::Kitsune::

In Love, Thieves and Fear Make Ghosts: old tales and new forms of Japanese ghosts, Innocent explores aspects of Japanese folklore in a contemporary context with styles borrowed heavily from the traditions of ukiyo-e (floating pictures) and manga (comics), and subsequent contemporary approaches such as Superflat. Showing at the Japan Foundation Gallery in Sydney until July 3rd, 2009.

Kitsune （きつね）

The fox (Kitsune), as with the Tanuki (racoon-dog) is a popular character in Japanese folklore and is often seen as a trickster, able to transform itself into human form, most often as young and beautiful women, and any children they bear will often have supernatural powers.

The tale of “Kuzunoha” tells the story of a young nobleman, Abe no Yasuna, who, on his way to visit a shrine in Shinoda, encounters a young military commissioner who is hunting foxes to obtain their livers for use as medicine. Yasuna battles the hunter and sets free the white fox he had trapped. Following this he meets a beautiful young women who tends to the wounds he sustained in the battle.
They return home together, fall in love and eventually marry. Later, she bears a child (a boy they call Seimei who grows up to be very clever). One day while Kuzunoha is distracted viewing the chrysanthemums in the garden her son catches a sight of the tip of her tail from beneath her kimono. Her secret is revealed, Kuzunoha departs to again live her life in the wild, leaving a farewell poem
which asks that her husband and son come to see her in the Shinoda Forest. Husband and son search for Kuzunoha and she appears to them in fox form, she tells them she is a kami (deific spirit) of Shinoda Shrine and she gives her son Seimei a gift, hoping he will one day come to comprehend the language of beasts.