires, the effort to navigate these contradictions drew that imagery into a larger imaginaire, one governed by the religious logics of ritual pacification and defilement. Like the theme of the fox wife or the semiotics of revelation discussed

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in previous chapters, the shapeshifting of the fox came to inform—and to be informed by—this larger field of religious significance. Thus a common epilogue to the story of the Lucky Teakettle describes the human protagonist using a portion of his new-found wealth to erect a shrine in the fox’s honor. In many variants, the enshrinement of the fox’s spirit is worship, a detail that described explicitly in terms of Inari reflects not only the prominent place of fox symbolism in this tradition, but also its remarkable proliferation during the Edo period. A regional divinity originally associated with rice agriculture and the protection of the imperial capital in the Heian period, Inari had become by the end of the Edo period one of the single most ubiquitous and multifaceted objects of devotion in Japanese religious life (Smyers 1999; Nakagawa 1999:180–212). In the process, Inari worship also became what was perhaps the single most widely-recognized focal point of fox imagery in Japan. The figure of the fox seems to have played a fundamental role in the symbolic associations by which the deity was linked to worldly success in a range of different enterprises—including not only agriculture but also metalworking, fire fighting and the work of female entertainers—

5. The tale of the Lucky Teakettle often includes another episode in which the fox’s transformations do not result in its immediate physical injury, namely its assumption of the form of a young girl, who poses as the man’s daughter in order to be sold into prostitution (a variant which unsurprisingly disappears from the tale when it enters the repertoire of modern children’s literature). In this form, the fox proves quite successful, and in some variants is eventually returned to her “father” by a grateful brothel owner. The reason for this exception should likely be sought in the social and symbolic logic explored in Chapter Two. Not only are foxes commonly understood to have a special facility for assuming the form of human women, but the theme of the fox-woman itself is emblematic of the particular status of women in patrilineal society, a status that in large part depends on their constitutive role in the social exchange between patrilines. In other words, while the damage inflicted on the foxhorse and the fox-teakettle can be seen as indicative of the cognitive dissonance produced by viewing things, not as objects to be used but as commodities to be exchanged, the success of the fox-woman in the same tale may indicate the fundamental unremarkableness within the same culture of viewing women in terms of their exchange value.


both before and during the Edo period.6 It appears to have been only during the Edo period, however, that the powers of Inari came to be linked explicitly with monetary success (Amino and Miyata 1999:62–3). In the eighteenth century in particular, a number of tales began to express the rewards of Inari worship in specifically commercial terms, tales which make use of the fox as an agent of prosperity. Like the tale of the Lucky Teakettle, many of these follow a pattern in which a man saves the life of a fox and is rewarded with its marvelous , for assistance. One tale from the Sanshū kidan example, describes a man who saves the life of a pregnant white fox, who later appears to him in the form of a young woman. She tells him to go to Edo, where her husband (another fox) teaches him the recipe for a patent medicine. Making a fortune in this new trade, he builds an Inari shrine in their honor (de Visser 1908:75). In tales such as these, the benefits of Inari worship are mediated through the figure of the fox, and the gifts of the divinity appear in their most immediate form as a gift from a fox. 6. The association between Inari and metal smiths is usually traced back to an episode in the thirteenth century when the god assisted a sword maker in creating a blade for the imperial court known as kogitsune maru or “the little fox” (Kondo 1978:153–161; Kusano 1962:77–9). Beyond the common idea that human creativity depends upon divine power and assistance, the importance of Inari to metal smiths likely also lies in the fox’s reputed control of fire, especially the mysterious lights known as fox-fire (kitsune-bi , see de Visser 1908:58, 66, 100, 104). At the same time, the fox’s power over flames also makes them a valued ally for firefighters (Smyers 1999:138–141), and various tales describe houses protected from fire when foxes are appeased, while other stories tell of foxes setting fires when angered by human transgressions (e.g. Uji shūi monogatari 52; de Visser 1908:37). As the seventeenth-century novelist Ihara Saikaku suggested in his Koshoku gonin onna , the ability of the fox to transform (and seduce) made it the epitome of life in the illusory “floating world” of the pleasure quarters (KNK 51:21), a fact that no doubt contributed to the popularity of Inari among women entertainers and prostitutes (Smyers 1999:134–138). In a similar fashion, Onnabake Inari, a shrine dedicated to the “Fox wife of Ryūgasaki” discussed in Chapter Two, draws on the marital implications of its foundation legend to claim a special power to grant kanai anzen or domestic tranquility.

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The symbolic and historical dynamics by which this identification came about, however, are far from clear. The image of the fox is conspicuously absent from the earliest records of Inari worship, and the historical origins of their association remains a matter of some controversy.7 A common argument holds that the fox—a figure often (and multifariously) linked by folklorists with agricultural fertility —is understood to have shared a basic affinity with Inari as a spirit of rice agriculture, a common symbolic ground which led to their association as a matter of course (see Figure 6). In a similar fashion, the deepening association of Inari, the fox and the growing forces of commercial wealth during the Edo period is typically described as having developed as a “natural” outgrowth of their common links with rice, as the new moneyeconomy grew out of and gradually supplanted traditional forms of exchange based on rice-agriculture (e.g. Smyers 1999: 215).8 Such arguments for the ancient origins of this symbolic constellation notwithstanding, I would suggest that the associations drawn in the discourse of the Edo period between foxes, Inari and monetary wealth suggest something quite other than the simple reproduction of previous symbolic forms. Rather, the links between the shapeshifter fox and the agricultural deity Inari—culminating in their popular identification by the end of the Edo period—should be seen as an essentially creative act of ritual signification. As in the story of the Lucky Teakettle, the veneration of the shapeshifter fox (especially within the idiom of Inari worship) represents, not the uncritical reflection of an underlying affinity, but rather a recognition of the fundamental (and troubling) 7. As Smyers notes in her critical review of the most commonly-cited theories (1999:73–87), most attribute the association between Inari and foxes to either (1) the connection between the fox and agricultural fertility, or (2) the link between foxes and the ambivalent protective beings—part of the esoteric Buddhist imaginaire—known as dākinī. Whatever its ultimate origins, the identification of the fox with Inari was closely bound up with the rapid expansion of its worship during the Edo period. As she writes: “In a two-way flow, folk practices involving foxes became incorporated into Inari worship while Inari beliefs spread quickly throughout Japan on top of the layer of fox beliefs” (1999:87).


Figure 6. Inari daimyōjin by the Edo-period artist Hokusai (1760–1849), reflecting the divinity’s close associations with both rice agriculture and the fox (Ball 1927:135). 8. Although the close association between Inari and financial success is often noted, the intersection of Inari worship, foxes and monetary wealth has yet to receive the attention it deserves. The disinclination to elaborate this dimension of Inari worship may have a great deal to do with certain orientations and preconceptions shaping the academic study of Inari and of Japanese religion more generally. On the one hand, the study of Inari worship has been strongly influenced by an enduring suspicion of the “superstitious” aspects of Inari worship, against which scholars have been forced to defend the relevance and legitimacy of their object of study. The idea of Inari as a god of commercial success represents this aspect of Inari worship in what may be its most extreme form: the crass materialism of praying for “worldly benefits” (genze riyaku ), a phenomenon that is only recently emerging as an object of serious study (Reader and Tanabe 1998; Smyers 1999:216–17). On the other hand, the question of superstition in Inari worship has often been addressed through a focus on its ancient origins, classing suspect elements of Inari worship (including, but not limited to commercial success) as a secondary phenomenon, to be dismissed as a derivation (or degeneration) from the primordial association between foxes, Inari and rice agriculture. Such approaches to the material, however, tend to explain away rather than explain the complex symbolic and historical dynamics by which Inari came to take on this role.

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contrast between two spiritual and economic orientations. That

is, it constitutes an effort to ritually resolve the growing tensions between a social ideology centered on rice (as well as the peasants who grow it and the samurai who consume it) and the economic realities of the time, in which money had become the lever of power and merchants its operators. Instead of a sim ple expression of gratitude, the ritual veneration with which the tale of the Lucky Teakettle concludes can thus be read as a continuation of its basic critique of commodified wealth, an act of pacification and purification by which the protagonist is able to rehabilitate the unstable power of the fox by subsuming it within an older paradigm governed by reciprocity and agricultural cooperation. In this sense, it may be as much this act of ritual domestication as the man’s monetary wealth that makes the ending of the tale a happy one, enabling him to avoid censure and join the ranks of the peasant elite. In other words, the enshrinement of the fox within the context of Inari worship may be less about recognizing the identity of these two figures than about creating that identity. As I suggested in Chapter Three, ritual veneration is not simply a reflection of human-spirit relationships; it also forges those relationships, the culmination of a complex negotiation that transforms potentially dangerous spirits into tutelary divinities.9 As the embodiment of rice agriculture (and the social institutions that it entailed), enshrinement of the fox in the ritual idiom of Inari worship reflected an urgent desire to subordinate exchange-value to use-value, to domesticate the socially corrosive effects of national economic networks within local patterns of hierarchical reciprocity. Indeed, other tales from this period suggest that just such a domestication was

9. De Visser (1908:58) describes a similar ritual logic in the expressions by which some villages refer to foxes (both natural and supernatural): during the day, foxes are referred to by their common name (kitsune), but at night (when the threat of fox-related tricks and hauntings is understood to be at its peak), they are described as “Inari,” an abbreviated ritual practice that nevertheless suggests the importance of signification in human responses to superhuman natural (and social) forces.


understood to be possible. One early eighteenth-century tale collection, for example, records a story that begins very much like the tale of the Lucky Teakettle, in which a fox-spirit offers to use its powers to repay the kindness of a samurai who had stopped a fox-hunt by his retainers. Unlike the fox of the Lucky Teakettle, however, this spirit appears from the outset within the context of Inari worship, introducing itself as Kiko a messenger of the god Inari. This myōjin identification appears to have important consequences for the fox’s behavior, for when the man asked for money (precisely the reward offered by the fox of the Lucky Teakettle story), the Inari-fox refused, insisting instead that title to land is the mode of wealth proper for the warrior class. Shortly thereafter, we are told, the man received just such a reward, a handsome stipend measured not in gold but in bushels (koku ) of rice (de Visser 1908:67). The growing identification of the fox and Inari during the Edo period seems to have worked both ways, however (Smyers 1999:87). Even as Inari worship provided a context within which to domesticate the ambivalent powers of the fox, the very ambivalence of those powers came to reflect on Inari itself. Thus, for example, a commonly-cited saying from that period holds that: chonai ni iseya Inari ni inu no kuso In the city [of Edo], Ise merchants and Inari shrines are as common as dog shit. As the above translation suggests, scholars have frequently used this expression to suggest—depending on the focus of their study—either the numbers of Inari shrines or the prosperity of those traders known as Ise merchants (iseya )10 The juxtaposition of Inari worship, merchants and excrement, however, asserts not simply their ubiquity but also their odiousness, an expression of disdain rooted in their ). Rather than a simple common corruption (kegare matter of distaste, expressions such as these portray the presence of Ise merchants and Inari shrines as essentially defiled, a transgressive contravention of both the moral and cosmic order (Douglas 1991:35).

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Such negative connotations of Inari imagery appear to reflect an older understanding of the corrupt (and corrupting) influence of the fox’s gift. From at least the twelfth century, a common motif in tales of the shapeshifter fox describes foxes offering food or money to human beings, gifts that are later revealed to be transformed refuse—leaves, old bones and excrement. It is a theme that runs throughout the Kobiki, for example, including not only the “Great Fox Banquets” described in Chapter One but also an account of a fox in human form who purchased a house with trash transformed into money and silk (GR 6:462). In some cases, these foxes seem to be motivated purely by a desire to deceive; in others, the fox gives its gift as an expression of its gratitude (Hearn 1976:332–333). Whatever the motivation, a common element in many of these tales is that the discarded trash and debris given by foxes are not simply items without value but are in fact filth. Of course, the use of money was not new to the Edo period, having gradually grown in economic importance (first in the form of Chinese currency and later as coins minted in Japan) since at least the twelfth century (Ohnuki-Tierney 1993:68–9). During this time it had frequently earned criticism expressed in the idiom of defilement. As early as the twelfth century, for example, the courtier Kujō Kanezane referred to the potential of money to destabilize key commodities as “a strange sickness 10. Komatsu (1997:204) and Smyers (1999:20) cite the expression in their work on Inari worship, while Kitajima (1958:111–114) mentions it in the course of a discussion of Ise merchants. In fact, however, the expression itself makes no mention of their relative numbers, being instead a relatively open-ended—and thus allusive—list. Another, more literal translation might read, “in the city, [there are] iseya, Inari and dog shit.” Matsumoto (1970:210) suggests that the reference to excrement may represent an allusion to the fifth shōgun, Tsunayoshi, whose reign was associated with the extravagance of the Genroku era (1688–1704, in which merchants thrived and divinities like Inari grew in popularity), and whose Buddhist-inspired edicts protecting the city’s canine population earned him the sobriquet “the dog shōgun.” From this perspective, the presence of Inari, iseya and inu no kuso within the capital could be understood as emblems of Tsunayoshi’s rule, a none-too-subtle indictment of bakufu social policy for its failure to control the upheavals affecting the social, economic and hygienic will-being of city dwellers.


going round the country” (Sansom 1961, 2:184). What was new to the Edo period, however, was the extent to which this money economy infiltrated every level of Japanese society, part of an unprecedented integration of village society into national patterns of exchange (c.f. Parry and Block 1989:12–16). It is interesting to note, for example, that the link between Inari, merchants and excrement explicitly singles out Ise merchants for criticism. While this may allow for the euphonious juxtaposition of iseya, inari and inu, it also specifies a group of traders whose success was directly linked to their nationwide scope—Ise merchants were known for their cotton goods, which they purchased in Ise for sale in Edo. Like Inari, whose largest—and arguably oldest—shrine could be found at Fushimi near the old imperial capital, Ise merchants had their headquarters in western Japan but were able to spread their influence into eastern Japan, as well. In this context, the transgressive associations of Inari worship may have reflected the institutional development of this tradition, as well as its symbolic links with the fox. Indeed, the rapid spread of Inari worship during the Edo period appears to have been closely bound up with the deterioration of local patterns of social and religious solidarity. Especially in villages absorbed into growing urban areas, the influx of new residents and the departure of older families altered the ideological foundation of communities and the role of shrines within them. These demographic changes, along with the corrosive effect of money economy on traditional village social structures, meant that communities were less and less defined by extended systems of familial relations, and many established shrines were no longer able to draw on the community cohesion and support necessary to survive as ujigamisha (shrines of tutelary clan divinities). To survive, these institutions often tapped into different forms of religious community, enshrining more nationally-recognized popular deities and forming congregations (kō ) which cut across regional and family boundaries (Nakagawa 1999:181– ) as 9). In addition to such gods of fortune (f’ukugami , Inari was among the most common Benzaiten divinities to be enshrined in this way. Today, these “subsidiary” Inari shrines (some so small as to be almost unnoticeable, others more prominent than the original

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worship hall) continue to be a common sight on the grounds of shrines and temples alike. In this respect, the spread of Inari worship as an institution was often intimately linked with the troubling socioeconomic transformations its ritual logics were called upon to address. As a symbol (and supernatural agent) of the new prosperity enjoyed by peasant magnates at the expense of their fellow villagers, Inari shrines could become a focal point of resentment and frustration, especially in the mass ) that grew in number as the period demonstrations (ikki wore on. A central theme in the rhetoric of these movements ), a was the fundamental importance of benevolence (jinsei principle which served as one of the cornerstones of the period’s Confucian ruling ideology, and which evoked for peasants the principles of hierarchical reciprocity and community solidarity that seemed in increasingly short supply by the end of the eighteenth century (Scheiner 1978:39–62; Hashimoto 1982:145–163). In popular accounts of these protests, the duplicity of the shapeshifter fox often served to symbolize those who ignored these principles for their own advancement (e.g. Walthall 1991b:122). Similarly, their worship of Inari as a personal god of prosperity could appear as the embodiment of their misplaced values, and in at least one peasant uprising, the Inari shrine of a wealthy peasant family was specifically targeted for attack (Esenbel 1998:203). It would be a mistake, however, to see peasants as simple reactionaries whose understandings of the complex forces they faced could be reduced to a single voice of condemnation. Thus, while Inari and the fox appears in some contexts as the symbolic trappings of the enemy, other sources suggest more nuanced evaluations, suggesting their authors’ complex understandings of the contexts in which these uprisings took place. , One of these accounts, entitled Abenodōjimon relates the story of the Tenmei uprisings that took place in Fukuyama between 1786 and 1787 (Moriyoshi, et al. 1968, 6: 341–386; see also Walthall 1986:173–204). As Herbert Bix has argued, the social, economic and political antecedents of the Fukuyama uprisings present a complex mix of factors, in which the common socioeconomic upheavals of the period were exacerbated by crop failures and poor management at various


levels of the feudal hierarchy, leading to an insupportable financial crisis among the peasants of the domain as well as in the feudal government itself (1986:114–26). For his part, however, the anonymous author of the Abenodōjimon places the blame for the crisis squarely at the feet of a single lowborn retainer named Endō Benzō. A figure whose ambition was matched only by his villainy, Endō succeeded in ingratiating himself with the feudal lord of Fukuyama, Abe Masatomo, rising far above his hereditary station to take control of the domain’s economic affairs while his master was at court in Edo. Enacting a series of oppressive new taxes while simultaneously manipulating currency and commodity values, Endō appears in this account as a virtual traitor to his class, exhibited a degree of low cunning and profit-motive more typically associated in the discourse of this period with merchants than with his own samurai class. A social-climbing deceiver and a merchant-in-samurai-clothing, Endō’s machinations are closely linked in the Abenodōjimon with the shapeshifting duplicity of the fox. Characterized by the peasants as the “Fox of Fukuyama,” he is described as the effective cause of their misery, a malevolent figure whose deceptions would only continue until he was brought to justice.11 Endō Benzō, however, is not the only fox mentioned in the Abenodōjimon. Like a number of other popular accounts of collective demonstration, the text frames its story as the

11. Faced with such resolute resistance by what appeared to be a peasantry united in its hatred of Endō and his policies, Masatomo eventually responded to the demands of the peasantry with a gesture of good faith that was striking in its lenient deviation from bakufu policy in these matters (but which he may have seen as necessary if he was to restore order in his domain). Although he refused to address the deeper structural problems of peasant debt and tenancy, Masatomo nevertheless ordered the return of the excessive tribute collected by Endō. Unlike the aftermaths of similar protests, there appear to have been no punishments or reprisals issued to the ringleaders, and those demonstrators who had already been arrested were released. Most importantly, Endō Benzō was removed from office and placed under arrest, along with a number of corrupt village leaders (Bix 1986:124–6).

