The Fox Woman by Kij Johnson.pdf

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Kij Johnson
The Fox Woman
For Chris and for Bob. I am a lucky dog.
CONTENTS
THE NEW YEAR
BOOK ONE:
SPRING
BOOK TWO:
SUMMER
BOOK THREE:
AUTUMN
BOOK FOUR:
WINTER
THE NEW YEAR
THE NEW YEAR
This world—
call it an image
caught in a mirror—
Real it is not,
nor unreal, either
—Minamoto Sanetomo (1192-1219) translated by Thomas Rimer
KITSUNE'S DIARY
Diaries are kept by men: strong brushstrokes on smooth mulberry paper, gathered into
sheaves and tied with ribbon and placed in a lacquered box. I know this, because I have
seen one such diary.
It is said there are also noble ladies who keep diaries, in the capital or on their journeys in
the provinces. These diaries (it is said) are often filled with grief, for a woman's life is
filled with sadness and waiting.
Men and women write their various diaries: I shall see if a fox woman cannot also write
one.
I saw him and I loved him, my master Kaya no Yoshifuji. I say this and it is short and
sharp, without elegance, like a bark; but I have no idea how else to start. I am only a fox:
I have no elegancies of language.
I need to start before that, I think.
BOOK ONE: SPRING
Neither waking nor sleeping
I saw the night out,
and now spend
all day in thought,
staring at these long spring rains
—Ariwara no Narihira (825-880) translated by Burton Watson
1. KITSUNE'S DIARY
There were four of us.
Grandfather was an old fox, of perhaps eight or nine years. Gray ran along his narrow jaw
and in a broad streak from his black nose to between his black-tipped ears; it frosted his
pelt so that he seemed almost outlined in gray light. His joints stiffened on cold wet days,
and he liked to doze in the spring sunlight when he could. He was missing a toe on one of
his front paws. When I was little and first realized he didn't have the same toes I had, I
asked him why, and he told me a
tanuki-badger
bit it off, but I think he was teasing. He
was like that.
Mother was simple, even for a fox. My brother and I watched her sometimes catch and
lose a mouse a half-dozen times before she remembered to bite it while she still had her
paws on it. We were amazed sometimes that she had survived long enough to bear us.
Fortunately, the place where we lived was thick with mice and chipmunks and other
small prey. The grasses around our home were too long and dense for hawks, and the few
humans who lived nearby chased off anything larger. Our only competition was a family
of cats led by a black-and-white spotted female. They lived in a deserted outbuilding near
the people, but they hunted in our range, and ignored us rigidly. The cats chased and lost
mice, too. I think this was intentional for them, but who can understand cats? Even as a
woman I have never understood them.
My brother and I had been born the winter before, down in the still air of the den. At first
there were four kits, I think. One died early, before we saw daylight; she smelled sick and
then she was gone. Another died when we were barely old enough to suck the juices from
meat our grandfather brought us. That kit was the boldest of us; one night when he was
still much too young he followed our grandfather out hunting and never came back.
Halfway to adulthood, my remaining brother was a gawky thing of long legs and
oversized ears. His fur had not yet filled into its rusty adult coat, so his brush and neck-
ruff were thin and spiky, dun-colored. I suppose I looked the same, but taller at the
shoulder, heavier-boned. It was easy for me to pin him, and he usually ended the play by
baring his belly to me. He was quiet, my brother.
I did not see all this back then. They were my family: why should I think of them? If
anything, I associated them with their smells. Grandfather was bright and dusty, like
damp leaves fallen underfoot. Mother was drying mud. Brother was tree bark and
woodsmoke.
Words, words, words. There were no words then, just sensation: smell, sight, experience,
day and night, as flat and complex as a brocade held too close to the eyes for focus, or a
rainstorm full in the face. All details, no pattern. I have words now, maybe too many. I
try to describe the fabric to you, but words will not make you wet or shelter you from the
rain.
We lived in a tangle of tunnels and rooms hollowed out of packed dirt. Everything was
wide—too wide, said Grandfather, who never did anything to change it—and worn
smooth, and it smelled of a hundred generations of foxes. Our sleeping chamber was
nearly at the bottom, lined with dead leaves and shed hair. We could all sleep together in
it, but Grandfather no longer slept well, and he liked to lie nearer the entrance, where he
could crawl out and stretch his legs when he needed.
