Kitsune San (2007)

In Japan, the word kitsune can refer to the familiar and completely real fox often found in countryside, gardens and suburbia in both the UK and Japan. It can also mean a supernatural fox spirit which can take many different forms, including a humanoid one. Stories of kitsune sometimes depict them as analogous to the sly, conniving tricksters of Anglophone folklore, but they can also be benign or entirely malevolent. San is an honorific at an ordinary level of politeness, roughly equivalent to ’Mister’ in English, and is also the number 3. In ’Kitsune San’ a storyteller recites an adaptation of ’Visu and the Old Priest’, a kitsune story from the English language collection ’Myths and Legends of Japan’ by F. Hadland Davis, 1917.

The images are mostly extreme closeup shots of wild English foxes hunting, feeding and otherwise going about their business, and these images all come in threes and repeat thrice like the typically folkloric events, admonitions and twists of fate that are told of in the story. In Japan, Britain and all over the world traditional stories frequently incorporate similar tales of animals with supernatural powers, and imagery related to the number three.

Kitsune are associated with the androgynous kami (animistic spirit) Inari who is recognised by both Shinto and Buddhist belief and is sometimes depicted as having a threefold nature. An Inari shrine in the woods at Nara is shown at the start of the film. Similar ones can be found all over Japan, even in the most urbanised parts of Tokyo. I’ve seen at least two of them hidden away in or near Akihabara, Tokyo’s electronics district / nerd mecca.