This month I’m doing something a little different. I’ve noticed that recently my reading and viewing has been dominated by stories involving Asian fox-spirits. So I’m going to recommend a varied group of Fantasy novels and series which feature these fascinating beings.

Last month I wrote about A.Y.Chao’s novel Shanghai Immortal (2024) whose heroine, Lady Jing, is part fox-spirit and part vampire. Her relatives on her mother’s side are hulijing fox-spirits who often appear as beautiful women but any human male who falls for their charms is liable to have the life sucked out of him. They derive from a class of Chinese folktale which seems to display a fear of uncontrolled female sexuality. These fox-spirits are supreme seducers who trick foolish men and take what they want from them.

Dangerous fox-spirits who wield powers of illusion also occur in two of the novellas that make up Nghi Vo’s The Singing Hills Cycle which I recommended on Fantasy Reads in June 2023. Set in an invented Asian world, these stories are centred on Cleric Chih and their memory bird Almost Brilliant whose mission is to wander around recording oral history. In When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain (2020) Chih tells a story about a female scholar who is nearly tricked into marriage with a male fox-spirit using an animated human corpse as a body. Foxes who set up illusory human households are common in Asian folklore. Usually the clue is that the splendid house wasn’t there the day before or was only a ruin.

In the latest Singing Hills novella – The Brides of High Hill (2024) – Chih is travelling with the Pham family who are taking their daughter Nhung to meet her potential husband, Lord Guo, an elderly nobleman with a sinister reputation. Nhung is so pretty and charming that Chih is in danger of forgetting to be an impartial observer. As Lord Guo entertains the bridal party something seems very wrong so Chih helps Nhung in her investigations into what might have happened to Guo’s previous wives. Vo plays a clever game of spot the monster in this suspenseful story. There are cunning and vicious fox-spirits involved but are they any worse than humans who commit, or turn a blind eye to, terrible crimes? As with the rest of the series, as soon as I’d finished this novella I went back to the beginning and read it again. A second reading shows everything in a different light.

Vo’s foxes inspired me to reread another story about fox-magic – Kij Johnson’s The Fox Woman (2000). Unfortunately this exquisitely written novel currently seems to be out of print so you’d have to look for a second-hand copy. The book is based on a legend set in 9th century Japan about a man called Yoshifuji who falls in love with a beautiful stranger while his wife is away and agrees to marry her. Yoshifuji believes that he has lived happily with his new wife in a splendid mansion for thirteen years when in fact he has only been in a den of foxes under an outhouse for thirteen days. He has to be rescued by the Buddhist goddess Kannon and struggles to readjust to real life.

Heian Period Japan (794-1185 CE) was a sophisticated era in which women wrote poetry, novels, and Pillow Books – diaries which reveal their innermost thoughts and feelings. So Johnson presents her narrative in the form of diaries by the three leading characters – Yoshifuji, his aristocratic wife Shikujo, and a young vixen, Kitsune, who longs to be human. When Yoshifuji moves back to his country estate he enjoys watching a family of local foxes while they watch him. Johnson paints a vivid portrait of a marriage which is failing due to lack of honest communication. Yoshifuji longs for some wildness and excitement in life. Shikujo feels lonely and neglected but there is a fox-related secret in her past. When Kitsune falls in love with Yoshifuji, her clever grandfather uses fox-magic to transform his whole family into humans, but each of the foxes finds that there is more to becoming human than romantic infatuations.

The Fox Woman is a slow-moving complex novel which explores the illusions we create about ourselves and others and the difficult process of becoming a fully-realized individual. Don’t expect a Fairy Tale ending. Some of the characters from this book also appear in another novel by Johnson – Fudoki (2003) – which features a cat who becomes a human warrior after losing her family. I recommended this on Fantasy Reads in March 2014.

Japanese fox-spirits (kitsune) also play a part in one of Studio Ghibli’s least known animated films: Pom Poko (1994), which was written and directed by Isao Takahata. Rewatching all of Studio Ghibli’s films was one of the things which kept me going during the Lockdowns. Pom Poko is a comical but ultimately pessimistic film aimed more at adults than children. It concerns a group of carefree and mischievous tanuki badgers (translated as racoons in the English-language version) who suddenly find their habitat encroached on by urban development. The tanuki are divided about how to deal with this. The elders try to use magic to frighten off the human intruders, including a parade of ghosts that is one of the most spectacular sequences in all Anime. Some of younger tanuki fight back more directly and resort to what might now be called eco-terrorism, which gives the film a contemporary resonance. In contrast to the tanuki, the kitsune accept the new reality and blend into and exploit human society. They become the ultimate in urban foxes but is it at the cost of losing their former cultural identity? However the family of urban foxes who live in my own garden do seem content with their lifestyle.

I’ll finish with two fox-spirits who have adapted to life in modern South Korea. The first of these is to be found in The Worlds Behind (2023-2024) a five-volume series by Australian author W.R. Gingell who has spent a lot of time studying Korean culture. I recommended another of her Korean-based novels – Lady of Dreams – on Fantasy Reads in February 2023. In A Whisker Behind (2023) we are introduced to beautiful white-haired YeoWoo, a nine-tailed fox (gumiho) who is annoyed to find herself sharing a house in Seoul with a mysterious landlady, a human boy haunted by dark visions, and a notorious Fae assassin called Athelas. Nine-tailed foxes are the most powerful of fox-spirits but some gumiho are ex-humans who have become fox-spirits via the gruesome process of eating human livers. 125 year-old YeoWoo has dedicated her whole life to finding and killing the elusive Glass Elder, whom she believes was responsible for the murder of her sister.

