Kyūbi

The nine-tailed fox, kyūbi no kitsune, or simply kyūbi, is the most powerful fox of Japanese folklore. Foxes in Japan were believed to grow wiser and stronger with age, and to grow more tails as they did. A fox with nine has lived for centuries and holds great power, for good or for harm.

The characters: 九尾

九 is nine and 尾 is tail: kyūbi, nine tails. It is the short form of the full name, 九尾の狐, kyūbi no kitsune, in which 狐 is fox.

The shapeshifter

Japanese foxes were said to take human form, most often as a beautiful woman, and the older the fox, the better its disguise. The nine-tailed fox is the master of it, able to pass for human at the highest levels of society, as the story of Tamamo-no-Mae shows.

Tamamo-no-Mae

The most famous Japanese telling is the story of Tamamo-no-Mae, a court lady of the twelfth century, beautiful and learned, who was revealed to be a nine-tailed fox in disguise. Driven from the capital, she fled to the plains of Nasu, where she was killed and her spirit became a poisonous stone.

The killing stone

The stone, the Sesshō-seki, sits on a hillside at Nasu in Tochigi, bound with a sacred rope. In March 2022 it was found split in two, and the news travelled around the world.

The design

The design is an original drawing of a nine-tailed fox. The fox’s other side, as the sacred messenger of Inari, is told on the Kitsune Mask page.