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The Fox's Craft in Japanese Religion and Folklore: Shapeshifters, Transformations, and Duplicities (review)

2007; Sophia University; Volume: 62; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mni.2007.0037

1880-1390

Janet Goff,

Japanese History and Culture

Reviewed by: The Fox's Craft in Japanese Religion and Folklore: Shapeshifters, Transformations, and Duplicities Janet Goff The Fox's Craft in Japanese Religion and Folklore: Shapeshifters, Transformations, and Duplicities. By Michael Bathgate. New York: Routledge, 2003. Hardcover $80.00/£50.00. The Japanese cultural landscape is studded with images of foxes, from the ubiquitous Inari shrines and newspaper accounts of fox possession to cinema and anime. Despite the wealth of material, however, this enticing subject has proven to be an elusive scholarly target in English. The early groundwork was laid by M. W. de Visser's catalogue of examples from the ninth to the nineteenth century in "The Fox and the Badger in Japanese Folklore" (Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, 1908). Then, after nearly a century, two scholarly books that impose an analytical sectarian structure on the protean subject were published: Karen Smyers's The Fox and the Jewel: Shared and Private Meanings in Contemporary Japanese Inari Worship (University of Hawai'i Press, 1999); and Steven Heine's Shifting Shape, Shaping Text: Philosophy and Folklore in the Fox Kōan (University of Hawai'i Press, 1999). Happily, a new work has now entered the [End Page 243] fray. The Fox's Craft in Japanese Religion and Folklore: Shapeshifters, Transformations, and Duplicities, by Michael Bathgate, explores from a broader perspective the fox's image as a shapeshifter (bakemono), while relating it to the process of social signification and Japanese perceptions of the world. Chapter 1 showcases the story of Tamamo no Mae, the epitome of metamorphosis and deception, who bewitches Retired Emperor Toba but whose true identity as a fox is ultimately exposed through exorcism. The femme fatale's story is a variant of fox-wife tales (kitsune nyōbō), the focus of chapter 2, which begins with a translation of the famous story of the fox wife of Mino from the ninth-century Buddhist setsuwa tale collection Nihon ryōiki. Chapter 3 links Heian- and Kamakura-period accounts of fox-spirit possession to a pervasive medieval belief in transformation, expressed in concepts such as honji suijaku (the belief that indigenous kami are local manifestations of Buddhist deities) and the notion that divine beings appear in this world in disguise to aid mankind. Bathgate argues that the shapeshifting fox's capacity for miscommunication and deceit, manifested, for instance, in exorcism rites, reflects the inherent indeterminacy of all supernatural revelations. Turning to the Edo period, chapter 4, "The Gift of the Fox: Shapeshifting and the Power of Wealth," examines Inari's image as a god of monetary wealth from the perspective of its transfiguration in popular protests and witchcraft accusations. Bathgate points out that the well-to-do were often regarded as "fox owners" (kitsune mochi) whose good fortune derived from their possessing foxes at others' expense. He takes up the related subject of "fox users" (kitsune tsukai)—individuals who employ magical rituals to acquire the fox's powers of illusion and spirit-possession for their own nefarious purposes—in chapter 5 in tandem with broader theoretical concerns. (By mistake, the running head for this chapter, "Using the Fox," has also been attached to chapter 4.) Although the book introduces a variety of material and raises interesting issues, it is marred by organizational and methodological weaknesses that betray its beginnings as a dissertation. The problems surface immediately in the handling of Tamamo no Mae's story, which originally circulated in the Muromachi period as an otogi zōshi. Bathgate's distorted summary belies his claim of drawing primarily on Komatsu Kazuhiko's account in Nihon yōkai ibunroku (Shōgakukan, 1992), which closely follows Muromachi-period texts. We are told, for instance, that "in one variant, [Tamamo no Mae] is even asked to serve as bearer of the purificatory wand (go-hei)" (p. 4; emphasis mine); on the contrary, this story element is representative of Muromachi-period texts. Conversely, Tamamo no Mae is described as having nine tails (an Edo-period innovation, according to Komatsu), not two. This point is not mere nitpicking: rather, it is symptomatic of Bathgate's conflation of narrative elements and images from nineteenth- and twentieth-century sources such as Sangoku yōfuden with earlier...