Page 145 - A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols BIG Book

A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols 138
beautiful girl appears one night to a young scholar while he is studying, and how he
makes love to her. She disappears in the early morning but comes back each evening.
The scholar gets weaker and weaker – until a Taoist informs him that the girl is really a
fox which is sucking him dry in order to imbibe the essence of immortality. Stories like
this are confined to North China, to such Palaeo-Asiatic tribes as the Orok and the
Gilyak, and to Korea and Japan. They are not found south of the Yangtse. In any case, the
fox of Korean and Japanese folk-tales differs markedly from its Chinese counterpart.
Fox-women often claim that their surname is hu, which is phonetically identical with the
Chinese word for ‘fox’.

The nine-tailed vixen and the Japanese ape

Songoku (woodcut by Hokusai)

In old Peking there were many houses in which foxes lived (they were, of course,
invisible). These foxes were under the jurisdiction of a fox-official who lived in a tower
at the eastern side-gate of the city. The families who shared these houses with the foxes
put out food for them, and did nothing to stop them when they made a noise at night.
Otherwise, the foxes would retaliate by putting filth in the family’s food supply. Fox-
women can be distinguished from ordinary women by the fact that they never change
their clothes, which, however, never look soiled. In this connection, it is worth noting that
‘fox-smell’ is a term for ‘under-arm sweat’.