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drunken vision of its narrator, who learns the tale from a marvelous apparition described as “the child of Abeno” ), a name full of allusive possibilities. In (Abenodōji the preface to the tale, the narrator states that he had come to in Settsu province, but live in a place known as Abeno the name Abenodōji also suggests the name of Abe no dōji , a figure appearing in a common variant of the fox wife tale (one which provided the inspiration for Kuniyoshi’s popular print, reproduced in Chapter Two as Figure 5). The child of a fox wife, Abe no dōji and his father Abe no Yasuna followed after their departed wife and mother to persuade her to return with them. She refused, but did bestow upon her son magical gifts by which he attained wealth and prominence, becoming the ancestor of the legendary sorcerer and exorcist Abe no Seimei (Seki 1953, 2:161–6). It is an interpretation all but spelled out by the way the text describes the circumstances of the vision: “When I awoke in surprise,” the narrator declares, “there were fox fires on all sides that scorched heaven with their flames…I doubtfully wondered whether this was a drunken dream, or a dream of being drunk, or the fox spirit of Shinoda” (Walthall 1986:175), a reference to the place where Abe no dōji caught up with his errant mother to receive his birthright, and where the spirit of the fox wife con tinues to be enshrined as Kuzunoha Inari (Ryūgasaki-shi Rekishi Minzoku Shiryōkan 1997:22). In this way, the fox imagery of the Abenodōjimon is associated with two very different figures, the nefarious trickster Endō Benzō and the benevolent “fox spirit of Shinoda,” whose powers are associated both with the god Inari and with the demon-quelling heroes Abe no Seimei and Abe no Yasunari, and whose motivation in relating the tale of Endō Benzō seems to have been to teach humans the evils of deception. These two very different sorts of foxes are implicitly juxtaposed in the account, presenting a hidden but recognizable comment on the morality of power. On the most basic level, the folkloric theme of the Fox Wife of Shinoda— whose powers were subordinated to the interests of the human community, supporting her family and giving to later generations a lineage of great heroes—served to highlight the self-serving predations of the Fox of Fukuyama. More importantly, however, the juxtaposition of these two foxes also


presents an implicit (and less-than-flattering) comparison of Abe Masatomo with Abe no Yasuna, figures who ultimately benefited from their intimate relations with their respective foxes. Although the obvious villain of the Abenodōjimon is presented as Endō Benzō (in contrast to whom Masatomo is described as a “shining prince”), the juxtaposition of the events of the Tenmei uprising with the motif of the Fox Wife of Shinoda presents the feudal lord in quite a different light— like his folkloric namesake, he appears not only as a figure who was deceived, but who may have wanted to be deceived, a man who chose (if you will) to “get into bed” with a fox. Indeed, Herbert Bix has suggested that, far from being a rogue element in Masatomo’s administration, Endō Benzō seems to have been faithfully executing his lord’s mandate (1986:120), a fact that may have been well known to the tale’s author yet dangerous to express openly.12 The links between Inari and the shapeshifter fox were thus continually and creatively redrawn throughout the course of the Edo period, both by those who prospered in the new economy and by those it threatened, a reflection of both of the marvelous power of commercial wealth and its profound social costs. Whereas exchange at the beginning of the Edo period (both within the village and between village and feudal lord) was built upon a cycle of labor, land and rice passing along 12. Bix argues that the presence of Endō Benzō as the Abenodōjimon’s primary villain “inadvertently absolved the bakuhan state itself of blame” (1986: 115), thus preventing peasants from directing their efforts at the real source of their frustration: the feudal system itself. The implicit critique conveyed by the tale’s fox imagery, however, suggests that the authors of such tales might have been less diverted from the real issues at stake than their explicit rhetoric—which may have been written as much for the censors as for their popular audiences—might at first suggest. Censorship by feudal authorities placed enormous constraints on accounts of collective resistance. Indeed, Walthall notes that the grassroots, revolutionary connotations of the term ikki itself led authorities to forbid its use, referring to such uprisings with the terms sōdō (riot) or totō (conspiracy) instead (1991b:123). In this context, the polyvalent significance of the fox provided an important medium for what James C.Scott (1990:19) has described as the “hidden transcript” of peasant discourse at work within the popular (and public) genre of ikki narratives.

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(and helping to cement) established lines of hierarchical social organization, money-based exchange as it operated by the end of the Edo period crossed regional lines and class boundaries, and was used to purchase everything from land to social prestige. As the embodiment of earlier forms of exchange, the imagery of Inari could be proffered as both a critique and a corrective to the transformations and duplicity of commercial wealth, powers symbolized by the ambivalent gifts of the fox. At the same time, the very link with those powers could render the worship of Inari suspect; as a nationally-popular god of financial success, it was also taken as the symbol and agent of a corrosive and corrupting profit-motive. It is precisely this ambivalence, however, that made the imagery of Inari and the fox such a prevalent and adaptable element the discourse of the Edo period. Just as Inari worship itself spread along national commercial networks, the imagery of Inari, the fox and the ambivalent power of money provided the foundation for an equally nationwide field of significance, on which the power, prestige, and sometimes even the lives of historical agents were negotiated. The Black Lineage of the Nouveaux Riches: Foxes, Inari and Witchcraft In the tale of the Lucky Teakettle, the human protagonist relies upon the gifts of the fox to achieve a degree of financial success beyond his wildest dreams, a success given at least the veneer of respectability through the fox’s ritual domestication in the idiom of Inari worship. By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, in villages throughout Japan, a new understanding of the fox’s gift began to develop within the popular imaginaire of financial success, the implications of which continue to be felt today. In 1753, peasants from Kuninobu Village in Hōki Province (modern-day Tottori Prefecture) rioted before a government official sent to investigate villagers’ complaints. Unlike many of the demonstrations of the period, the expressed object of these complaints was not government policy or economic hardship, but rather the spiritual misdeeds of a fellow villager. A rash of spirit possessions had afflicted members of the community, and a local exorcist had proclaimed it the work of


a fox employed by a villager named Kanshirō. Repeated requests to call off his vulpine minion had gone without reply, and an official petition had been sent to the feudal authorities requesting assistance. After an investigation, the official dealt with the issue in the sweeping fashion common for government rulings on disturbances of the peace—Kanshiro, the exorcist and the ringleaders of the riot were all imprisoned (Kanshirō and the exorcist were later exiled), and numerous other villagers (including the village headman) were reprimanded for their lack of propriety. Far from being an isolated incident, accusations of this sort became a recurring phenomenon in village-level disputes during the second half of the Edo period, a phenomenon that increasingly came to the attention of the feudal authorities in a number of different regions. Although such incidents seldom escalated into riots like the one in Kuninobu, villagers , frequently responded to these accusations with engiri the “cutting of ties” of kinship and support to the accused, a ), that quasi-legal state of ostracism (murahachibu struck at the heart of village-level cooperation, threatening agricultural productivity and by extension tax revenues. In 1791, the feudal government of Matsue domain in Izumo Province (modern-day Shimane Prefecture) officially denounced what it considered an alarming increase in ostracism accompanying such accusa tions. Combining both reasoned argument and the threat of prosecution, this “Notice Refuting Foxes” (kitsune kore naki gi ofuregaki ), attributed such accusations to the foolish beliefs of commoners and the slanderous statements of exorcists, and called upon villagers to report anyone spreading such rumors to the authorities (Hayami 1999:63–70). Such cases reflect a widespread pattern of social action revolving around the imagery of fox ownership (kitsune-mochi ), a phenomenon which can be traced back to the eighteenth century and which has endured well into modern times.13 This imagery has been documented across Japan osakiunder a variety of names, including kuda-mochi , yako-mochi , and ninko (also mochi pronounced hito-gitsune). Although these differences in terminology reflect some regional variations in this phenomenon, certain common themes recur.14The foxes held

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by these fox-owners were understood to live in their owner’s households and use their powers—sometimes at their owner’s instruction, but frequently without their knowledge—to bring good fortune to their owners at other’s expense. Not only do these foxes use their abilities to cheat and steal from their owner’s neighbors, they also act as agents of their owner’s anger, jealousy or resentment. These foxes were understood to employ a broad arsenal of techniques for wreaking havoc on the lives of their owner’s rivals, but by far the most common form of attack seems to have been spirit possession. In regions where fox-owners were said to live, mental and physical illnesses were often seen as a sign of a fox-owner’s ill will. Although fox ownership is often said to have begun with an ancestor who actively sought out their help, it is in practice a hereditary stigma, passing within a lineage and spread by marriage—a commonly-cited idea holds that a woman from a fox-owning family will bring 75 foxes with her to her new home.15 Because the stigma will affect not only the individual household into which she marries but the extended family of which it is a part, any man who marries a fox-owner and is not already a fox-owner is usually cut off from membership in his extended family. As a result, fox-owning lineages—often (black), warui hō designated by such terms as kuro (the bad side) or simply suji (lineage)—are seldom accepted for marriage by non-fox-owning, “white” (shiro ) or “good ) families, a form of social discrimination side” (ii hō that continues to shape regional demographics up to the present day. The idea of fox ownership has also influenced village commercial relations—according to some sources, going

13. In 1787, the author of the Ninko monogatari traced the beginning of these accusations in Izumo Province to the Kyōhō era (1716–1735), a finding which Hayami (1999:61–63) has supported with research into the genealogies of village families. 14. Academic discussions of fox-ownership exist in substantial numbers, both in Japanese and in English. Perhaps the single best general introduction tozz the phenomenon in English remains Blacker 1975:51–68. Yoshida 1984:85–104 provides another, more recent review, supported by the author’s own field work. In the general comments that follow, I will be drawing on these two sources except where otherwise noted.


into debt to a fox-owner put one at risk for becoming a foxowner oneself, as was buying property that had formerly belonged to fox-owners.16 The fox may be the most ubiquitous spirit with which such families are stigmatized, but other types of possessing spirits are also understood to develop intimate relationships with certain households to the detriment of their neighbors. Together with the fox, these other spirits—including inugami (dog god) and hebigami (snake god, also known as tōbyō )—are usually studied as part of the same phenomenon, under the rubric of the scholarly term tsukimono-mochi (ownership of possessing spirits).17 Over the last eighty years, the aca demic study of tsukimonomochi accusations has brought together daunting amounts of material—both archival records and field research—the analysis of which has introduced a number of illuminating insights that bear directly on the more specific phenomenon of fox ownership accusations.18Accusations of fox ownership, however, depend on a particular imaginaire, one which extends beyond the characteristics it shares with other forms of spirit-

15. Insofar as fox-ownership represents a stigma attributed to others rather than a designation assumed by fox-owners themselves, foxownership seems to fall squarely within the anthropological category of witchcraft. While the stigma may be believed to have originated in sorcery (i.e. self-interested heteroprax ritualism) by the accused or by their ancestors, these accusations would appear to have been largely unconnected to any ritual activity in which the accused may have actually engaged. 16. The eighteenth-century Ninko monogatari relates the story of a family accused of fox ownership which, when the strain of ostracism led to financial ruin, was unable to sell its land in order settle its debts. In the end, the land devolved to the village itself, which was forced to cultivate it in order to pay the assessed taxes (Hayami 1999: 71–2). 17. Like the deceitful triad of foxes, tengu and tanuki noted in Chapter Three, foxes, dogs and snakes form a trio of possessing spirits that sometimes blend into one another in such a way that it is difficult to draw clear distinctions between them. Yoshida (1972:45), for example, suggests that both the foxes held by fox-owners and inugami are often described in a way that seems more like a weasel than either a fox or a dog. Similarly, Kuramitsu (1922:66–82) argues that the mysterious term tōbyō refers both to snakes and to foxes.

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possession.19 It was this wider constellation of asso ciations and implications that provided the concrete features of an ideational landscape, navigated both by accusers and accused in the complex negotiations of village-level social-symbolic practice. The earliest accounts of fox ownership accusations as well as more recent analyses have identified accused fox-owners with the growing class of peasant magnates of the eighteenth century, village nouveaux riches that had grown wealthy as traders, landlords and moneylenders (Hayami 1999:61). These accusations took place against a background of dramatic increases in the disparity of wealth between villagers—in the first part of the eighteenth century, the number of small

18. In 1922 the folklore journal Minzoku to rekishi dedicated an entire issue to the collection and analysis of tsukimono beliefs from across Japan, a project continued by Ishizuka (1959). Numerous articles have since appeared in both Japanese and English on the subject, but the past fifteen years seems to have witnessed something of a scholarly boom, including new scholarship of the sort presented by Komatsu (1992b and 1994a), as well as compilations of previous materials (Tanikawa 1990) and re-editions of earlier works (Hayami 1999). 19. The categorization of fox-ownership within the general class of possession beliefs has been employed in the context of a number of overlapping theoretical interests. Among these the oldest concerns itself with the elimination of these beliefs as superstitions (meishin ). The Meiji-period education reformer and Buddhist apologist Inoue Enryō, for example, presents tsukimono-mochi beliefs such as fox-ownership as the epitome of superstition, lacking either scientific or social value (1987:103). Similarly, Hayami Yasutaka (himself born to a family known as fox-owners) begins his work with the fervent hope that his exploration of the phenomenon’s petty origins will result in its eradication (1999:vii-ix). Meanwhile, scholars working in the tradition of Japanese folk studies (minzokugaku ) have tended to approach these materials as survivals of enduring folk beliefs. In his introduction to Hayami’s work, for example, Yanagita Kunio argues that more attention should be paid to the religious practices of tsukimono-mochi themselves, suggesting that accusations may be based on those families’ worship of tutelary animal spirits (Hayami 1999:i-iv). Finally, scholarship within the social scientific disciplines have been concerned with these phenomena as a class of more generalized social dynamics (see Yoshida 1972: 52–5).


