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My head is full of foxes. Also, the major drawback to reading all these books on Asian fox spirits is that the authors keep mentioning these wonderful stories, which are all in books written in languages I can't read.

In Alien Kind: Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese Narrative, which I'm reading totally out of order, the author mentions that Chinese foxes often threw roof-tiles at people when haunting houses, from which she extrapolates that falling roof tiles were a common problem in Chinese houses. :) (and also mentions that roofs are liminal spaces, boundaries between the outside and inside.)

What I find fascinating is the commonalities between Western and Eastern things - houses haunted by foxes often have the same phenomena as poltergeists in Europe, and mediums could be either possessed by foxes or hold seances in which people and things behaved in ways that would have been completely familiar to any turn-of-the-last-century Spiritualist medium.

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In Japan foxes are consider clever and cunning. When I first heard the expression, "she is a fox/ foxey" I thought the person didn't like the girl! And the 9 tailed fox Youkai (kyubi) supposedly have come from China after eating an emperor posing as his beautiful wife. Also as you know, Seimei's mother was said to have been a Kitsune. There are some very good Kabuki plays based on it. And don't forget, Kurama from YuyuHakusho is a kitsune youkai, too. Wow come to think of it, there are lots of kitsune based mystical legends that I took for granted...

They're clever and cunning in the European tradition as well. Reynard the fox is a European trickster figure from the middle ages.

Telophase, you might take a look at this site. It is the 1481 translation of the story by William Caxton. http://bestiary.ca/etexts/morley1889/morley1889.htm

Cool, thanks! :D

:D And the perfume I'm wearing right now is Tamamo-no-mae, a limited edition blend from the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab (http://www.blackphoenixalchemylab.com). (They were running a series of perfume inspired by shapeshifters, and I got this one and Bakeneko. XD)

Tamamo! Oh my that is sexy....But Bakeneko? What is the smell like? I wonder.(Bakeneko in japan licks lamp oils) I checked out their site, it's really cool. I love the names of their perfumes. It touches one's imagination.

The official description of Bakeneko was:

In sharp contrast to the stark sterility of Hunger Moon, we present a carnivorous chaotic charmer: the bakeneko. The Monster Cat is a shapeshifter, and is empowered to take the form of a beautiful woman (to entice lonely gentlemen) or a winsome young maiden (to the peril of childless couples). Though some bakeneko are benevolent, and only wish to find someone to care for them, or to show gratitude to a mortal that has done them a great service, others are furry balls of malevolent mayhem. Their mischief ranges from simply destructive -- knocking over lamps and destroying property, tossing ghostly, freezing fireballs from their hands -- to horrifying acts of carnage.

Warm amber musk, Satsuma tangerine, black tea leaf, cardamom, cherry blossom and cinnamon.

The best part about BPAL's perfumes is that they tend to smell slightly different on everybody as they combine with your skin chemistry. So - in the bottle, Bakeneko smells to me like a soft cinnamon with something a bit tangy behind it, which is probably the tangerine. When I first put it on, I get just cinnamon, but over a while the cinnamon dissipates and the amber comes out. Amber is something that works really well on me - hard to describe what it is, but it's a resin, so it's a base note in perfume (the note that lasts longest), and it becomes soft and warm and almost vanilla-y. (The vanilla note that BPAL uses in their perfume turns to plastic on me. XD)

BPAL.org (http://www.bpal.org) is a message board not officially connected with the Lab, but it's got lots of traffic about the perfumes, and a really big reviews section. If you do a search on the board for any of the perfume names, you can get people's reviews of them and how the scents worked for them. Some people get a bit carried away. XD

Tamamo-no-mae reviews. (http://www.bpal.org/index.php?showtopic=33531&hl=tamamo)
Bakeneko reviews. (http://www.bpal.org/index.php?showtopic=30204&hl=bakeneko)

Thank you so much for the info. NOw I want some perfume from them. It sounds so enticing.

XD Send your mailing address to me at telophase14@gmail.com and I'll send you a small random selection of imps (what they call little testing vials). I've got a ton here. :D

(Another addict in the works! YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED!)

You can see posts about BPAL I've made on LJ by clicking the BPAL tag (http://telophase.livejournal.com/tag/bpal), and I've got the reviews I've done posted on LJ linked from my enormous BPAL roundup post (http://telophase.livejournal.com/234134.html). :D

Resistance is FUTILE. i think.
I just sent you a short mail with my mailing address. Thank you so much. I was going to read your "enormous" post before going to sleep, but i think I better wait til tomorrow to tackle it.*grin*

Meaningless, yet interesting: the girls who started the Spiritualist movement in 1848 by hearing rappings in their upstate New York house were the Fox sisters--Margaret and Catherine Fox.

Hah! I remembered that there was a fox *somewhere* in Spiritualism/hauntings, but I kept thinking that the Bell Witch had perhaps shown up as a fox or something. XD

I've always been intrigued that a "fox's wedding" is used to describe the combination of sunshine and rain-showers both in Japan and in the rural Cornwall where I first went to school. There's a lovely sequence about a fox's wedding in Kurosawa's last film, Dreams.

Nowadays, there are many real foxes living in towns around England - I've seen far more in the past year or so in central London than I ever did when I was growing up in the country. They tend to be very cheeky and not a bit shy, probably because no-one in a town is likely to shoot them. I wonder if any urban myths or stories about these foxes will emerge?

Sorry, that was me - forgot to log in.

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