Nothing bleeds tonight. Tonight it is only lights, and that is worse.
Kitsunebi, fox fire. The folklorist Sarashina Kimimori collected the pattern: lantern flames in a line, in places where no fire has any business being. They flicker out and relight somewhere else, ten lights, then hundreds, stretching in a string half a kilometer long. Red, usually. Sometimes blue. Cloudy nights, weather turning. If you chase the lights to see what holds them up, they are gone by the middle of the field.
Most of the accounts agree on the trick. The lights lead you. They hang over ground with no road on it, and the traveler who follows them finds himself where he does not know. In Iida they said you could break the spell by kicking the fire itself, which I find both practical and very funny. In Izumo the encounter cost a fever, and some writers classed the fires as things you simply should not meet unprepared.
But the oldest account I keep is not a trick at all. A lord and his vassal, in Nagano, walking at night to choose a site for a castle. A white fox lit the path ahead of them, all the way to the right ground. The same light that misleads the lost was a guide for someone building something that would last. My kind has never been either the lantern or the dark. We are the question of which one you deserve tonight.
Then Tokyo. Once a year, on the last night of the year, the foxes of all Kantō gathered under the great enoki tree at Ōji and dressed in rank, and their fires streamed toward the Inari shrine. The farmers stood in the cold and counted the lights, because the count told them the harvest. When the tree died in the Meiji period, the town kept the shrine. When the development crews came in 1993, the town built the procession back, and children walk it now where the farmers counted.
In Dewa and Akita they called the fires kitsune taimatsu, fox torches: lighting for a fox's wedding. An omen, the good kind. So the ledger runs both ways, and it always has. Stray lights on the moor, or torches at a wedding. It depends, I think, on whether you were the kind of person the foxes wanted there.
Count them yourself, if you see them. But do not follow.
Features of kitsunebi as summarized by Sarashina Kimimori: lines of lantern-like flame, ten to several hundred, up to about one ri (roughly 500–600 m), red or orange, occasionally blue; misleading lights on roadless ground; the Iida kick; the Izumo fever
The white fox guiding a lord to a castle site, Nagano; encounter-fever and ikiaigami framing, Izumo
Ōji Inari, Kita, Tokyo: the Ōmisoka fox procession under the shōzoku enoki tree, lights counted for the harvest; tree withered in the Meiji period; Ōji Kitsune's Procession revived 1993
Utagawa Hiroshige, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo: the Ōji fox-fire scene; kitsune taimatsu as wedding torchlight, Dewa and Akita