holders and tenants in many villages exploded while more and more land was concentrated in the hands of a small number of village landlords (Hayami 1992:54). Accusations of fox ownership are thus frequently described as an expression of resentment by impoverished villagers against those to whom they were growing increasingly indebted. The ill-will at the heart of such accusations can be seen, for example, in the Ninko monogatari (written in 1787, it is perhaps the oldest source concerning fox ownership outside of domanial records), which presents those accused of fox ownership as “greedy and merciless. Without giving charity, they boast of their wealth and show contempt for people” (Hayami 1999:61). In such accounts, the wealth earned by fox-owners is predominantly characterized as wealth badly earned— contentious, anti-social and injurious to the community. Indeed, the imagery of fox ownership seems to be devoted less to the specific benefits that it brings to its owners than the harm it does to others. The idea that those who become wealthy with the help of foxes do so primarily by cheating others (invisible foxes can tamper with weights and balances) and by sabotaging their rivals’ enterprises (digging holes in irrigation works, killing silkworms and causing possessioninduced illnesses) suggests an understanding of their prosperity related to what George Foster has described as “the image of the limited good:” By “Image of Limited Good” I mean that broad areas of peasant behavior are patterned in such fashion as to suggest that peasants view their social, economic, and natural universes—their total environment—as one in which all of the desired things in life such as land, wealth, health, friendship and love, manliness and honor, respect and status, power and influence, security and safety, exist in finite quantity and are always in short supply… [I]t follows that an individual or a

family can improve a position only at the expense of others (1965:296–7; c.f. Komatsu 1994a:96–7). In the context of eighteenth-century Japanese village society, the image of the limited good represented more than just a general cultural axiom. During the seventeenth century,

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growing urban populations depended on commensurate growth in the agricultural sector, and food production increased dramatically during the first part of the Edo period. Improved technologies led to greater yields from existing fields, while tax incentives and the redeployment of military infrastructure to peacetime use resulted in a tripling of arable land under cultivation (Smith 1968b:283–4; Satō 1990:62–72). By the eighteenth century, however, when fox ownership accusations begin to appear, the finitude of resources had become in many respects a pressing fact of life. Population and agricultural growth had leveled off, and village landlords were able to increase their holdings only by purchasing or confiscating the land of others.20 Those accused of fox ownership, however, seem not to have been simply wealthy, but to have possessed a specific sort of wealth. Many older families seemed able to maintain their wealth and prestige without being condemned as fox owners. Rather, fox-owners tended to be nouveaux-riches, those who rose above their former peers, earning the resentment of those they left behind as well as those whose positions of authority they began to threaten. Fox ownership thus seems to have been less a matter of inequality as such than a disturbance of previously existing patterns of inequality (Hayami 1992). As noted earlier, wealth, prestige and authority at the beginning of the Edo period lay in the hands of the titled peasants, whose social status was based on family pedigree and supported by the feudal authorities. As the period wore on, however, this socioeconomic status quo began to shift. The increase in land under cultivation in the seventeenth century resulted in a corresponding increase in the number of peasant families. Their status as “new peasants,” however, was carefully enforced, and “founding peasant” households ) maintained their original (kusawake hyakushō

20. While I do not necessarily share Foster’s understanding of this “cognitive orientation” as a generalized peasant phenomenon, it does seem to reflect the specific circumstances of eighteenth-century Japanese villages quite well. It is, for example, significant that foxownership accusations did not occur during the agricultural and population expansion of the seventeenth century, but only when that growth had stagnated.


monopoly on leadership positions within the village (Ooms 1996:177). In the eighteenth century, however, the earlier association of wealth and status became increasingly tenuous —many “founding” peasants declined in wealth but continued to guard their hereditary status against the new class of peasant magnates, who in turn attempted to parley their wealth into positions of village leadership (Hashimoto 1982: 152–3; Ooms 1996:81–82). In the conflicts that resulted, the imagery of fox ownership provided a valuable weapon for old families against the social-climbing pretensions of the

nouveaux riches.

In his study of fox ownership accusations in Izumo Province, for example, Hayami Yasutaka (1999:109–115) presents the history of his own family, who have been known as fox-owners since the Kyōhō era (1716–1735). Established at the end of the sixteenth century, the Hayami family were prominent titled peasants of Kanbara Village, serving in the leadership of the village shrine. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, their wealth and influence had declined, and in the Kyōhō era, their family name was assumed (by legal adoption, no doubt in return for remuneration of some sort) by another household from outside the village, moneylenders whose rise from obscurity had corresponded with the financial decline of the Hayami household. Making use of the hereditary status of the Hayami name, this new family attempted to revive the older family’s position within the village leadership. They were opposed, however, by the other founding families of the village (led by the household which of the village had supplanted the Hayami as the hongan shrine a generation before).21 It was a conflict which culminated in the Hayami’s identification as fox-owners, and resulted in their expulsion from village leadership.

21. Hayami notes that the position of hongan at the village shrine serves an indicator the prominence of the family. Insofar as the village shrine represented the symbolic center of the village community, however, shrine leadership no doubt also carried with it considerable political influence, as well (c.f.Smith 1959:58–9, 188– 200).

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Other case studies could be introduced along these lines (e.g. Hayami 1999:115–120), and although each presents particular combination of actors, settings and strategies, in general terms they present a similar picture. As a mechanism of social control, fox ownership accusations provided a powerful tool by which older families could protect their status positions against the incursions of social-climbing families (Yoshida 1984:99). Stigmatized by fox ownership, they were rendered unsuitable for a role in the management of the village shrine; shunned by villagers wishing to avoid being identified as fox owners themselves, their influence in village society and economy would also have been severely curtailed. The power of these accusations to mobilize village society against particular families, however, arguably lay as much in the power of the imagery itself as in the coercive power of their accusers to enforce such families’ exclusion from village society. Much more than simple slander or a pretext for ostracizing unpopular elements in village society, the designation “fox owner” represented what might be called a symbolically accurate characterization of these families as nouveaux riches, drawing on the imagery of the fox to signify their impact on village society on a number of different levels. In more than one sense, the imagery of fox ownership was linked to the shapeshifting characteristics of the foxes they were said to employ. Like the Aristotelian critique of the Lucky Teakettle, the stigma of fox ownership was in part linked to the unsettling power of money to render all things interchangeable. From this perspective, financial success could be both attributed to and symbolized by the fox—the designation kitsunemochi (fox-owner) was in this sense a (usually symbolic equivalent to the term okane-mochi translated as “rich,” but literally meaning “money-owner”). As I have already noted, however, financial success in and of itself did not a fox-owner make. Rather, fox-owners were those who used their financial success to transgress village-level social distinctions. Like the fox, whose transformations run roughshod over what should be rigid taxonomic distinctions, attempts by nouveaux riches to assume village leadership roles previously restricted to the founding families of the village represented an affront to hereditary status distinctions that the “old money” of the village wished to remain equally


rigid. At the same time, the assumption of prestigious family names by upstart households could be seen as a deception every bit as dubious as the tricks by which foxes assume human form. In this sense, the use of the expression ninko or hito-gitsune (literally “man-fox”) prevalent in the San’in region seems an apposite designation, reflecting the parallels between the legal maneuvers of fox-owners and the marvelous transformations of foxes themselves.22 One of the most significant intersections of imaginaire and social circumstance can be seen in the complex associations between fox ownership and lineage structure. As suggested earlier, the fundamental organizing principle of traditional Edo-period village society was oriented around lineage, especially the dōzoku relationship between main and branch families. As “founders” of the village, kusawake hyakushō constituted the main families of the village, to whose lineages all others were attached. As I argued in Chapter Two, however, the hierarchical, “vertical” imagery of the patrilineal dōzoku existed in constant tension with “horizontal” relations between households belonging to separate patrilines, mediated by the exogamous exchange of brides between them. More than the perennial threat of the Other implicit to patrilineal exogamy, however, the idea of fox ownership gave concrete form to the outside forces that were understood to be actively insinuating themselves into village society and prying apart the vertical bonds of traditional village authority. The imagery of fox ownership accusations frequently reflects the social logic of lineage structuring the village-level conflicts of the eighteenth century. Foxes are understood to live within the households of their owners, and the imagery of fox ownership as a hereditary stigma frequently presents the relationship between fox-owners and their minions in kinship terms. For example, fox-owners are sometimes described as having brought foxes into their home through a kind of adoption in which the fox becomes a member of the household

22. A similar association may be at work in the designation that sometimes refers to fox-owners as yotsu or “four-legged” (Yoshida 1984:88).

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kinship group just as any human servant (Hearn 1976:317– 318; Izumo minzoku no kai 1990:196). Of equal significance, however, are understandings of how that kinship relation is transmitted—a common image of the spread of fox ownership presents it as essentially matrilineal, following a bride from her natal family to the family of her husband (Nagai 1926:771– 3).23 In this respect, the stigma of fox ownership was framed as an alternative lineage, the antithesis of dōzoku relations and a reification of the threats posed to the vertical integrity of the patrilines on which traditional village society rested. Stories about fox-owners, for example, are often closely ) who originally associated with strangers (yosomono came to the village from outside (Yoshida 1964:87). While it seems likely that a number of fox-owning families may have begun as branch families within the village rather than coming from without, these households shared with strangers an unsettling connection with outside social and economic forces. The identification of a household as fox-owners constituted a recognition that, wherever the origins of the family itself, their power came from outside the hierarchical structure of family relations on which prestige and power traditional depended.24

23. Komatsu Kazuhiko (1994a:48–9) has attributed this tendency in fox-ownership to the ancient shamanistic imagery of miko-suji in which a medium’s sensitivity to divine possession was understood to follow the female line, from mother to daughter. Whatever its origins, however, the matrilineal as sociations of fox-ownership became implicated in the lineage-structures of village authority, providing an important resource in eighteenth century village disputes. 24. Yoshida (1984:102–3) notes that fox-ownership tends to predominate in areas where dōzoku relations are relatively weak and social organization is primarily organized around shinrui relations (a point that is important to his understanding of the correlation of these accusation and the structural instability of local social systems). If, as Hashimoto (1982:152–3) argues, however, the economic shifts of the eighteenth century often led to the dissolution of earlier mainbranch family relations, it is possible that foxownership accusations were directly tied to the historical developments that led to the weakening of dōzoku relations in those areas.


As villages became integrated into national markets, they experienced the effects of diffuse, nationwide economic forces to a theretofore undreamed of extent, forces whose large-scale causes were indistinct but whose beneficiaries at the village level were all too clear. In this context, the imagery of the fox provided an idiom by which to represent the none-toobenevolent “invisible hand” at work in the contemporary village economy, and marked those who had benefited from its operation as outsiders, caught in the grips of a foreign “antilineage” that made the cutting of ties a natural response. More than just a strategically useful form of ostracism, engiri became an assertion of identity, a strengthening of vertical in-group ties against the horizontal ties personified by the “outsiders” (in spirit if not in fact) that threatened them. The ideological significance of the designation “fox-owner,” however, is not limited to its capacity to describe these complex states of affairs. As an act of categorization, fox ownership accusations coordinated perceptions of village society with constellations of images and symbols, constellations entailing both moral evaluation and at least the broad outlines of a possible response. In so doing, the discourse of fox ownership drew upon a number of symbolic systems, prominent among them the imagery of the fox and Inari.25 A phenomenon that closely paralleled the spread of Inari worship during the Edo period, fox ownership accusations worked within the complex of Inari and fox imagery to en gage the effects of nationwide socioeconomic change, especially as it was experienced at the local level. A recurring element in the imagery of fox ownership— especially in the San’in region—is its characterization as gedō (heterodoxy), a dangerous spiritual state explicitly attributed to ritual impropriety in the worship of Inari. In some cases, this ritual impropriety is described in terms of ignorance or error, as when the stigma of fox ownership is incurred by improperly constructing an Inari shrine, or allowing a properly-constructed shrine to fall into disuse (Izumo minzoku no kai 1990:196; Hayami 1999:77–82). In either case, the foxes associated with the shrine (either as its guardian messengers or as the enshrined spirit itself) are left without the domesticating and pacifying structure of proper worship. In other sources, this ritual impropriety is described

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as an intentional act, reflecting a more general social immorality on the part of the fox-owner. In these cases, foxowners are said to have achieved their status by making secret, nocturnal offerings at village Inari shrines, so as to be given the power to rise above their rivals. Nagai Yanagiko, for example, describes the culmination of this illicit worship as a sort of adoption, in which the fox-owning family receives their minions as a “branch-family (bunke) of Inari,” an act which implicitly severs their connections with the dōzoku of village society (1926:771). Whether it is understood as a ritual sin of omission or of commission, however, the stigma of fox ownership appears in these accounts as a deficiency of proper behavior, an improper ritual relationship with a god of wealth

25. Following the logic of ritual domestication described earlier in this chapter, Miyata (1973:265) notes that enshrinements of Inari in response to episodes of fox possession grew increasingly common by the end of the Edo period, as indicated by the following comic verse (senryū ) from the early nineteenth century:

kitsune

tsuki

ochite

Inari

ga

issha

fue

(A fox is exorcised and Inari adds one more shrine.) At the same time, Inari worship also provided a backdrop for medium divination by folk religious practitioners. An important element in the growing popularity of Inari worship in the latter half of the Edo period involved the practice of Inari sage (“descent of Inari”), in which professional and semi-professional mediums conveyed divine pronouncements to the human world, pronouncements often understood to be conveyed through the agency of the medium’s fox familiars (Iwai 1983; Nakagawa 1999). Komatsu (1994b:206–213) describes fox-ownership beliefs as a superimposition of Inari worship on a much more ancient strata of shamanic beliefs. While he traces many of the features of fox-ownership as a form of tsukimono belief to this earlier strata, he argues that Inari worship provided a symbolic groundwork by which these possession beliefs were oriented towards the problems of families’ changing economic fortunes during the Edo period. In what follows, my own reading of the imagery of foxownership will work to elaborate some of the ways in which the imagery of Inari and the fox served in this capacity to link ancient religious paradigms and contemporary concerns.


paralleling the improper social relationships created by that wealth. Drawing in this way on the imagery of both the fox and Inari, accusations of fox ownership represented a symbolic and moral field for the negotiation of village disputes. For those who made these accusations, the imagery of fox ownership provided a way to symbolize the socioeconomic upheavals centered on these nouveaux riches in a way that incorporated the unsettling moral implications of their actions. As Herman Ooms notes, the translation of financial capital into social status was such that “cash alone was insufficient. Since the title was essentially a social one, its acquisition had to be sanctioned socially” (1996:184). In this context, the accusation of fox ownership could be seen as one way in which this social sanction could be actively rejected. Moreover, the practice of engiri that was often associated with these accusations not only appeared as the proper response to the spiritual dangers symbolized by fox ownership—a quarantine of a morally corrupt anti-lineage and its ritually corrupt relation to a tutelary divinity (both of which were associated with the power of money as a dangerous outside force)—but also as a pragmatically fitting behavior, employing one of the most powerful sanctions available in village life to exclude households from the family relations that provided the basis for village-level social status (Ooms 1996:197, 216–221). The field of fox ownership imagery not only provided resources for those making accusations, however. It also provided the means by which those accused of fox ownership could respond. Some accused fox-owners appear to have contested the categorization itself, seeking out alternative religious authorities and gathering “second opinions” from other exorcists with which to refute the statements of their accusers and the exorcist(s) that supported them. In this sense, religious authority played a fundamental role in the efforts of both accusers and accused, and both parties often traveled substantial distances to obtain documents and talismans from recognized authorities in order to support their respective cases in the court of village opinion. In some cases, accused fox-owners also made recourse to the feudal authorities for relief from what they proclaimed as their unwarranted persecution, although this appears to have been

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a last resort, a fact that is perhaps not surprising, given the sweeping nature of feudal justice during this period (Hayami 1999:78, 84). Even if they could not avoid being drawn into the imaginaire of fox ownership, accused fox-owners were sometimes able to employ the implications and entailments of that imagery for their own ends.26 Playing on the associations between fox ownership and ritual impropriety, for example, some alleged fox-owners responded to their accusers by publicly enshrining and venerating the foxes they were understood to possess, correcting their supposed ritual improprieties through the orthoprax rituals of Inari worship (Ishizuka 1959:230–44; Yoshida 1984:100). Like the protagonist in the story of the Lucky Teakettle, these families used the links between Inari and the fox (links made explicit in the imagery of fox ownership itself) as a means to pacify and domesticate the transgressive powers of their foxes, powers to which their rise in village society had been directly attributed. Just as the imagery of fox ownership had provided a strategically powerful weapon in village conflicts, the institutions of Inari worship provided those accused of fox ownership with a creative means by which to undercut much of the force of those accusations. At the same time, such veneration may have also provided a ritual means by which those accused of fox ownership (accusations which, as I have argued, insightfully represented the complex socioeconomic maneuvers in which they were engaged) were able to acknowledge the criticisms of their fellow villagers, as well as a means to signify (through Inari’s associations as a spirit of traditional rice agriculture) the intent of such families to behave by more traditional principles of village life. In so doing, these families may have been able to address the spiritual stigma with which they had been accused, as well as

26. Accounts like those of Lafcadio Hearn (1976:329) and Basil Hall Chamberlain (1971:119) suggest that some fox-owners at the turn of the nineteenth century played on their role as fox-owners to intimidate fellow villagers and achieve greater control over village affairs. It is hard to determine, however, whether these reports represent first-hand observation or simply a reiteration of foxownership accusations themselves.


to ameliorate the resentments that prompted those accusations, thereby setting the stage for their reintegration into village society. Foxes, Inari and the End of the World: Shapeshifting in the Imagery of Value The social disruptions and resentments fueled by the economic developments of the Edo period can be said to have reached ) their apogee in the “world renewal” (yonaoshi period (c. 1853– movements that marked the bakumatsu 1873), a time of transition between the collapse of feudal rule and the establishment of Japan as a modern nation-state. Guided by a desire to eradicate the insupportable inequalities within the peasant class and return to a nostalgic vision of a truly egalitarian and cooperative village social order, many peasants rose up in mass demonstrations, destroying the accumulated wealth of their fellow villagers. In the imagery of yonaoshi, appeal to the feudal authorities—even the forced redistribution of wealth—that marked earlier collective demonstrations could no longer hope to address the disparities and injustices inherent to the social order. Only the complete destruction of that order could restore the “moral community” that (at least in the minds of its adherents) had once characterized village-level society (Hashimoto 1982:156–163). Like other religious institutions, the imagery of Inari worship found itself implicated in the yonaoshi movements of this period. It was during just such an uprising in 1871mentioned earlier in this chapter—that the peasants of Nakano targeted the Inari shrine of their wealthy neighbors for destruction (Esenbel 1998:203). As a symbol and instrument of their unseemly prosperity, the shrine was destroyed along with other emblems of wealth and media of exchange. At the same time, however, insofar as it represented the spirit of rice agriculture (and by extension, the peasant lifestyle on which the utopian goals of world renewal were based), Inari could also serve as a symbol of that renewal; Inari appears to envisioned as yonaoshi daimyōjin have been venerated in at least one shrine within the city of Edo itself as the divine patron of those who struggled for this radical new vision of peasant society (Nishigaki 1983:170–1).

