The Fox Woman
Summary
In the lacquered hush of a Meiji-era Kyoto studio, hunchbacked painter Marashida—spine twisted like a calligrapher’s wayward brushstroke—weds Jewel, the porcelain-skinned daughter of courtier Yasakuji. Their idyll splinters when Alice Carroway, an American missionary’s daughter nicknamed Ali-San, arrives armed with chisels, Bible verses, and the chill hunger of the kitsune of legend. Beguiling the artist into posing for her grotesque Ni-O sculpture, she siphons his spirit; each modeling session warps his posture further, vertebrae curving to echo the snarl of the temple guardian she carves. Jewel, desperate to keep her husband’s gaze, consents to be Ali-San’s “playmate,” only to be demoted to scullery drudge in the mission compound, corseted in foreign calico like a moth pinned under glass. When the Fox-Woman’s mirror reflects Yasakuji’s righteous fury, Ali-San plummets from the veranda, her spell shattering like silvered glass. Clad in crimson bridal silk, Jewel slips her wedding dagger from her obi and kneels before the ancestral tombs; the blade never tastes her flesh, for Marashida arrives in time, reclaimed, and the couple retreat into a reborn dawn, their silhouettes inked against the torii like a double stroke of sumi-e that finally finds its balance.
Synopsis
Hunchbacked Japanese artist Marashida, marries Jewel, the daughter of Yasakuj. Their happy married life is destroyed when the daughter of an American missionary, Alice Carroway, known as Ali-San, persuades Marashida to pose for her sculpture of the deformed god Ni-O. While Marashida's character gradually deforms, Yasakuji recognizes in Ali-San the traits of the legendary Fox Woman, who because she had no soul of her own, stole those of others, sometimes turning warriors into crazy beasts. After Jewel, to please Marashida, indulges Ali-San's demand that she be her "playmate," she suffers further humiliation when Ali-San makes her the servant in her father's mission. Finally, Jewel discards the American clothes she is made to wear and, dressed in her wedding robes, goes to her ancestors' tomb to commit harakiri. When Yasakuji climbs up Ali-San's balcony, and she sees his face in her mirror, she accidentally falls off the balcony to her death. Released from Ali-San's spell, Marashida takes Jewel's dagger from her, and they live happily again.
