Some fox stories end with a chase. This one ends with a poem, which is the part everyone agrees on.
The legend goes like this. Abe no Yasuna, a young nobleman, was walking to a shrine in Shinoda when he crossed a hunting commissioner who was killing foxes for their livers, which sold as medicine. Yasuna fought him off and took wounds doing it. The white fox he freed came back for him, in the shape of a woman, and helped him home. She stayed to tend his injuries. Tending becomes marriage in the old tellings, and marriage becomes a son, Seimei (called Doji as a boy), quick and strange in the way of children with something wild one generation back.
She kept her tail behind the screens. The story never asks whether a marriage that needs a whole body hidden is a marriage; it asks what happens when the hiding fails. One afternoon, while she was looking at chrysanthemums, her son caught sight of the tip of her tail. That was enough. A house can keep a wild wife; it cannot survive a seen one.
She left. Not a scream, not a vanishing. Handwriting, on the screen:
恋しくば尋ね来て見よ和泉なる信太の森のうらみ葛の葉
“If you love me, darling, come and see me. / You will find me yonder in the great wood / Of Shinoda of Izumi Province where the leaves / Of arrowroots always rustle in pensive mood.” (Kiyoshi Nozaki’s translation)
She left an address, not a farewell. That is the whole difference between a disappearance and a door.
Yasuna and the boy followed it. In the wood she came to them as a fox and said plainly what she was: the spirit of Shinoda shrine. Before she went she gave her son a gift, the language of animals. He grew into Abe no Seimei, the most famous onmyoji in Japanese history, a man whose mother is still, in a way, standing in a wood outside Osaka. There is a small Inari shrine in Izumi at the place where she walked away, and a pond, no longer famous, still remembered as hers.
Tonight’s hour is hers. She kept the way open. Some doors are only doors because someone refused to close them.
The Kuzunoha legend (Settsu and Izumi traditions; the farewell poem left on a screen, trans. Kiyoshi Nozaki)
Kabuki and bunraku cycle Ashiya Doman Ouchi Kagami (1734), part four, “Kuzunoha, the White Fox of Shinoda”
Klaus Mailahn, Der Fuchs in Glaube und Mythos (Münster, 2006), pp. 170-172, 179-184