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In its frustration with existing patterns of cooperation and exchange, and in its millennial drive towards a new golden age, the imagery of yonaoshi would appear to implicitly reject one of the basic assumptions of the imaginaire at work in both the tale of the Lucky Teakettle and in kitsune-mochi accusations, a field of signification whose contours this chapter has worked to chart. Unlike either of these earlier forms of discourse (discourse that would ultimately outlive the radical imagery of world renewal), there seems to be no room within the revolutionary imagery of yonaoshi demonstrations for the possibility that commercial wealth—for all its corrosive influence—might yet be subordinated to the ideal values of village society. Unlike the story of the Lucky Teakettle, yonaoshi discourse holds little hope for the ritual domestication of the shapeshifter fox—a symbol of the transformation and duplicity of commodified wealth—within the confines of Inari worship. Unlike those engaged in the symbolic field of fox ownership accusations, the adherents of world renewal seem not to have held out the possibility that the heretical agents of the new wealth might ultimately reconcile their power with the obligations of ritual (and social) propriety, that their vulpine minions might once again become servants of Inari. As reflections on the changing nature of wealth and society, however, the discourse of yonaoshi, fox ownership and the Lucky Teakettle alike share a common understanding of the basic ambivalence of exchange, a socioeconomic imaginaire whose insights parallel those of Aristotle (and, by extension, the economic critique of Karl Marx). In this imaginaire, the two faces of economic value (described by Aristotle as the “two uses” of all objects, which Marx would later differentiate as “use-value” and “exchange-value”) are given expression through the ambivalent imagery of Inari. Enshrined first and foremost as a spirit of rice, Inari served as the personification of both the primary staple and the primary unit of exchange for much of Japanese history. As a cornerstone of Japanese culinary practice and a central product of Japanese agricultural labor, rice represented a veritable embodiment of use-value. Moreover, as the primary commodity by which those agricultural laborers were required to pay tribute and


taxes to their overlords, rice typically served as a form of “universal equivalent,” the basic measure of exchange-value. So long as use- and exchange-value were expressed through the single idiom of rice (as it largely appears to have been until the middle of the Edo period), the dual nature of Inari as a god of rice and of prosperity appears to have remained unelaborated in the imagery of Inari worship. With the growth of nationwide socioeconomic networks during the Edo period, however, the power of money-economy (a form of exchangevalue abstracted from use-value) appears to have influenced popular understandings of prosperity, highlighting the distinctions between the two forms of value and creating what amounted to a kind of symbolic opposition at the heart of Inari imagery. As the spirit of rice-as-foodstuff, Inari was implicated in the ideal, hearth-and-home values of village society, of peasants working together to feed themselves. As the spirit of rice-ascommodity, on the other hand, Inari was equally implicated in the growth of commodified wealth, as well as the unrestrained accumulation and social stratification it made possible. Understood within the radical imagery of yonaoshi, these two faces of Inari appear to have prompted responses that were equally radical—as a symbol of wealth, Inari shrines were subject to mob violence; as a symbol of agriculture, Inari was enshrined as a patron spirit of world renewal. As a god associated, not simply with rice but with the fox, however, the imagery of Inari worship also provided a powerful resource through which to mediate the growing tensions between usevalue and exchange-value experienced during this period. Indeed, it may be precisely this association that led the imagery of Inari worship to spread so quickly throughout Japan during the Edo period (a degree of institutional success unmatched by any other god of rice or agriculture). Whatever its origins in the centuries before the Edo period, the links between Inari and the fox were appropriated during the Edo period, not only as symbols by which to signify the ambivalent coexistence of use—and exchange-value in all commodities, but also as a ritual idiom through which to incorporate the power of the one within the constraints of the other. In this context, the figure of the fox appears, not simply as Inari, but as a complement to Inari, an embodiment of the disruptive,

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shapeshifting powers of exchange-value, in contrast to the stabilizing power of use-value.27 Whereas the discourse of Inari worship sought to placate and control the powers represented by the shapeshifter fox, the language of its critics emphasized the corollary of that imagery, identifying Inari (and those who benefit from its worship) as the fox, the supernatural agent of social disruption. Such an ambivalent and multi-faceted historic phenomenon demanded an equally versatile set of symbols by which to represent it, and the dual imagery of Inari and the fox served admirably to represent the manifold significance of these complex developments, a shared field of signification in which meaning, value and action were integrated and negotiated throughout the Edo period.

27. As suggested by the epigraph with which I began this chapter, my analysis of the role of fox imagery in the developing socioeconomic imaginaire of the Edo period shares with Taussig (1980) a guiding sense of the striking parallels between popular perceptions of commodity exchange and some of the formative economic theories of the Western tradition. Rather than thinking of this discourse as “proto-Marxist” or the product of “neophyte proletarians,” however, I am inclined to consider its affinities with a much longer tradition of critique, one that begins not with Marx but with Aristotle. More importantly, I will suggest that this critique—closely implicated in the virtual identification during this period of the shapeshifter fox with Inari—reflects a sense of exchange-value, not as something inherently unnatural and demonic, but rather a power that must be subordinated to traditional patterns of exchange. As Parry and Block (1989) have argued, it is less the power of commodified wealth itself that tends to bear the weight of stigma than the socially irresponsible use of that wealth, when it is used to transgress previously established hierarchies and channels of exchange.

CHAPTER 5 Using the Fox

The Crafts of Shapeshifting and Signification

These days in our country, there are crafty people skilled in using foxes. Honchō shokkan (NKZ 150:954) In these terms a late seventeenth-century encyclopedia begins , individuals who employ its description of kitsune-tsukai magical rituals to acquire foxes as familiars, using those creatures’ powers of illusion and spirit-possession to serve their own nefarious purposes. The earliest record of the term appears in the diary of the courtier Nakahara Yasutomi, who wrote in 1420 that the physician to the Shōgun, as well as the court’s chief in ‘yōshi diviner and exorcist were arrested and exiled on the charge that they had “made use of foxes” ; de Visser 1908:50–1). The text is (kitsune o tsukau not entirely clear about how or to what end these foxes were understood to have been employed, but recurring themes in subsequent literature are suggestive. Like the kitsune-mochi discussed in the previous chapter, kitsune-tsukai are commonly reported to use their foxes as agents of spiritual violence.1 Thus some fox-users were said to employ their vulpine minions to inflict possession-induced illnesses in their rivals, or to place their services up for hire as spiritual mercenaries, afflicting (and even killing) the enemies of their clients.2 Other accounts describe professional ritualists said to secretly employ foxes to cause the very incidents of spiritpossession that they were called upon to treat (de Visser 1908: 120). Indeed, it would seem likely that the fox-users described by Yasutomi were understood to be engaged in the latter kind of enterprise—the Shōgun’s consort is noted as the primary

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target (rather than the Shōgun himself, a more likely target for an assassin), and those accused of the crime (a physician and an exorcist) were precisely the people likely to be called upon for help if she became ill, as well as those most likely to be rewarded upon her recovery. A prominent feature in the imagery of fox-using sorcery is the association between the use of foxes and religious illegitimacy. Like Jien’s accounts of fox trickery in the thirteenth-century Gukanshō (discussed in Chapter Three), the disgraceful designs of kitsune-tsukai on the Shōgun’s household is presented by Yasutomi as a sign that the Last Days of the ) are upon us. The disrepute of fox-using Dharma (mappō sorcery, however, depends not only on the malevolence of its purported practitioners (injuring others for their own benefit) but also on their treachery, fraudulently promoting their own careers by appearing to save the lives of people they had placed in harm’s way themselves. A key aspect of fox-using sorcery, in other words, lay in fox-users’ skill in religious misrepresentation, making use of their vulpine familiars in order to feign spiritual advancement. Not only do kitsunetsukai secretly collude with the possessing spirits they claim to exorcise, but they are also said to use those spirits as spies, collecting information that they then pass off as extra-sensory knowledge, of the sort usually associated with meditation or mediumship. Indeed, the Honchō shokkan presents such

1. In both scholarly and folk discussions of fox-possession, kitsunemochi and kitsune-tsukai are frequently linked. As I mentioned in Chapter Four, accusations of fox-ownership sometime attribute the hereditary stigma to an original fox-using ancestor, whose sorcerous dealings with foxes established the family’s continuing relationship with the creatures. Similarly, historical discussions of fox-ownership frequently suggest that the imagery of fox-using sorcery (which appears in medieval documents) represents a historical precursor to fox-ownership, which seems to appear only after the mid-Edo period (e.g. Hayami 1992:51–65). 2. Taninobu (1922:218–22) reports an incident from 1914, in which an exorcist interrogates a fox-spirit who had possessed a woman. The fox claimed to be ritually compelled to possess the woman (against its better judgment) by a certain Buddhist monk (bōzu ), who had been hired by another woman, jealous of the affair she was having with her husband.


feigned omniscience as the primary feature of fox-using sorcery: When the sorcerer asks the fox about things he does not know, the fox’s form cannot be seen. When the sorcerer then miraculously speaks [about these matters], the people see it as the work of a god (NKZ 150:954). Unlike the fox-owners discussed in Chapter Four (a status individuals usually assume by heredity or association, usually without their consent and sometimes without their knowledge), fox-users are understood to actively seek out their familiars. Thus, while fox-owners are commonly described in terms suggestive of stigma and contamination, fox-users are , a term which is often typically characterized as jutsuka rendered in this context as “sorcerer,” but which suggests on the most general level something akin to cunning or craft, a person skilled in particular techniques or arts (jutsu ). Like accusations of fox-ownership, however, accounts of foxusing sorcery are arguably more illustrative of the imaginaires and social contexts in which they were enmeshed than of the actual practices of those to whom the label was applied. The phenomenon of kitsune-tsukai, in other words, should be located less in the ritual practice of the accused than in the discursive practices of their accusers.3 Indeed, I would suggest , that the term itself—kitsune o tsukau jutsuka or as I translated it in the epigraph to this chapter, “crafty people skilled in using foxes”—is as apt a description of those who represent the sorcery of others as it is of those being represented. Rather than using the shapeshifting powers of spirit-foxes to alter the perceptions of others, accusations of fox-using sorcery employ constellations of imagery and meaning associated with the figure of the fox to establish the categorical ground on which events and individuals are perceived. And like their sorcerous counterparts, the’se cultural kitsune-tsukai should be seen first and foremost as jutsuka, skillful practitioners of that “very clever language game” that Charles Long described at the heart of signification (1986:1). In this sense, the imagery of kitsune-tsukai provides both a fitting topic and a useful idiom with which to conclude this study, highlighting a number of issues—both theoretical

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and methodological—involving the study of imaginaires in general and the image of the shapeshifter fox in particular. Signification and the Contest of Sorcerers The Honchō shokkan describes fox-using sorcerers as ), a term that adherents of the “Law of Izuna” (Izunahō . may allude to the fox-riding deity Izuna daigongen The practices by which kitsune-tsukai are reported to gain their vulpine familiars, however, appear to bear little resemblance to the esoteric Buddhist rituals usually associated with this divinity. According to the Honchō shokkan, an individual who desires to become a fox-user must first find a fox-hole occupied by a pregnant vixen, providing her with food and protection until her kits have matured. Governed perhaps by the strong sense of reciprocity for which foxes are commonly known in Japanese sources, the female will then present her human patron with one of her offspring, who receives from the sorcerer the name by which he will be able to call upon it as a spirit-familiar (c.f.de Visser 1908:119– 20). While the invitation to grant the young fox its name may represent a token of respect analogous to the role of patrons in

3. Common motifs in the rituals by which fox-users are understood to gather their familiars seem to focus on domestication, lineage and the quasi-contractual nature of ritual veneration, themes which 1 have described in association with fox imagery more generally in previous chapters. In Chapter Four, for example, I mentioned the significance of lineage imagery in depictions of kitsune-mochi, an idea that also appears in depictions of such families’ sorcerous predecessors. Like the negotiations with spirits described in Chapter Three, offerings of food also appear as a common theme in the reported rituals of fox-using sorcerers, an idea that suggests not simply the feeding of animals but a ritual offering, one which if accepted establishes a reciprocal relationship between the spirit of the fox and the human who makes the offering. Indeed, Taninobu suggests that a fox’s acceptance of food offerings will compel it to obey its human master, even against its will (1922:222). Nevertheless, while it may be possible to trace the imagery of fox-related witchcraft or sorcery to earlier beliefs and practices (Komatsu 1994b:192–229), such a history applies as much to the cultural resources appropriated by accusers as to the behavior or beliefs of the accused.


human coming-of-age ceremonies, the idea that the sorcerer gains his familiar primarily through an act of naming appears to draw on a more ancient Japanese understanding, regarding the spiritual power of words over the things they ). This principle at work in the foxsignify (kotodama users’ craft represents one of the basic presuppositions associated with magical thought more generally—the idea that control over the signs of things translates into control over things themselves. More than just an empirically bankrupt ideology—as James Frazer described it, “the bastard sister of science” (1922:57)—the magical imagery of the foxusing jutsuka may be taken as a kind of metasemiotic commentary, providing provocative insights into socialsemiotic practice. Indeed, insofar as human beings live their lives, as Geertz suggests, “suspended in webs of significance,” control over signs does indeed establish some degree of control over the things they signify—if not the brute circumstances themselves, at least their meaning as events, and thus the terms in which they will be valued, engaged and negotiated. As I have suggested in previous chapters, the craft of signification is one that is frequently contested, as different groups and individuals constantly struggle to negotiate the contours of the shared field(s) of meaning on which they interact. In this sense, the contest of signification can be understood at least in part as a contest between jutsuka, a common theme in Japanese tale literature.4 One such contest —recounted in both the Konjaku monogatarishū (24.16) and the Uji shūi monogatari (11.3)—concerns the famous in’ yōshi exorcist, diviner and sorcerer Abe no Seimei. According to the

4. It is interesting to note that, in the Konjaku monogatarishū, tales of jutsuka in various arts constitute the single largest segment of the collection (57 stories in Chapter 24), many of which revolve around the theme of a competition between two masters. In comparison, tales of rebirth in the pure land (ōjōden , with 54 tales in Chapter 15) come in second (the average number of stories in any chapter is 38). Only tales in praise of the Lotus Sūtra—and only if such tales from both China (Chapter 7) and Japan (Chapter 13 and a portion of Chapter 12) are combined—exceed the number of stories describing the marvels of jutsuka.

