Goblin foxes are peculiarly dreaded in Izumo for three evil habits
attributed to them. The first is that of deceiving people by
enchantment, either for revenge or pure mischief. The second is that of
quartering themselves as retainers upon some family, and thereby making
that family a terror to its neighbours. The third and worst is that
of entering into people and taking diabolical possession of them and
tormenting them into madness. This affliction is called 'kitsune-tsuki.'
The favourite shape assumed by the goblin fox for the purpose of
deluding mankind is that of a beautiful woman; much less frequently the
form of a young man is taken in order to deceive some one of the other
sex. Innumerable are the stories told or written about the wiles of
fox-women. And a dangerous woman of that class whose art is to enslave
men, and strip them of all they possess, is popularly named by a word of
deadly insult--kitsune.
Many declare that the fox never really assumes human shape; but that
he only deceives people into the belief that he does so by a sort of
magnetic power, or by spreading about them a certain magical effluvium.
The fox does not always appear in the guise of a woman for evil
purposes. There are several stories, and one really pretty play, about a
fox who took the shape of a beautiful woman, and married a man, and
bore him children--all out of gratitude for some favour received--the
happiness of the family being only disturbed by some odd carnivorous
propensities on the part of the offspring. Merely to achieve a
diabolical purpose, the form of a woman is not always the best disguise.
There are men quite insusceptible to feminine witchcraft. But the fox is
never at a loss for a disguise; he can assume more forms than Proteus.
Furthermore, he can make you see or hear or imagine whatever he wishes
you to see, hear, or imagine. He can make you see out of Time and Space;
he can recall the past and reveal the future. His power has not been
destroyed by the introduction of Western ideas; for did he not, only a
few years ago, cause phantom trains to run upon the Tokkaido railway,
thereby greatly confounding, and terrifying the engineers of the
company? But, like all goblins, he prefers to haunt solitary places.
At night he is fond of making queer ghostly lights, [8] in semblance of
lantern-fires, flit about dangerous places; and to protect yourself from
this trick of his, it is necessary to learn that by joining your hands
in a particular way, so as to leave a diamond-shaped aperture between
the crossed fingers, you can extinguish the witch-fire at any distance
simply by blowing through the aperture in the direction of the light and
uttering a certain Buddhist formula.
But it is not only at night that the fox manifests his power for
mischief: at high noon he may tempt you to go where you are sure to get
killed, or frighten you into going by creating some apparition or making
you imagine that you feel an earthquake. 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,
levelling 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 neighbouring peak as
unconcernedly as if he had been looking at a drama. He saw a black
column of ashes and steam rise to the height of twenty thousand feet and
spread out at its summit in the shape of an umbrella, blotting out the
sun. Then he felt a strange rain pouring upon him, hotter than the water
of a bath. Then all became black; and he felt the mountain beneath him
shaking to its roots, and heard a crash of thunders that seemed like
the sound of the breaking of a world. But he remained quite still until
everything was over. 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.