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Western |
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Vulpines |
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That's not what they meant... |
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Graves, roofs, and your own living room |
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Where next? |
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Where should I go to read more about foxes?That depends on whether you're writing about Chinese or Japanese foxes. (I can't help you with Korean foxes.) ChineseOnline: The best way to learn about foxes is to read fox stories, so check out the collection at Kitsune.org and the novel at Ping Yao Zhuan. For context, read Peter Nepstad's brilliant summary of foxlore in The Illuminated Lantern, and Rania Huntington's article on vampiric vixens, "Foxes and Sex in Late Imperial Chinese Narrative," in Volume 5, Number 1. Books: Start with Rania Huntington's book Alien Kind: Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese Narrative. It's a brilliant and juicy historical overview of Chinese foxes, with a focus on the height of fox literature, the High Qing. Follow that up with Leo Tak-hung Chan's The Discourse on Foxes and Ghosts: Ji Yun and Eighteenth-Century Literati Storytelling. This covers the High Qing as well, and goes into great detail on how and why fox stories—and, by extension, foxes—are what they are. After that, you're going to have to be creative. Most books on Chinese foxes are out of print. However, you have a fighting chance of finding a used copy of Pu Songling's Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. Every translation changes the name a little, so look for "Pu Songling" rather than the exact title; keep in mind that some versions take the sex out of the stories; and remember that most editions have only selected stories from Pu Songling's massive original book. Despite these flaws, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio is the collection of Chinese fox tales—Pu Songling wrote hundreds of them, interleaved with stories about ghosts and other wonders.
There are several good collections of Chinese fairy and folk tales, some with their own sections on foxes. Any or all of them are good resources. JapaneseOnline: There's a small and eclectic group of Japanese fox stories online. Check out the links on my page of kitsune stories, and fan out from there. For more factual information, search Yahoo! groups and other forums for scholarly communities about Japanese folklore and religion. Books: Once again, most books on foxes are out of print. However, these books are not too hard to find:
There are also quite a number of excellent collections of Japanese folk and fairy tales, with Royall Tyler's Japanese Tales in a strong lead. |