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tale, Seimei was approached one day by an old Buddhist monk asking for instruction. The old man was attended by what appeared to be two 10-year-old boys, but Seimei realized they ), a sign that the were in fact his spirit-familiars (shikijin old man was already an accomplished sorcerer, come not for instruction but to test Seimei’s powers. Without indicating his suspicions, he continued to speak with the old man about arranging a time when they might begin his instruction, while , within his sleeves he secretly wove various mūdras (in casting a spell (ju ) that caused the two spirits to vanish. When the two boys disappeared, the old man was amazed, ) declaring that “using shikijin” (shikijin o tsukau was a relatively simple matter, but to exert control over the spirits employed by another was beyond his power. He admitted coming in order to test Seimei, and again asked to become his student, this time in earnest (NKBZ 23:318). In this tale, Seimei (who, it may be recalled, is described in some tales as the child of a fox himself) shows his superiority over the old monk by beating him at his own game; not only does he demonstrate his ability to manipulate spirits, but he does so by controlling the very spirits employed by his opponent. In a similar sense, the craft of signification described in the preceding chapters often takes place as a contest between signifying agents, revolving around their use of images and categories to transform the shape and meaning of the world(s) they share. Like Seimei’s interaction with the old monk, these negotiations often involve the appropriation and reversal of one another’s images and categories, manipulating the imagery invoked by one’s rivals so as to dismiss it altogether or to claim for it meanings and implications more in line with one’s own interests. Like the fox-using sorcerer, whose craft depends on the shapeshifting powers of the fox, these contests of signification can be understood to depend on the shapeshifting power of signs. In the manifold texts and contexts explored in the preceding chapters, the transformations and duplicities of the shapeshifter have served to represent the multiple forms of indirection present in a variety of different fields of meaning, representing axes of significance that appear as collateral or tangential to those forms of meaning characterized as essential, direct or proper.5 Thus, for example, the tracks of


the shapeshifter fox have frequently appeared at the edges of various representations of lineage as a stabilizing entity in Japanese society, from the exchange of brides between patrilines to the exchange of labor and prestige within the extended family (dōzoku). A recurring theme in the metasemiotic imagery of the shapeshifter fox, however, is that meaning (social or religious) does not derive simply from the stable, one-to-one connections between signifier and signified— between generations within a patriline, for example, or between the Absolute Truth of the dharmakāya and its provisional manifestations. From the maternal bonds between the fox wife and her child to the unlimited exchange-value of the Lucky Teakettle, the roles of the shapeshifter fox in various economies of meaning are indicative of the multiple axes of significance at work within these economies, and the fox is identified again and again with signifying relations that appear to operate at cross-purposes to regimes of significance privileged as normative or dominant. As Roland Barthes notes, significance involves the articulation, not simply of two terms (‘fox’ and ‘wife,’ for example) but of two “floating kingdoms,” 5. The multiple axes on which signs are understood to operate have been described in various ways (paradigm and syntagm, metaphor and metonymy, etc.), but a recurring theme is the complementary operation of what Roman Jakobson has described as the “two poles” of signification, one based on similarity, the other on contiguity (1987: 95–114). As Jonathan Culler has suggested, there has often been a tendency in Western scholarship to privilege the former axis of meaning over the latter (188–209), a tendency which can also be found in folkloric representations involving the shapeshifter fox. In Chapter Two, for example, the “good son” of the early modern fox wife tale asserts his proper patrilineal identity by affirming his resemblance to his human father over his physical connection to his vulpine mother. Similarly, the honji suijaku semiotics of revelation described in Chapter Three repeatedly contrasts the manifestations of “deceptive demons” like the fox with the genuine manifestations of Absolute Truth in provisional form, equating the expedient devices of the Dharma with the analogical transformations from one level of truth to another, while presenting demonic shapeshifting with the alternative pole of significance, a kind of metonymic transformation between forms on the same manifest level of experience. Even as the contiguity embodied by the shapeshifter fox is subordinated to the power of analogy, however, the transformations represented by the fox remain indispensable.

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shifting bodies of associations and entailments on which the creativity—and hence the frequently troubling fluidity—of meaning depends (1967:56; c.f.Eco 1979b:67–89). In a similar fashion, the assertion of a meaningful identity between the fox and those figures with which it has been associated represents an assertion of analogy between two networks of entailments. The ubiquity of the figure of the fox may be attributed in part to its utility as a kind of symbolic bridge, a nodal point allowing for the juxtaposition and inter play of different fields of meaning—applying the language of husband and wife to the relations between human and divine, for example, or registering the ethics of commercial exchange through the imagery of family lineage. Yet it is precisely the incompatibility between these constellations of meaning being compared—the inherent untidiness of the “floating kingdoms” articulated in every act of signification—that gives images like the shapeshifter fox their cognitive power and dynamism over time.6 Indeed, the manifold entailments of an image like the shapeshifter fox may render it especially prone to unintended meanings; the application of fox imagery to a given set of circumstances has the potential to highlight unexpected elements implicit in those circumstances, often beyond the intent of the original speaker or author (c.f.Giddens 1979:44, 58). The broad semantic field of shapeshifter fox imagery thus provides a complex arena for social signification, giving agents considerable latitude in which to negotiate the meanings and implications of the world(s) they share.

6. Lakoff and Johnson distinguish between “conventional” metaphors —whose meanings and implications have become fixed, often to the point that their metaphorical operation is lost to view—and “new” metaphors, suggesting that a great deal of cultural change takes place in and through the introduction of these unconventional, creative metaphors (1980:139–146). The example of the shapeshifter fox, however, highlights the intermediate character of many metaphors, which can create new understandings out of the “accidental” entailments already inherent in existing metaphors. At the heart of this issue, I think, are the mechanisms by which categories are structured, as well as the social processes in which the relevance of certain entailments are negotiated with each application.


It is in this context that the creativity of signification as a social practice—the skilled work of a jutsuka—comes to the fore. As I suggested in Chapter One, signification implies not simply an act of naming but of placement, of locating the circumstances at hand in a particular, pre-existing and mutually accepted “cultural space” chosen from a number of such spaces, a categorical field the contours of which are understood to fit one’s perceived best interests. As Charles Long notes, signification of this sort is based on a subtle semiotic sleight-of-hand, a “verbal misdirection” which “parallels the real argument but gains its power of meaning from the structure of the discourse itself without the signification being subjected to the rules of the discourse” (1986:1). In other words, the act of signification uses the entailments and associations implicit in the terms it employs to carry the bulk of its significance; the real implications of the discourse are escorted in under the cover of the terms used to frame it. The efficacy of such a practice thus depends on maintaining a fundamental misrecognition; in the words of Pierre Bourdieu, signification must be “both an objectively intelligible practice and also an objectively enchanted experience of that practice” (1977:4). To be accepted by others, the use of imagery like the shapeshifter fox must provide an intelligible sign for the circumstances at hand; the associative field of the image must provide a number of illustrative analogies with the phenomena to which it is applied. At the same time, however, the structure of the imagery works to shape one’s experience of those circumstances—not only the entailments upon which the sense of resemblance is based, but potentially the entire set of such entailments— representing a shift from things to images and words every bit as marvelous and elaborate as the illusory worlds said to be created by foxes. Especially in moments of conflict and contradiction, novel circumstances tend to bring signification out of the realm of convention and reveal its striking transformations. At the same time, imagery such as that of the shapeshifter fox carries as one of its basic entailments the idea of duplicity and deception, highlighting the very ideological enterprise that it is sometimes used to pursue. Thus, the imagery of the fox has often been used to represent the trickery of others, from the

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scholarly formulations of Ando Shoeki, who dismissed all ideology as the foxy duplicity of oppressors, to the more popular depiction of the deceitful government functionary Endō Benzō as “the fox of Fukuyama.” Moreover, as I argued in Chapter Three, setsuwa tales of shapeshifting frequently have as their message the importance of discernment or penetration, of seeing through the outward form of signification (divine and otherwise) to uncover its always hidden motivations. In this respect, the figure of the shapeshifter fox carries with it an inclination towards critical reflection, even skepticism, regarding the nature of signification at the same time that it serves as a ubiquitous sign. As a practice of enchantment that is simultaneously (if sporadically) recognized as such, the discourse of kitsunetsukai accusations represents both a pertinent example and an apposite metaphor for the strategies employed by those who use the imagery of the fox, and by extension for the social practice of signification in general.7

7. Any study that takes into account the application of imaginaires in practice will quickly recognize the superficiality of terms such as “faith” or “belief’ (shinkō ) with which elements of the collective imagination are commonly described (c.f.Law 1997:77). In dealing with this “problem of belief’ presented by the medieval Zen imaginaire, Bernard Faure suggests that questions of belief (as an individual, fragmentary and constantly shifting subjectivity) are less relevant than the practical constraints and opportunities presented by the structure of a tradition, similar to the constraints and opportunities presented by a literary genre (1996:20–29). In this context, engagement with a particular imaginaire could be said to represent what Paul Veyne has described as “a form of symbolic obedience” (1988:32). In a similar fashion, Peter Brown has suggested in the context of medieval Europe that the life of collective imagination in history involves not so much “a body of men acting on specific beliefs about the supernatural,” but rather “specific beliefs held in such a way as to enable a body of men to act” (1982:316–7). Indeed, insofar as the imagery of the shapeshifter fox and the sorcerers’ contest can be taken as a kind of metasemiotic commentary, it can be seen to reflect a reflexive self-awareness of the essentially pragmatic character of the very life-worlds of which these images were a part.


Like Jien’s doctrine of deceptive demonic influence, the imagery of fox-using sorcery provided a means by which to dismiss claims to religious legitimacy, especially those of the ) that arose in so-called “new religions” (shinkō shūkyō the nineteenth century. Accounts of the early history of , for example, note that the founder of the Konkōkyō movement (Kawate Bunjirō, 1814–1883) and his immediate disciples repeatedly faced charges of fox-using sorcery. Rather than the work of the newly-revealed deity Tenchi kane no kami (as followers of the movement claimed), critics asserted that their marvelous capacity to heal and their miraculous displays of omniscience were the product of foxes kept in their employ (Konkōkyō Honbu Kyōchō 1983:418, 598– 9, 695, 731). Just as kitsune-tsukai were understood to use the shapeshifting powers of their vulpine minions to change others’ perception of reality, however, those who accused others of fox-using also employed the figure of the fox in order to reinscribe miracles like those claimed by the followers of Konkōkyō. Insofar as accusations of fox-using sorcery were successful against this movement, the work of the deity Tenchi kane no kami would be transformed in some minds by the accusers’ use of fox imagery, resignified as the work of religious con artists and their fox familiars. Nevertheless, like the legendary figure Abe no Seimei, the picture of Kawate Bunjirō that emerges from the accounts of his followers is of a figure with a nuanced understanding of his accusers’ rhetorical techniques and a masterful ability to play on them. In responding to the allegations of fox-using sorcery against him, for example, Kawate Bunjirō is said to have argued: There are people who say that I use foxes (kitsune o tsukau), but if I really use foxes, then I would need a

hundred of them for a hundred worshippers, and a thousand of them for a thousand worshippers (Konkōkyō Honbu Kyōchō 1987, 2:207).

More than a simple denial, this retort asserts the basic inapplicability ofthe kitsune-tsukai imagery, by playing on the commonly-held image ofthe fox-using sorcerer as a figure whose powers arise from his partnership with a single adopted

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fox-familiar. The benefits associated with theworship of Tenchi kane no kami, he suggests, would be simply beyondthe ability of a single fox-spirit, and he invokes instead the image of averitable army of fox familiars, an image that so exceeds common understandings of fox sorcery that it renders the original accusation absurd. A similar logic can be seen at work in another account of his teachings, in which he asked one of his followers to desist from (“hand divination”), in which the practice of temikuji the worshipper’s clasped hands are understood to move of their own volition to indicate the divine response to one’s prayers. The man’s performance, according to the account, ), bearing too close a was “extreme” (hanahadashii resemblance to the possession rituals used by professional mediums. Among the most notorious of these mediums were (“the descent of those who practiced Inari sage Inari”), granting oracles commonly understood to be the product of fox possession. During this period, Inari sage practitioners were prosecuted as charlatans by the bakufu and condemned as heretical by the Shinto establishment (Nakagawa 1999:190–97, 210–11), and it was clearly better to eliminate the practice of temikuji as a prophylactic measure than to risk the similarities with these infamous itinerates to be used as fodder for the religion’s critics.8 This mode of argument can also be found prefigured in the machinations at court discussed in Chapter Three, between the Tendai priest Jien and Lady Jōdo-ji. As I noted, Jien rejected the claims made by the widow of Go-Shirakawa that the retired emperor’s spirit had become vengeful, and that he

8. In his declaration forbidding the use of temikuji, Kawate describes the practice in a way the closely matches the characterization of Inari sage during this time. First, he comments that “possession is thought to be the work of foxes and tanuki” suggesting that the process of temikuji may be mistaken for the work of foxes rather than Tenchi kane no kami. He adds, however, that these foxes and tanuki “are not the foxes and tanuki that live in the mountains. There are many who live right here in the village,” perhaps a reference to the idea that Inari sage might be associated with deceivers more human than animal (Konkōkyō Honbu Kyōchō 1983:731).


had demanded a costly institution to be established in his honor. He did so, however, not by alleging simple fraud (although the details of his account suggest that he suspected it) but by arguing for an alternative explanation, one whose entailments better fit the circumstances at hand (and, coincidentally, better fit his own desire to deprive Lady Jōdoji, of influence at court). These uses of the imagery of the fox and fox-using, however, ultimately depend as much on the hidden play of entailments within these images as they do on the applicability of those images to the circumstances at hand. Not only does the perception and assertion of similarity require a sensitivity to the entailments of the categories being used (the sort of awareness that led Kawate Bunjirō to alter the ritual practice of his followers in order to prevent unwanted associations), but the social negotiation of those similarities requires an ability to play on the instability and wealth of such entailments in order to control the process of signification. Thus in his response to accusations of fox-sorcery, Bunjirō shifted the terms of the accusation by highlighting different aspects of the very imagery used against him—instead of a matter of deception (of presenting the powers of the fox as divine revelation), he made the issue about how such deception might take place, presenting an image of swarming multitudes of fox-familiars incompatible with the common picture of the fox-using sorcerer. Similarly, when Jien responded to the claims of Lady Jōdo-ji, he did so, not in the same terms emphasized by the widow (the cultural pattern by which onryō are pacified by veneration as goryōshin), but by focusing on the commonly-held ideas about how such spirits become onryō in the first place. Unlike such famous vengeful spirits as Sugawara no Michizane or Emperor Sutoku, the spirit of Go-Shirakawa did not fall victim to court intrigues— in short, he had no reason to become vengeful, raising the distinct possibility that forces other than the spirit of the former emperor were at work. And what kind of beings would possess a medium under false pretenses except a shapeshifting junma like the fox? In this respect, the ability to play on the shiftiness of these “floating kingdoms” articulated by signification can be seen as indispensable to the craft of

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rhetorical self-defense by which one turns the signification of a rival to one’s own advantage. The Persistence of Heresy: Foxes in Modernist Discourse The discourse of religious illegitimacy with which the imagery of the shapeshifter fox is so closely linked is first and foremost concerned with the establishment of boundaries, with ) in order to separating inside (nai ) from outside (ge maintain integrity against that which threatens from without. In the preceding chapters, the shapeshifter fox has frequently appeared in the signifying practices by which those boundaries have been drawn; as a transgressor of boundaries par excellence, the fox has frequently represented a sort of illicit exception that makes the rule. In Chapter Two, I argued that the motif of the fox-wife served both to mark off the limits of human domestic space (boundaries between the world of human culture and the non-human wilderness) and to represent their always troubling permeability. In Chapter Three, I discussed the role of the shapeshifter fox in the imagery of religious duplicity, representing the deluding alternative to divine revelation. Aspects of both these themes reappeared in Chapter Four, where I explored the figures of the fox and Inari as both a symbol and a supernatural agent of the profound and ambivalent transformations that rocked Japan during the Edo period. In each of these contexts, illegitimacy (of children, of revelation, of social behavior and of institutions) appeared in a number of analogous ways. It is a motif, moreover, that continued to be a central component in the signifying practices of the Meiji era (1868–1912), a period during which the fundamental discourses and disciplines of modernity were framed in Japanese history. Foxes and the Foreign: Syncretism as Nativist Heresy As an illegitimate religious practice, the rituals of fox-using sorcery have often been associated with esoteric Buddhist rites for worldly success, especially those dedicated to the deity Dakiniten, a figure which, like Izuna daigongen often


appears mounted on a fox (see Figure 7).9 Like the practice of fox-using sorcery itself, the illegitimacy with which these rituals have often been characterized appears to be due as much to its associations with personal advancement at the expense of others as with the worldly nature of that advancement or the nature of the deities employed.10 Like the malevolent exploits of Tamamo no mae, the veneration of Dakiniten is associated in some sources with the civil wars of the late twelfth century, including the military epics Genpei and Heike monogatari . The first seisuiki chapter of the Genpei seisuiki, for example, tells the tale of a confrontation between a fox-dākinī and the future hegemon Taira no Kiyomori. While on a hunt, Kiyomori was surprised to see the fox he was about to shoot transform into a woman. If he would but spare her life, the fox-woman told the warrior, she would grant him a wish. Kiyomori identified her as Kiko (“the venerable fox deva-king”) and prostrated tennō himself before her, upon which she resumed her fox form and disappeared. From that time forward, he became a regular ), a devotee of the cult of Dakiniten (daten no hō practice that foreshadowed his eventual rise to become the most powerful man of his day (YB 16:18). This particular story of divine benefits, however, seems to be less a tale of piety rewarded than a telling instance of the whatever-meansnecessary approach of one of the most ambitious and ruthless men of his time, using dubious religious practices to further his ambition.11 In a similar vein, the Heike monogatari mentions the dākinī worship commissioned by Fujiwara no Narichika (a man who would eventually become one of the conspirators against Kiyomori’s hegemony) as a sign of his “unnatural ambitions,” desiring wealth and power beyond his

9. The characters used to render the Sanskrit dākinī into the Japanese Dakiniten varyfrom source to source, including , , and . 10. As Ian Reader and George Tanabe note, the religious pursuit of worldly benefits (genze riyaku ) is not in and of itself sufficient for a practice to be dismissed as heterodox, nor is the identity of the specific divinities being venerated (1998). As Smyers notes, Buddhist Inari worship often presents the divinity in the form of Dakiniten or a similar fox-riding esoteric divinity (1999: 25–8).