When a series of murders take place in Seoul which seem to be the work of a gumiho, YeoWoo is top of the Fae Enforcers’ suspect list. To clear her name, YeoWoo must investigate the murders herself and she is forced to accept the deceptively dangerous Athelas as an ally. YeoWoo knows that Athelas has his own agenda but as they uncover dark conspiracies and battle supernatural criminals she learns to respect his formidable fighting skills. If you think you already know where this relationship is going, you’d be wrong. YeoWoo has no interest in romance but she does learn to value friendship and begin to question the high cost of her obsession with vengeance. The Worlds Behind is a violent but very exciting and absorbing series. The drawback is that if you find yourself fascinated by soft-spoken, tea-drinking, reformed murderer, Athelas, you will probably want to read all eleven volumes of Gingell’s previous series The City Between (2018-2022), in which he is one of the leading characters.

I’ve saved the best till last. It is only recently that I have come to realize that South Korea produces TV Fantasy Dramas with standards of writing, acting, and design which put most Western efforts to shame. They also have no swearing (at least according to the subtitles, the worst the action heroes exclaim is Gosh!) and no graphic sex scenes, which for me is a bonus. My pick of these dramas are the 16 episode Tale of the Nine Tailed (2020) and its sequel/prequel the 12 episode Tale of the Nine Tailed 1938 (2023). I believe that the main writer is Han Woo-Ri but please correct me if I’m wrong. I watched these series on streaming services (Netflix and Prime) and then bought sets of DVDs which have English subtitles.

The central character in both series is Lee Yeon, a nine-tailed fox who was once a powerful mountain deity. He is played with great charm and charisma by the impossibly handsome Lee Dong-wook. After abandoning his mountain realm to try to save Princess A Eum, a human woman whom he loved, Yeon now works as an agent of the stern Taluipa, the sister of the King of the Underworld, who is in charge of making sure that souls cross over to the afterlife at the proper time. Punishing supernatural beings who harm humans is part of Yeon’s duties (he executes a rogue gumiho in Episode 1) but his own younger half-brother, Lee Rang, is one of the worst offenders. Yeon enjoys some aspects of modern life, such as his fancy car, his smartphone and chocolate-mint ice-cream, but he can never be happy until his lost love is reincarnated. Yes, no-one does Romantasy like the South Koreans.

After 600 years, Yeon comes to believe that he has found his brave and beloved princess again, reincarnated in the form of intrepid TV Journalist Nam Ji-ah. She and her team investigate Urban Legends – such as fox-spirits. Ji-ah is always hoping to uncover a clue to the mysterious disappearance of her parents when she was nine years old after an accident at a place called Fox Hill. Yeon and Ji-Ah are drawn to each other, but Lee Rang is plotting against them and an ancient enemy, the Serpent, has arisen again. Taluipa warns Yeon to stay away from Ji-ah or the tragedy of the past will repeat itself and the whole world may be endangered. The reunited lovers are determined to fight to change their destiny but there can be no happy ending without a terrible sacrifice.

This complex series is mainly set in a present in which ancient supernatural beings live in disguise (as actors in a Folk Village for example) but there are frequent flashbacks to show how dramatic events of the far past have shaped the main characters. Reincarnation is both a profound belief and a very handy plot device, especially when we are introduced to the Tiger Brows, a pair of glasses which enable the wearer to see the past lives of the people they look at. Tale of the Nine Tailed is an intensely romantic story involving several sets of lovers but Ji-ah (played by the wonderfully expressive Jo Bo-ah) is a very modern heroine who wants to be loved for who she is now not who she was in the past. She is a successful career woman whose inner suffering can never be healed until the mystery of her parents’ disappearance has been solved.

There is a great deal of humour in the series, much of it centred on an excitable tail-less fox-spirit who fusses over Yeon like a nanny but has become a successful Vet because he can talk to animals. Yet this character soon develops his own fascinating story-arc when he rashly falls in love with a ferocious Russian fox-spirit who is working for Lee Rang. Essentially there are no minor characters in this story. They are all shown as fully developed individuals with triumphs and tragedies of their own. Even the underworld goddess Taluipa has a failing marriage and the loss of a child to contend with (Korean television seems packed with strong roles for women of all ages). Tale of the Nine Tailed is a television series with the depth of a novel.

This is most true of the volatile central relationship between Yeon and his half-fox, half-human, brother Rang. We gradually learn why Rang both hates and loves his brother more than anything else in the world. Rang starts the series as a smiling villain but a subtle performance by actor Kim Bum allows us to see the hurt and vulnerability behind the smiles. Abandoned by his human mother, Rang believes that he is a monster but this is a monster who can’t bear cruelty to animals and who gradually acquires a found-family of waifs and strays. In a series that often made me laugh, I found myself weeping for Rang and I was truly moved by the eventual reconcilation between the estranged brothers. It was a joy to visit a different past for these fox-brothers in Tale of the Nine Tailed 1938. I thoroughly recommend both series. Until next month.

Geraldine