The den was pitch-dark. Surrounded by the smells of my family and burrow, I lay inside
on spring days: dozed and waited for the crisp scents of dusk. Filtered through the fur of
my brother's haunch, I smelled the air outside, sweet and sharp.
Nights we went out.
Mother and Grandfather hunted, sometimes together but often alone, one leaving the
other to watch as we kits played near the den. Mother never had anything to spare, but
Grandfather usually returned dragging a soft-boned
kiji-pheasant
or a half-eaten hare,
which he threw down for us to bicker over. We caught things on our own, as well:
fledglings fallen from their nests, mice, voles. We learned to stamp for worms, and to
catch birds, and to cache our kills for leaner days. I played with and ate the blue-black
beetles that came my way, felt the smooth knotting of my joints operating, wrestled with
my brother for the experience of hunting. I was learning to be a fox.
Our burrow was dug under a structure that was flat and black over our heads, supported
by a forest of tree-thick pillars, each resting on a rock. When I was old enough to be
curious about this, I jumped up into the structure.
I saw and smelled a cavern supported by pillars and roofed with dead grasses a tree's
height over my head. The floor under my toes was of boxwood planks, smooth and cool
and flat. Through a crack in the floor I heard my brother barking at my grandfather—
impatient little noises. I scratched at the crack. Paws padded below. A nose snuffled
upward.
"Sister?"
"I'm
walking
on you?" I couldn't understand this.
"Where are you?"
I didn't know what to say. This floor I stood on was the roof over the burrow, I knew—
there was my brother, after all—how could it be else?
A scrambling noise behind me.
"It is a building," Grandfather said, and he stretched and walked across to me. "A house.
Humans make them." Brother clambered up after him.
I looked around. There were no walls, just empty screen frames and lattices. Beyond
them I saw other buildings, roofed and walled and raised on posts, with covered
walkways that led from one to the next. "This is a den," I said, realizing it. "The big
buildings are chambers, and the little ones that lead from place to place are like tunnels.
Or trails."
Brother sniffed at a pillar's base and lifted his leg against it. "How did they make this
place?"
"And
why?"
I demanded. "If it's a burrow, it's open to everything. How can it be safe?"
"They were humans, they feared nothing. But it was not like this, back then. It was closed
in with walls they could slide away or remove."
"How did they do that?" Brother asked.
"How did they do
any
of this?" I sniffed a lintel rubbed shiny by passing feet. Even now I
smelled the shadows of people, ghosts in my nose.
Grandfather made a face, as if he'd eaten something bitter. "Magic."
"Humans don't have magic," I said scornfully. "Magic is spring turning to summer, day
and night."
"There are a lot of sorts of magic, little bug-eater. More than you can know."
"What kind is this, then?" Brother asked.
"They have clever paws," he said. "They change things with them."
I inspected my own paws, cinnamon-colored with black-edged toes and ragged claws.
Not clever, not magical. "But
how?"
He bared his teeth: not hostile yet, but tired of the topic. "Give it a rest, Granddaughter."
Brother was marking every pillar, sharp little squirts of urine. I should check his marks, I
knew. And Grandfather? He was temperamental at all times and smelled irritable now,
like a high wind filled with dust, still a long way away. I should leave Grandfather alone,
I knew. But how could I?
"I just want to know how their paws are clever—" I stopped when he took a step toward
me. "Well, then, what other magics are there?"
"None that concern you," he said dampingly. "The people will never be back."
"But people live across the garden from us, past the wall—"
Brother came to sit next to us, lolling his tongue. "This is like that, isn't it? Where they
live—those are dens, too, aren't they?"
"Mere servants' quarters," Grandfather snorted. "Wretched drafty barns. They bring their
stock in to sleep under the same roof."
"I don't understand. Servants?" I said, but he continued without listening.
"This—" he looked around us, at the empty neglected buildings and walkways "—is
where the master and mistress lived. They were sweet-smelling, sweet as flowers out of

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