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Figure 7. Dakiniten by Hokusai (Ball 1927:134)

status (Kitagawa and Tsuchida 1975, 1:52). In both cases, the ambition reflected in their embrace of this practice is ultimately tied to the onset of civil war, the disruption of political authority, and the ignominious death of those involved.12 Although the nature of existing records (literary and iconographic) preclude definitive conclusions as to the origins of the association between foxes and dākinī, the issue nevertheless continues to be a focus for scholarly speculation (see Smyers 1999:82–85; de Visser 1908:41–43). This

11. The Genpei seisuiki also attributes the seduction and destruction of King Yu of Zhou (an episode which appears in the curriculum vitae of the malevolent fox-spirit Tamamo no mae, as well) to the power of the daten no hō practiced by one of the king’s rivals, and declares the being venerated by this practice to be a fox (YB 16:210).


speculation, however, is seldom idle—the attribution of origins is a prominent element in the discourse of institutional legitimacy and illegitimacy, from the earliest engi into the modem period.13 This particular question of origins, for example, has had its most pronounced impact in the discourse surrounding Inari worship, the basic contours of which can be found elaborated in the Inari jinjakō (written in 1836): For that reason (namely because three foxes were worshipped in the temple behind that of Inari at Kyoto, and the people had begun to call them the sacred messengers of that divinity) the cult of the Indian fox-god Dakini in later times got gradually mixed up with that of Inari, a terribly unreasonable thing! (de Visser 1908:111)

12. Another tale of magic rites associatcd with Dakiniten appears in the Kokonchomonju (Tyler 1987:63–4), a story with a number of parallels with the accounts presented in the Genpei seisuiki and the Heike monogatari. Like the story of Narichika, the rituals are commissioned by the nobleman Fujiwara no Tadazane (1078–1162) for purely worldly advancement, and like Kiyomori’s encounter with Kiko tennō, the divinity manifests itself as a foxwoman. While the protagonist of this story clearly appears to be driven by ambition, however, his veneration of Dakiniten does not appear to represent the kind of ominous portent that it does in the Genpei seisuiki or Heiki monogatari, and his success does not appear to be followed by an ignominious end. 13. The idea, discussed earlier in the chapter, that the work of culture is the product of skillful practice, in which images are used and manipulated even as they are reproduced, shapes the following discussion in two important senses. First, it removes the privilege of origins that often attend these discussions in scholarly discourse. The “original” circumstances that gave shape to an image or category are only one step in a chain of analogous moments that continue to shape its form and meaning. While some may be more dramatic or revealing than others, each such moment should be seen on a par with all others in the chain. Indeed, the idea of cultural practice as a continual chain renders the idea of origins (a sort of cultural “unmoved mover”) itself untenable. Second, it shifts the focus from the terminology and imagery of religious illegitimacy to how those terms and images are employed in the discursive practice of “illegitimization,” that drawing of boundaries in which the trope of origins itself plays a prominent part.

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This depiction of the history of fox imagery in Inari worship— which continues to appear in the scholarship and selfrepresentation of Inari worship today—depends on a basic distinction between two types of symbolic association. On the one hand, certain practices are described as “internal” to the practice of Inari worship at Fushimi—on Mt. Inari, fox-spirits were venerated, becoming identified as the animal messengers of Inari. While the shift from a marginal fox-cult to the deity’s minion could be said to have involved a certain degree of semantic drift—in which the proximity of the shrines translated into a link between the spirits being venerated in those shrines—the idea of a kami expressing itself through animal messengers (tsukawashime) remains well within the acceptable compass of “indigenous” religious practice, comparable to the deer of Kasuga or the doves of Hachiman. On the other hand, the worship of Dakiniten is described as an “external” phenomenon, an “Indian fox-god” that has become intertwined with the indigenous cult at Fushimi. In making this distinction, the author effectively signifies the essential nature of Inari worship, placing it on a nativistic grid dividing Japanese ideas and practices from foreign notions (c.f.Nosco 1990). Semantic drift within those regions— as purportedly occurred in the initial association of Inari with the fox—is an acceptable (if somewhat dubious) development in indigenous religious history. Drift between those two fields, on the other hand, is a fundamental category mistake, “a terribly unreasonable” substitution of the essence of Inari as a kami with its accidental similarity to a foreign cult. The implications of this distinction involve not only the question of indigenous versus foreign religion (an issue of increasing importance with the rise of nativism in the latter part of the Edo period when this work was written), but also the very nature of the divinity being worshipped—is Inari the spirit of rice (as suggested in the earliest records of Inari as ujigami of the Hata clan), or is it a wish-fulfilling vulpiform divinity, comparable to the Buddhist-style Kiko tennō venerated by Taira no Kiyomori in his rise to political power? By attributing the syncretism of continental and Japanese imagery to accidental similarities within the two systems of imagery, the author of the Inari jinjakō attempts to mark off the


boundaries of its legitimate essence as an indigenous religious tradition. The move to split the authentic essence of indigenous religion (identified with the term Shinto) from the foreign influences with which it had been intertwined (and by which, according to nativist thinkers, it was being corrupted) grew to national significance in the early Meiji period, when the (“the differentiation of discourse of shinbutsu bunri kami and buddhas”) became government policy. To eliminate the sort of category mistakes attributed to Japanese religious history by works like the Inari jinjakō, institutions attempted to unravel a millennium’s worth of interwoven doctrines and practices, honji and suijaku, essentially overnight. Although the initiative to “untangle” Buddhism and Shinto was ultimately impracticable (Ketelaar 1990:46–77), it did succeed in establishing the basic tropes of a prevailing field of discourse, on which individuals and institutions charted their identity. In so doing, it served to set the terms of debate in a way that continues to leave its mark on Japanese religious thought. This in turn set the stage for numerous “countersignifications,” skillful manipulations of this new field of meaning, in pursuit of interests that were often at odds with the nativist agendas that first gave it form. This rhetorical self-defense may not have always rivaled the skill of Abe no Seimei in beating others at their own game, but it was often enough to open up a favorable discursive space sufficient for their purposes. Thus, for example, the distinctions implicit in the Shinto-centered rhetoric of the Inari jinjakō was employed to very different effect by some adherents of Inari worship, wishing to continue the veneration of the divinity in a Buddhist idiom. As Karen Smyers notes, the Sōtō Zen temple Myōgonji in Aichi prefecture—long identified as a major center of Inari worship (known as Toyokawa Inari)—faced severe pressure during the Meiji period to follow the lead of Fushimi Inari by setting aside its Buddhist affiliations and declaring itself a Shinto shrine. The head priest, however, was able to maintain his Buddhist lineage by playing on the very logic that threatened him. Accepting the idea that the worship of Inari and Dakiniten had become mistakenly confused in the past, he asserted that the patron deity of his temple was not

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the kami Inari at all, but rather Dakiniten. In this case, he argued, the original mistake had not been to confuse an indigenous kami with the “Indian fox-god” but the reverse. By officially declaring Toyokawa Inari a Buddhist temple protected by Dakiniten rather than a Shinto shrine to Inari, he was able to preserve the Buddhist identity of Myōgonji within the newly-established shinbutsu bunri paradigm (1999: 24–8).14 In more than one respect, these negotiations of the “Shinto” or “Buddhist” character of Inari worship implicitly pivoted on the figure of the fox within the tradition. According to the common narrative of origins, it was the image of the fox (by appearing in the iconography of both traditions) that motivated the initial confusion of Inari and Dakiniten. Moreover, the theological distinctions between them can be condensed into the basic question of whether the fox should be venerated as an attendant of Inari (the “orthodox” Shinto interpretation) or whether it should be worshipped as Inari (the “Buddhist-influenced” idea of Inari as a vulpiform deity akin to Kiko tennō). The fox thus represented in Inari worship a liminal figure at the boundaries of two intertwined dichotomies by which nativist discourse in general and shinbutsu bunri ideology in particular constructed religious identity. Spatially, this argument holds that the fox is a figure in both native and continental religions, spanning the divide

14. Smyers also describes the case of Saijō Inari, an institution in Okayama whose identification with Nichiren Buddhism is founded on a similar logic. In discussing the case of Toyokawa Inari, she describes its self-representation as Buddhist to be “invented tradition,” incompatible with the historical evidence that places it “originally in the ‘Shinto’ lineage” (1999:26). As Ketelaar notes, however, the distinction between “Buddhist” and “Shinto” is itself essentially a product of shinbutsu bunri discourse (1990:45). Ultimately, the historical accuracy of these declarations is less relevant than its signifying function, its effort to place particular practices and institutions within a field delineated by the (newlydistinguished if not altogether new) categories “Buddhism” and “Shinto.” In this context, all lived tradition should perhaps be characterized as invented, the continual reproduction of ideas and practices in adaptation to continually changing circumstances.


between indigenous and foreign. Temporally, the fox appears at the intersection between authentic origins and a corrupted present, signified as the medium through which the process of syncretism took place. Foxes and the Folk: Superstition as Enlightenment Heresy Nativist discourse, however, was only one of the sources for the spatial and temporal dichotomies by which identities were charted during Japan’s modernization. Equally important was the so-called “civilization and enlightenment” (bunmei kaika ) movement, the proponents of which sought to create a modem nation-state able to compete on the international stage. Influenced by the work of Buckle, Guizot, and Spencer, ) Japanese enlightenment thinkers (keimōsha envisioned world history according to a universal evolution from primitivism to civilization. The criteria by which to characterize these two terms remained open to a considerable diversity of interpretation, but their opposition formed the two poles of a continuum of development against which contemporary Japanese culture and its institutions were placed in world-historical terms. Images and categories that were worthy of a civilized, modern Japan were thus ), distinguished from “misguided beliefs” (meishin superstitious holdovers from a primitive past. In this context, the figure of the shapeshifter fox came to have implications that extended beyond the institutional and theological negotiations of Inari worship to become a major trope in representing the mental world of the Japanese people in bunmei kaika discourse. In a manner not dissimilar from that found in the discourse of Inari worship, for example, foxes were depicted as an unsuitable object of worship, venerated by what the eminent keimōsha Fukuzawa Yukichi characterized as “country bumpkins, the kind who finger their beads and chant their nembutsu.” In such people’s eyes there is no difference between Jesus, Confucius, Buddha, or Amaterasu-ō-mikami. To these worshippers, foxes and badgers are all gods and Buddhas (1973:96).

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In such depictions, the veneration of foxes appears as the consequence of a basic lack of discernment on the part of the uneducated. The proper criteria for such discernment are seldom explicitly elaborated in such writings, and the veneration of foxes takes on an emblematic quality, recurring as an example of inappropriate worship to be contrasted with socio-educationally “higher” (and thus legitimate) worship. An implicit distinction between the fox and these “higher” objects of worship, how ever, can be seen to lie in their relative degrees of immanence and transcendence. In a series of essays , for for the enlightenment journal Meiroku zasshi example, the keimōsha Nishi Amane frequently draws the rhetorical distinction between the common worship of foxes and the veneration of kami or buddhas. While foxes are the single most common figure in this rhetoric, they frequently appear grouped together with tanuki, snakes, insects, trees and stones—beings that are all immanent figures of the natural world. Meanwhile, Nishi identifies the opposite extreme—the object of veneration by “sages”—as “the ), a being Supreme King of Kings” (jōtei shusai described as entirely beyond human knowledge (Kyōmonron , Braisted 1976:62, 110, 152).15 As immanent beings, the fox and their ilk fall under the rubric, not of faith in the unknown, but of empirical investigation and education. As Nishi writes: When asked how religion differs from education, I would respond that they really are as far apart as heaven and earth since the hundred arts and sciences civilize and enlighten the intellect, while religion is rooted in the area that does not reach the intellect and arises from faith. Faith itself, however, will become more elevated as education advances. Thus belief in foxes, snakes, goblins (tengu) and the like will be proved false if we just further the study of zoology (Braisted 1976:74).

15. This trope is taken up with great force in Kashiwabara Takaaki’s refutation of Nishi’s views in the same journal (Briasted 1976:370– 372).


