Fictional thought exercise

[chipotle]

In a setting that is an alternate version of feudal Japan, with races of anthropomorphic animals instead of humans but no other (overt) magic and myth, what would it mean for a fox-person to be a kitsune?

Comments

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

I know the "modern kitsune" that comes to us mostly through anime and roleplaying games (and from what my research a while ago suggested, from Mercedes Lackey!) are only marginally related to the original myths, yep. I actually did an article a few years back for a long defunct furry non-fiction 'zine on kitsune; a version of it is on my web site now.

I've thought about Usagi Yojimbo in relation to my story setting, which I suppose isn't at all surprising: you're quite right in that the settings are very similar. Usagi's world is more overtly mythic, by conscious design, but Hisae, my samurai wolf, could appear as a character in a Usagi story without being remotely out of place. But I think Hisae's world isn't one in which magic is going to be quite as easy to come across as Usagi's world, or at least as easy to be sure you've actually come across it. After all, in the original folk tales, people sometimes lived for years with a kitsune among them before some mistake on the kitsune's part revealed their spirit nature.

(The homogeneous nature of "real" Japan, particularly during that time period, is something I haven't tried to grapple with yet. Having the species reflect personality like Sakai does is one approach; another that occurred to me is having them reflect social class, but that opens cans of worms that wouldn't have been there in the real world that I may not want to add.)