The Nine-Tailed Seductress, and Fox-Possession

The most famous individual kitsune is Tamamo-no-Mae, a beautiful court woman revealed to be a nine-tailed fox who had, in the legend, brought ruin to courts in India and China before appearing in twelfth-century Japan; exposed by a diviner, she flees and is finally killed, her spirit lodging in the "killing stone" (Sessho-seki) of Nasu. Belief in kitsunetsuki, fox-possession, a person, usually a woman, taken over by a fox spirit and speaking or acting as it, was widespread into the modern period and had real social consequences, with certain families stigmatised as "fox-owning" households.

The nine-tailed fox has since travelled far beyond Japan through anime, games and film, where it is often detached from Inari and from the possession beliefs and treated simply as a powerful shapeshifter, a modern flattening of a figure that in its home tradition was tied closely to a specific deity and to real anxieties about spirit affliction.