Indeed, a number of keimōsha embarked on a widespread program of education (supported by government edict), subjecting what they considered to be popular misconceptions like “belief in foxes” to scientific standards, an attempt to reinterpret the “superstitious” elements of local folk beliefs into a nationwide, enlightenment world view (Figal 1999:77– 104). The imagery of shapeshifters like the fox, however, may have represented more than simply an aspect of folk knowledge to be recast in modern scientific terms. As I argued in Chapter Three, shapeshifting was central to a pre-modern semiotics of revelation, a theory of interpretation that represented a fundamental alternative to the empiricist enterprise at the heart of enlightenment scientific discourse. Insofar as one’s perceptions can be attributed to the illusions of a fox rather than the transparent manifestation of the “real world,” the imagery of shapeshifting could be said to undercut the basic principles of scientific empiricism. Perhaps the most obvious expression of this orientation to the fox can be found in the writings of Lafcadio Hearn, an early commentator on Japan to the West: Consequently, the old-fashioned peasant, on seeing anything extremely queer, is slow to credit the testimony of his own eyes. The most interesting and valuable witness of the stupendous eruption of Bandai-San in 1888-which blew the huge volcano to pieces and devastated an area of twenty-seven square miles, leveling forests, turning rivers from their courses, and burying numbers of villages with all their inhabitants— was an old peasant who had watched the whole cataclysm from a neighboring peak as unconcernedly as if he had been looking at a drama… He had made up his mind not to be afraid—deeming that all he saw and heard was delusion wrought by the witchcraft of a fox (1976:323–4). In the writings of Japanese keimōsha, as well, the idea of foxwrought illusion appeared among the dangerous obstacles to a properly empirical approach to reality. In an 1874 article on fox superstitions in Meiroku zasshi, for example, Sakatani Shiroshi attributes the idea of such illusions to a basic form

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“mental derangement” that seized on the idiom of fox trickery and possession through the suggestive influence of popular tales and the misguided treatments of the ignorant. In this sense, the delusions of foxes takes on a double meaning, in which the idea that one can be deluded by foxes is itself a delusion, the product of superstition and madness. Like Hearn, Sakatani concludes his discussion of these delusions with a paean to the power of education that ultimately reverts to the traditional imagery of the fox—in Hearn’s essay, education is credited with the power to exorcise these spirits (1976:342), while Sakatani characterizes those who impose unenlightened ideologies in the name of modernizing the nation as guilty of “exchanging one fox for another” (Braisted 1976:254). More than just a clever use of metaphor, such turns of phrase may also point to a fundamental yet disturbing parity between these two modes of knowledge, one that reveals both the epistemic character of fox imagery at the same time that it reveals the ideological, world-transforming aspect of bunmei kaika discourse. By addressing it primarily as a matter of fact (to be proven or debunked by scientific investigation), enlightenment discourse on the fox largely avoided the much more difficult problem of refuting it as an alternative epistemology. At the same time, however, an understanding of the fox in these terms—as an embodiment of the Cartesian evil demon, challenging the possibility of empirical knowledge —may help to explain the vigor with which the imagery of foxes and other shapeshifters were specifically targeted for assault and assimilation by enlightenment thinkers. Foxes Past and Future Nativist and enlightenment paradigms were based on different sets of categorical distinctions and often ill-matched ideological agendas, but they came together in the Meiji period to form the basic discursive landscape in which groups and individuals located themselves in the establishment of a modern state. At stake was the creation of a Japanese modernity that would be competitive with the technological advancement of the West, but that would also be distinctively Japanese. Rendered according to the popular slogan of the day, ) were sought in which “Eastern Values” (tōyō dōtoku


to serve as the complement and guide to “Western ), this enterprise involved Technology” (seiyō geijutsu navigating a fundamental tension between preservation and progress, past and future, cultural identity and technical efficiency.16 Of course, this dynamic is in many respects common to the creation of modern nation-states more generally, the attempt to locate a transcendent ground from which to direct the disruptive and revolutionary changes shaping the nation, and from which that nation could be distinguished from others (Bellah 1970:64–73). Ultimately, this enterprise could be de scribed as an act of signification itself, perhaps the grandest of them all.17 In order for such an endeavor to succeed in a specific context like nineteenthcentury Japan, it would have to grapple with traditional repertoires of images, categories and practices. Among these was the figure of the fox, an image emblematic of the shiftiness inherent in signification more generally. Historically, the image of the fox appeared at the crux of syncretistic transformations threatening the link to a native past. Ideologically, it served as a glaring example of a world of folk knowledge standing in opposition to the basic empirical principles on which (at least some) wished to establish both state and polity. As it did in Edo-period village practice, the figure of the fox thus represented an essentially heresiological figure, and those with whom it was associated (most particularly the images and practices of the “ignorant masses” ), demanded expulsion or conversion. or gumin It was in this context that the scholarly disciplines of ) and religious studies folklore (minzokugaku were established in Japan, motivated and (shūkyōgaku shaped by the agendas and ideological tensions that characterized this period.18 It should thus not be surprising 16. Attributed to the writings of Sakuma Shōzan (1811–1864), the slogan of “Eastern Values, Western Technology” has often been seen as emblematic of much of the Japanese discourse on modernization (e.g., Yamazaki and Miyakawa 1966:111–125). 17. By describing nation building as an exercise in signification, I am drawing on Benedict Anderson’s notion of nation-states as a sort of grand rhetorical strategy. creating imaginary bonds where before none had existed (1991).

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that the same tensions which made the figure of the fox problematic in the larger field of Meiji signification can be found recapitulated in the discourse by which these disciplines categorized and signified their objects of study. In a brief essay on the theme of fox-wives and fox-weddings (kitsune no yome) in Japanese folklore, for example, the iri pioneering folklorist Yanagita Kunio suggests that these motifs are suggestive of early beliefs involving a fox-god ) associated with marriage and childbirth. (kitsunegami Strongly influenced by the nativist Hirata Atsutane, Yanagita’s inquiry into these tales was part of a larger project of piecing together the indigenous Japanese religious heritage hidden beneath the structure of foreign, elite traditions (Morse 1990). As an educated member of the Meiji establish ment, however, he remained less than entirely comfortable with the image of the past that figures like the fox appeared to represent, referring to it as “the crude and infantile worship of ancient peoples” (1963b:482). The ambivalence displayed in such portrayals of the fox and related figures of the premodern popular imagination reveals a great deal about the complex tensions at the heart of these modern disciplines. My point in raising such examples, however, is less to explore the complex relationships between such disciplines and the contexts in which they were established, than to suggest their place in a continuing history of signification and counter-signification, extending from the earliest sources to the present. Although the agendas, the agents and some of the tropes may change from one period to another, the nature of this discourse as a skillful practice of strategic meaning-making—a contest of jutsuka—continues. In the end, we are all of us users of the fox, premodern and modern, lay and scholar.

18. A number of recent studies (including Ivy 1995 and Harootunian 1990) have addressed the modern foundations (and inherently modernist tensions) that mark the minzokugaku movement in Japan. On the place of Japanese religious studies in the Meiji era, see Suzuki (1979).


Man into Fox: The Common Ground of Shapeshifting tells the story of a pilgrim to The Shinchomonjū Fushimi Inari, a man whose experience at the shrine left him transformed in a way he could never have anticipated. As he stood before the impressive rows of red torii gates—for which the shrine is well-known, erected so close together that in some places they form what amounts to covered walk-ways— he was amazed to see a fox appear and begin jumping back and forth over the long expanse of gateways. The fox told the man that it would teach him how to jump in a similar fashion, and with the help of a rope tied around the man’s waist, helped him to leap back and forth over the torii. When he returned home, however, his wife and children failed to recognize him, and he realized that his encounter with the fox had changed him into a fox himself. By leaping over the gates at Fushimi, he had somehow embarked in this very life on the “animal road,” one of the six realms of rebirth described in Buddhist cosmology (de Visser 1908:62). This story is one of a very few expressions of an idea that human beings can turn into foxes rather than the other way around, joined most notably by Ando Shoeki’s allegorical Hōsei monogatari (described in Chapter One), whose rhetorical force lies primarily in its man-bites-dog peculiarity: People…point at me and say that foxes transform themselves into human beings, but this is a delusion… I do not change into a human; human beings transform themselves into foxes! (Yasunaga 1992:149) Although this study has been concerned with tracing the shared outlines of the shapeshifter fox and the imaginaires with which it interacts, it seems fitting to begin and end the work with these anomalous tales, insofar as they express a logic that is as insightful as it is unusual. In other, more common tales, foxes appear as ultimate outsiders, and the shapeshifting powers by which they cross between their world and ours largely serves to emphasize the extremity of the gap between them. These rarer tales of the man-into-fox variety, however, suggest that there may be a more basic common

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ground in which both human beings and foxes participate, whether their shared (Buddhist) identity as sentient beings caught in the round of rebirth or their common (ideological) deviousness. Throughout this work, I have approached the imagery of the shapeshifter fox as a meaning-making sign, and endeavored to illustrate the richness and ubiquity of the sign-functions associated with this figure. In part, my analysis has been inspired by the idea that a certain degree of metasemiotic reflexivity is inherent to all semiotic practice, involving a metalinguistic vocabulary with which to represent and negotiate signification itself. Insofar as the shapeshifter fox functions as this sort of “second-order term” (that is, as a sign signifying signification), it suggests a basic affinity between emic and etic knowledge. A theme that has remained constantly in the background of this work, its research and its writing, is an interest in the possibilities and implications of this affinity, of the isomorphisms between scholarly signification and the signifying practices it studies. The transformation and transgression implicit in the imagery of the shapeshifter fox makes it emblematic of the permeability of boundaries, and in previous chapters, it has appeared frequently as a mediator between disparate imaginaires and fields of significance in Japanese history. This work has been concerned not only with how this boundary-crossing has functioned as a conceptual tool in Japanese discourse, however, but also with how it might function as a conceptual tool in bridging the “commensurability gap” between that discourse and the equally shifty discourse of the contemporary Western academy. This study, in other words, has been not only an enterprise in analyzing the imagery of the shapeshifter fox, but also an experiment in using that imagery. The idea that contemporary Western scholarship and the narratives and images associated with the shapeshifter fox can be seen as commensurable second-order discourses in turn suggests the possibility of their mutual interaction, not only on the level of theory and object but as alternative theories, as models and metaphors that can be combined and compared in illuminating ways. It was a comparison of this sort that motivated my use of the term “signification.” Drawing on the


formulation of Charles Long, I have used this term to emphasize the duplicity inherent in the use of signs, extending it not simply to the ways in which the academy signifies on its object (the focus of Long’s use of the term) but to the socialsemiotic practice of Japanese discourse on the shapeshifter fox —in other words, this work signified “signification” on the significance of the fox. At the same time, however, the shapeshifter fox is itself a figure of duplicity, and my use of “signification” to understand the use of shapeshifter fox imagery was paralleled by my use of shapeshifter fox imagery to signify the dynamics of signification. Especially in this chapter, I have tried to show the ways in which the imagery of boundary-crossing, magical delusion, and the contest of sorcerers can all appear as models and metaphors by which to elaborate the ideological power of signification. On what is perhaps the most basic level, this study has been in pursuit of the now-axiomatic methodological formula “rendering the strange familiar and the familiar strange.” On the one hand, much of the effort involved in studying the works of a culture removed in time and space like the imagery of the shapeshifter fox depends upon a project of translation; like the fox who must transform to enter the human world, the Japanese image of the shapeshifter fox must take new forms (linguistic, theoretical) in order to enter the discursive world of the Western academy, and the degree of this transformation only underlines the basic aporia between those works of culture and this one. On the other hand, insofar as the effort to cross that divide is motivated by a sense of shared humanity, the transformations by which the image of the shapeshifter fox becomes intelligible can also transform us. Not only can the imagery of the fox be used to reveal the shapeshifting character of our own cultural practice (the duplicitous and transformative powers of signification as a human—rather than a strictly emic or etic—practice), but the imagery of the shapeshifting fox, with its particular logic of entailments and associations can become part of our own repertoire of conceptual tools. By following the figure of the fox, leaping from imaginaire to imaginaire, world to world, we find that we have internalized the fox, becoming foxes ourselves. By entering the worlds it creates, we find ourselves transformed.

Glossary

Abeno Abe no dōji Abenodōjimon

atae bakasu bakemono bakeru bakufu bakumatsu Benzaiten bōzu

bunbuku chagama bunke bunmei kaika buppō chi chōja chōnai ni iseya Inari ni inu no kuso dakini

Dakiniten ,

Daodejing daten no dōzoku emaki engi engiri fukugami fushigi Fuso ryakki ge gedatsu no ju gedō gehō Genji monogatari Genpei seisuiki

,

,

genze riyaku gohei gōnō goryōshin Gukanshō gumin hanahadashii hebigami Heike monogatari hen henge hengen hengen no ge henshin henshin ganbō hirono hitogami hito-gitsune hōben Hokke genki honbyakushō Honchō shokkan

hongan honji suijaku honke Hōsei monogatari hosshin hossu hyōrei shinkō ie iegimi ie no inu ietoji ii hō ikki in in Inari

170 GLOSSARY

Inari jinjakō

kitsune no yome-iri kitsune nyōbō kitsune o tsukau kitsune-tsukai kitsune-tsuki kitsune tsuki ochite Inari ga issha fue

Inari sage injū

inmon

inugami

in’ yoshi iseya

Izuna daigongen Izunahō

jama Jihi

Mangyō

Bosatsu

jinpen jinsei jinzū jōtei shusai ju junma jutsu jutsuka kafu kaibutsu kami

kamigakari kamisori kitsune kanai anzen Kasuga gongen genki katachi kegare keimōsha keshin kikimimi

Kiko myojin Kiko tenno

kitsune kitsu-ne ki-tsune kitsune-bi kitsunegami kitsune kore naki gi ofuregaki kitsune-mochi

Kitsune zōshi ko kōan Kobiki kogitsune maru Kojiki kokata Kokonchōmonjū koku Konjaku monogatarishū Konkōkyō

kori Koshoku gonin onna kotodama kuda-mochi kuro kusawake hyakushō Kuzunoha Inari Kyōmonron kyū

Laozi ma mappō Meiroku zasshi meishin michi miko miko-suji Mino no kitsune minzokugaku Minzoku to rekishi mono mononoke mononoke yamisu

GLOSSARY 171

murahachibu nai naihō Nasuno

nenbutsu Nihon ryōiki Nihon shoki ninko Ninko monogatari no obake ōjōden okane-mochi Oku no hoso michi oni onmyōdō onryō osaki-mochi otogi zōshi oyakata rakugoka reiko ren riki rokudō sangoku Sangoku yōfuden Sanshū kidan seiyō geijutsu senryū sesshōseki setsuwa bungaku Shasekishū shikijin shikijin o tsukau shinbutsu bunri shinbutsu shūgo Shinchomonjū shinkō shinkō shūkyō shūkyō shinrei shinrui Shinto

Shintōshū shiro shirushi shiryō shōtai shūkyōgaku soryo sugi sui suji tai Taiki Taisan fukun

Tamamo no mae

Tamamo no mae zōshi ta no kami tanuki tatari no mononoke ten

Tenchi kane no kami

tengu

Tenjin

temikuji tōbyō tokoro arawashi tōyō dōtoku tsū tsūgen tsukawashime tsukimono-mochi uji ujigamisha Uji shūi monogatari warui hō ya yacho yakan yako-mochi yama no kami yasha

172 GLOSSARY

Yijing yo yōkai yonaoshi

yonaoshi daimyōjin yoriai yoso-mono Zenka hiki zhiguai

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Index

allegory, 31, 40, 44n14, 56, 91, 106–7, 161 Abe Kazue, 10n3 Abe Masatomo, 116, 118 Abenodōjimon, 116–118 Abe no dōji, 117 Abe no Seimei, 66n34, 117, 141, 154 Abe no Yasuna, 117 Abe no Yasunari, 4, 8, 12, 13–15, 24, 32, 66, 78, 118 Amaterasu, 5, 83–7, 90–91, 156 ama-tsu-kitsune, 20 n10 ambivalence of Inari, 113, 119, 135 of metamorph, 11 of tradition, 160–1 of wealth, 102, 107–8, 134–5 Anderson, Benedict, 160n17 Ando Shoeki, 31, 145, 161 animal ancestor, 45 authority, 32, 33 accusations and, 132 spiritual, 24 axes of significance, 142–3, 148 contiguity, 66 similarity, 66, 69, 91, 145, 153 badger, See tanuki bakemono, See shapeshifter bakufu, 61 n30, 103, 117 n11, 120, 147

bakumatsu period, 133 Barthes, Roland, 28 n15, 30 n17, 143 Bashō, 7 Beauvoir, Simone de, 48 n17 belief (shinkō), 146 n7 bellevedere phenomenon, xv Benzaiten, 115 Berlin, Isaiah, xii Bix, Herbert P., 116, 118 Blacker, Carmen, 20 nl0, 77, 121 n 14 boar, wild (yacho), xvi, 21 nl0, 90 n 15 Bourdieu, Pierre, 27 n14, 145 Brown, Peter, 146 n7 bunke, See dōzoku bunmei kaika, 156–9 cats, xvi, 102 commodities, 30, 101, 106–7, 112, 135 complement demonic, 90 exorcism and mediumship, 73 fox and Inari, 136 lineage functions, 54, 57, 60 Confucius, 82, 156 congregation (kō), 115 contest, xv, 14–18, 26 n14, 32, 87 n 13, 93–4, 97, 132, 141–2, 144, 146 n7, 147, 154, 161, 163

185

186 INDEX

cosmography, 40 cost-price squeeze, 104 Culler, Jonathan, 66, 99, 142 n5

dākinī, 81, 150, 151 Dakiniten, 150–5 debt, 104, 105 and fox ownership, 122 deception, x, xv, 12–14, 17, 81, 116, 127, 145 and expediency 86, 88, 90 as proprium of semiosis, 98 demonic, 85–7, 89, 91, 92, 95, 146, 148 in animals 19 in revelation, 30, 72, 74, 86, 94, 97–9 of wives, 56, 118 self-, 24 deva, 81, 150 dharmakāya (hosshin), 82–4, 90 See also honji suijaku Dinnerstein, Dorothy, 66 discernment, 90, 92, 97, 145, 156 dogs, 35–6, 49 n18, 56 dog-god (inu-gami), 122 dog shit, 113 “dog-Shōgun” (Tsunayoshi), 113 n 10 Doniger, Wendy, xii, 41 n7, 44 n 14, 48 n17 dōzoku, 61 n31, 104, 128–9 dreams, 88 duplicity, 12–17, 19 and metamorphosis, 10, 12, 24, 27, 31 and signification, 31, 145 of authors, 17 of commodities 106, 114, 116, 119, 134 of signs, 28 n15, 30 n17, 68, 79, 80, 85, 92, 98, 143, 163 of spirits, 85–8, 98, 149 of wives, 65, 68

