The Nine-Tailed Fox in Human Guise
Nine-tailed foxes appear across East Asia, but the Korean kumiho is notorious for its malice. It usually takes the form of a young woman, a bride, a widow, a traveler asking for lodging on a mountain road, and by moonlight reverts to a fox that digs up fresh graves to gnaw corpses or reaches into the living to pull out their livers. Village tales list the ways to unmask one: dogs bark at it wildly, its fingers will not curl properly around a spoon, and it never touches wine at a feast.
The best-known tale is the oral story of the Fox Sister. An old couple's long-awaited daughter is a fox in disguise; livestock die night after night until her brothers keep watch and see her slip into the barn to eat the animals' livers. The brother who tells the truth is driven from home, and returns years later with three magic bottles to find the fox has devoured the whole household. Thrown one by one as it chases him, the bottles become a thicket of thorns, a flood, and a fire that finally consumes it. Another cycle concerns the fox bead, passed in and out of a student's mouth with each kiss until he wastes away; told to swallow it and look first at the sky, he stumbles and looks at the earth, gaining mastery of geography but losing the heavens.
A widespread later motif holds that a kumiho who refrains from harming humans for a thousand days becomes truly human, and is always exposed or betrayed on the eve of success. Korean television has replayed the figure since the KBS anthology Hometown of Legends began in 1977, and modern dramas have recast the man-eater as a tragic heroine, so that the old monster and the new lover now circulate side by side.