See also deception “Eastern Values, Western Technology,” 159 Eco, Umberto, xvi, 71, 90, 98, 143 economy Edo-period, 103–6, 119 of meaning, 30 n17, 68 Eliade, Mircea, xi, 69, 73 Ema Tsutomu, 10 n3 empiricism, 158–9 Endō Benzō, 116–18 engi, 7, 152 exchange, 30, 134 economic, 101, 105, 134, 144 national networks, 114, 119 of labor, 11, 62 n31, 105, 119, 143 of women in marriage, 30 n17, 64, 65, 67–9, 107 n5, 128, 143 reciprocal, 30, 67, 110, 134 exchange-value, 103 n2, 106, 112, 135, 136 n27, 143 excrement, 113; See also kegare expedient devices (upāya, hōben), 74, 82, 86 exorcism, 5, 14, 60, 62, 75 and education, 158 fantastic, 17–18 Faure, Bernard, 22, 146 n7 fox and dākinī, 109 n7, 152 fox (cont’d) and dogs, 49 n18, 122 and hedgehog, xii, xv and Inari, 108, 109–112, 130– 33, 136, 153 and moral reciprocity, 43, 112, 140 and snakes, 42 n8, 122, 157 and telegrams, 80 and telephones, 81

INDEX 187

and wild canines, 20, 47–8 as animal (Vulpes vulpes), 19–20, 25 as Cartesian demon, 29, 159 as doppelganger, 14, 36 n1 as immanent beings, 157 as injū, 41–2, 43 n11 as kami, 76, 78, 160 as marginal figure, xv, 30, 81, 99, 142–3 as messenger, 76, 79, 112, 131, 153, 155 as metasemiotic figure, 28, 69, 143, 145 as possessing spirit, 72, 96–7, 120–21, 130 n25, 137–8 as yakan, 36, 47, 48, 96 head-shaving (kamisori), 16– 17 nine-tailed, 5, 6 of Fukuyama, 116, 118, 145 of Mino, 45, 57, 58 n27, 68 fox-buddha, 14–15, 156 fox-fire (kitsune-bi), 108 n6 fox-owners (kitsune-mochi), 120– 33 and Inari, 131, 136 and sorcery, 121 and tsukimono-mochi, 122 and wealth, 124–5, 127, 129 as witchcraft, 122 n15 fox’s gift, 106n4, 109, 114 fox-using (kitsune-tsukai), 137– 141 and signification, 145–6 fox-weddings, 160 fox wife, 36–7 and domesticity, 43, 48–50 and etymology, 47–8 and Swan Maiden, 44 n14 as divine ancestress, 45–7, 50–51, 57–8, 66 Buddhist orientation, 40–43 children of, 45, 56–7, 59, 65–6

inversion of gender roles, 56 kikimimi variant, 43 n12, 36 n1 of Bitchū, 58–60, 64 n33, 87 of Mino, 35–8, 40, 43, 45, 47, 51, 52 n21, 55–60, 65–6 of Ryūgasaki, 44, 47 n16, 109 n6 of Shinoda, 61 n29, 117 tragic ending, 44, 46 fox-woman of Kōyagawa, 15–16, 17 Foster, George M., 124–5 Frazer, James George, 141 Fujiwara no Narichika, 151–2 Fujiwara no Tadazane, 152 n12 Fukuzawa Yukichi, 156 Fusō ryakki, 77

gedō, See illegitimacy, outsiders Geertz, Clifford, 22, 141

Genji monogatari, 17–18, 79 Gennō, 5, 7, 8, 12, 14, 24

Genpei seisuiki, 150, 151 n11 genze riyaku, 110 n8, 150 n10 Giddens, Anthony, 22 n11, 29

gohei, 4, 8, 33 gōnō, See peasant magnates goryōshin, 72, 97, 149; See also onryō

Go-Shirakawa, 71–3, 95–7, 149 Go-Toba, 72, 96 Goux, Jean-Joseph, 30n17, Great Fox Banquets, 13, 114 Gukanshō, 71, 72n1, 95, 138 gumin, 160;

See also superstition

Hachiman, 5, 82, 153 Hatto, A.T., 44 n14 Hayami, 126 hearth-sharing taboo, 54, 62 Heike monogatari, 150–51 Heine, Steven, xiv, 12 n5, 81 heterodoxy, See illegitimacy hidden transcript, 119

188 INDEX

hierophany, 69 Hirata Atsutane, 160 hitogami, 50 hito-gitsune, 121, 127 hōben, See expedient devices Holbek, Bengt, 39 Honchō shokkan, 42, 43 n11 1, 137, 139–40 Hōnen, 95 honji suijaku, 82, 84–5, 93–4; See also shinbutsu shūgo honke, See dōzoku Hōsei monogatari, 31, 161 household, See ie hyōrei, See spirit-possession identity, ix, xiv, 23, 49, 154, 156 indeterminacy, 29, 68 matrilateral, 56, 63, 66 multiple, 54, 62, 68 of children, 53, 56, 66 of spirits, 14, 79 of women, x, 30, 62, 64, 65, 68 patrilineal, 56, 57, 59, 66 religious, 155, 162 shifting, 9, 64 ie (household), 49, 52, 54 Ihara Saikaku, 109 n6 ikki, 8, 115, 119 n12 illegitimacy, 87, 131, 134, 138, 146, 149, 152 n13 and dākinī, 150–52, 153 as category mistake, 153–4 See also outsiders Image of Limited Good, 124–5 imaginaire, 22–3, 27, 68 ecological 25, 67–8 religious, x, 73, 81, 108 semiotic, 28, 69, 141, 143 socioeconomic, 120, 128, 134– 5 Inari, xiv, 108 and agriculture, 110, 111, 135, 153

and financial success, 109– 11, 131, 135 and fox, 108, 109–112, 130– 33, 136, 153 and heterodoxy, 131 and spirit-possession, 130 n2 5, 147, 148 n8 as fukugami, 115 as target of violence, 116, 134– 5 as yonaoshi daimyōjin, 134–5 “branch-family of,” 131 Fushimi, 114, 153, 154, 161 Kuzunoha, 118 nationwide spread, 108, 114– 15, 135 Onnabake, 109 n6 origins, 153 Saijō, 155 n14 Sasahara, 5 Toyokawa, 154 Inari jinjakō 153–4 Inari-sage, 130 n25, 147, 148 n8 indeterminacy, 29 of honji and suijaku, 85, 93–5 of metaphor, 144n6, 148 of spirits, 73, 79 injū 42n8 Inoue Enryō, 123 n19 in’ yōshi, 4, 23, 24, 32, 137 Ise, Great Shrine, 80, 83, 91 merchants (Iseya), 113 Itsukushima Shrine, 85 Izuna, 140, 150 Jakobson, Roman, 28, 67, 142 n5 Jewel Maiden, See Tamamo no mae Jien, 71, 95–7, 148 jinsei (benevolence), 115 Jōdo-ji, Lady, 95–8, 148 junma, 95, 149 jutsuka, See signification

INDEX 189

kami, 23, 75, 153 and dharmakāya, 83 and mononoke, 75–6 churning of primordial brine, 84 imperial, 14, 24 manifestation, 84 n11 mountain and field, 50 n19 thunder, 58, 69 kamigakari, See spiritpossession Kannon, 5, 59, 69, 93 Kawate Bunjirō, 146–48 Kaya no Yoshifuji, 58–60, 69, 87 kegare (defilement), 114 Kiko myōjin, 112 Kiko tennō, 150, 153–4 Kitsune zōshi, 64 n33 Kobiki, 13, 38 n3, 114 Kojiki, 84 Kokūzō, 88–9 Komatsu Kazuhiko, 12, 73, 75, 125, 128 n23, 130 n25 Kongō-in, 16 Konjaku monogatarishū, 21 nl0, 42, 60, 141 n4 Konkōkyō, 146–8 Konoe, 4 kotodama, 79, 141 Kuninobu riot, 120; See also ikki Laozi, 82, 83 n9 Leavy, Barbara Fass, 44 n14, 48– 9, 51 n20 Le Goff, Jacques, 21–2 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 28 n15, 35, 39, 55, 67–9 lineage and household (ie), 52, 53, 54, 61 and social integrity, 6, 129, 143 anti-lineage, 129, 131

“black,” 122, 128 Buddhist, 154 matriline, 56, 128, 129 patriline (uji), 30, 52, 54, 56– 7, 59, 60, 65, 68, 69, 128 wives’ 57, 58, 62–4 See also dōzoku and hearthsharing taboo Long, Charles, 26–7, 140, 144, 163 Lotus Sūtra, 42, 86, 87 Lucky Teakettle, 101–3, 120, 134 madness, 158 Mahāvairocana (Dainichi), 82, 83, 91 mappō, 93, 138 Māra 83, 90 marriage, 25, 30, 49 and fox ownership, 122 marriage (cont’d) and lineage, 53–4, 60 and love, 55–7 as language, 39, 67 as theological image, 50–51, 57–8, 66, 68 bridal white, 62 in Heian period, 52–60 in medieval period, 60–64 uxorilocal, 52, 58 n28, 59 virilocal, 53, 61 visiting 52, 56 Meiroku zasshi, 157, 158 metalanguage, xvi–xvii, 28, 67, 98, 162 metamorphosis (henshin), 10– 12, 86 n12, 87 n13 metasemiotic figure, 28–32, 69, 98, 140–4, 162 Midas, King, 107 miko, 75 Minamoto Yoritomo, 96 minzokugaku, 123 n19 160–61

190 INDEX

modernization, 159–60 money, 101, 104, 106, 110, 111, 113, 132, 135 and defilement, 114 corrosive power of, 115, 119, 127 mononoke, 75–6, 78, 81 mūdra, 17, 142 Murder Stone (sesshōseki), 5, 7, 14, 32 Myōgonji, 154 Nasuno, 5, 7, 14

nenbutsu, 82, 154 Nihon ryōiki, 11 n5, 35, 38 n3, 40, 45, 47, 49, 57, 60

Nihon shoki, 84, 91 Ninko monogatari, 124 Nishi Amane, 157

no, 7

“Notice Refuting Foxes,” 121 nouveaux riches, 106, 124–7, 131

onmyōdō, 41, 73 n2 onryō, 72, 76, 97, 148–9 See also goryōshin origins, xiii n2, 39, 75, 155 n14 and legitimacy, 152 of Inari, 152–4 Ortner, Sherry, 48 n17 ostracism, 120, 122 n16, 127, 129, 131 outsiders, 129–130 Dakiniten as, 153 nationwide economy and, 128, 132 nouveaux riches as, 126, 129, 130 Tamamo no mae as, 11 women as, 49, 129–30 See also illegitimacy pacification, 82, 108 of fox, 30, 77, 133–4

of goryōshin, 72, 96, 149 of Inari, 112, 131 of Tamamo no mae, 5, 24, 32 of thunder, 58 See also exorcism patriarchy, 51 n20; See also lineage peasant (hyakushō), financial distress, 104, 105, 116 founding (kusawake hyakushō), 126 magnates, 102, 103, 105, 112, 115, 124, 126 new, 125 titled (honbyakushō), 104, 125 uprisings, See ikki; village

society

phenomenology, xvi, 29 Propp, Vladimir, 37 n1 racoon-dog, See tanuki rebirth, See six realms regimes of significance, See economy of meaning residence name, 54 n26 revelation, 30 and empiricism, 157–8 as code, 90–91 false, 89–90, 92 semiotics of, 74, 79, 98, 157 Reynard, 18,21 rice, 103–4 and money, 111 -12 use-value and exchangevalue of, 112–3, 135 and Inari, 110, 135 and fox, 110 Rokujō, Lady, 79 Sahlins, Marshall, 22

sakabettō no jōdo, 58 n28 sangoku, 7

INDEX 191

Saussure, Ferdinand de, 28 n15, 30 n17, sea monster (wani), 45 second-order term, 162 Seki Keigo, 36 n1, 37 n2, 43 n12, 61 n29, 101, 102 n1 semiotics, 28, 29, 31, 98, 141, 162 of revelation, 85, 90, 157 setsuwa bungaku, 11, 26, 40, 60 authorial voice, 41 n7, 52 n21 moral-ontological program, 40–41, 43, 90, 92 theological paradigms, 74, 87 n 13, 88 transmission, 37–9 shamanism, 73 n3 shapeshifter (bakemono), xiv, 9– 18, 27 and social upheaval, 25, 29, 136 as metasemiotic figure, 28– 32, 69, 140, 142–4 author as, 17, 31 humans as, xvii, 14–15, 31–2 money as, 102, 106, 119, 134 spirits as, 69, 73 women as, 39, 56, 68 shapeshifting, and expediency, 86–7 and rebirth, 12 and skepticism, 145, 158 contest, 15 demonic, 92, 94, 97–9 of saviors, 69, 87, 89 of fox, xiv-xvi of signs, 142 shinbutsu bunri, 154–5 shinbutsu shūgo, 73 shinkō, See belief shinkō shūkyō (“new religion”), 77, 146 shinrui, 63, 129 n24; See also dōzoku Shinto, x, 23, 74 n4, 154–5

shūkyōgaku (religious studies), 160 signification, xvi, 26, 140, 144, 163 accusations, 130–133 and misrecognition, 144–5 and sorcery, 140–1 as articulation, 143–4, 149 as craft, xv–xvi, 141–2, 149 as cultural practice, 26 n14, 28, 31, 144 as placement, 26, 144 contest of, 141 reflexivity, xvi–ii, 146 n6, 162 signification (cont’d) scholarly, 162–3 See also contest signs, 43nl0, 68, 74, 79, 90, 97, 98, 142 six realms (rokudō), 11, 41, 161 Smith, Jonathan Z., 63 Smyers, Karen, xiv, 11, 106 n4, 109 n7, 110, 154 n14 Sō-ō, 77, 81 sōryō system, 61 n30 spirit-familiars fox as, 120, 128, 130 n25, 131, 134, 137–140, 146. 147, 148 shikijin as, 141 spirit-fox (shinrei, reiko), 76–7 spirit-possession, 71, 73, 76–78, 120 and shinbutsu shūgo, 81, 85, 92, 94 Inari-sage and, 130 n25, 147 misrepresentation in, 79–80 structure, 47, 144–6 and agency, 25–6 and context, 39 duality of, 22 n11 See also signification superstition (meishin), 110 n8, 123 n19 156–7

192 INDEX

Sutoku, 72, 149 Swan Maiden, 44 n14

ujigami, 62 n31, 66, 94, 115, 153 upāya, See expedient devices

Taira no Kiyomori, 150, 152, 154 Taisan no fukun (Lord of Mt. Tai), 4 tama, 4 n1, 78 Tamamo no mae, 4–8, 23, 29, 66, 73, 77–8, 151 n11 and rebirth, 12 as agent of chaos, 150 as cultural fantasy, 11 as fox wife, 71 tanuki (racoon-dog), xvi, 20, 21 n 10, 73, 81 n7, 89, 90 n15, 96, 97, 102 n1, 122 n17, 148 n8, 157 tatari, See onryō Taussig, Michael, 134 n27 temikuji, 147–8 Tenchi kane no kami, 147–8 tengu, xvi, 20, 21 nl0, 73, 90 n15, 96, 97, 122 n17, 157 157 Tenjin, 72 n1 Tenmei uprisings, 116–18; See also ikki Toba-no-in, 3–5, 7 tokoro arawashi, 53 n23 torii, 161 transgression, 11, 30, 127, 136 n27 trickster, xvi, 12 n6, 27 trickster tricked, 15, 17 truth and expedient devices, 86, 90 provisional and absolute, 92 tsukawashime, 76, 153 tsukimono, See spirit-possession

Venerable Dōjō cycle, 58 n27 village society impact of nationwide commerce, 105, 129 nouveaux riches in, 104, 124 shrine leadership, 126–7 traditional, 104–5, 133–4 See also peasants and ostracism wealth, 106–7 and fox wife, 45, 59, 117 and rice, 113 and village society, 126, 134 and yonaoshi, 133 badly-earned, 124–5 new, 105, 124, 134 social cost 119, 131, 134 wild, 25, 48–50, 68 women and nature, 48 n17 as outsiders, 49, 129–30 as signs, 68 See also lineage work of culture, xv, 152 n13 See also signification

yaksa (yasha), 81 Yanagita Kunio, 81 n7, 102 n1, 123 n19, 160 yōkai, 10, 21 n10, yonaoshi, 133–5

zhiguai, 20, 40, 73 n2 Zenka hiki, 58 Zorro, 18

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