The Fox's Wedding: a Compendium of Japanese Folklore

Byakko, the white fox
almost 4 years ago – Fri, Dec 04, 2020 at 11:59:57 PM

Greetings yokai fans!

We just passed 1000% funding! What a milestone!

Today I'd like to share a little "behind the scenes" work and talk about some of the kitsune folklore you'll see in the book. Keep in mind that since this is folklore and not mythology, there are many different ways of categorizing kitsune, many of which contradict each other.

Byakko (白狐) literally means "white fox." They are one of the five "families" of kitsune. Kitsune are born as the ordinary red foxes you think of when you imagine a fox. As they grow, some of them transform into the various colors of foxes you'll see in folklore; white, black, gold, and silver. Think of it sort of like Hogwarts houses. No color fox is necessarily higher or lower than the others. They just have different features. And, not all kitsune "level up" in this way; some remain red foxes and "free agents" their whole lives.

Byakko are the foxes most closely associated with Shinto and the god Inari. Not every Shinto-associated fox is a byakko, but every byakko is a servant of Inari. As a byakko spends its life serving its god, it will rank up further, achieving various honors and degrees from the shrines it serves. Sort of like boy scout badges. And, as they age, they can also increase in power and evolve into higher forms of kitsune, shedding their bodies and becoming entirely spiritual entities. One of the requirements that byakko must fulfill as they rank up is that they do not possess humans or play tricks on them, aside from perhaps teaching them a minor lesson here and there. Byakko are not evil.

A number of the foxes you'll see in the book are byakko. And some of the foxes in my previous books are also byakko, a famous example being Kuzunoha, the mother of Abe no Seimei.

Creating an Illustration

When I create an entry for the book, I start with pulling information from as many sources as possible. Then I translate, and break apart the information into what I find most interesting and compelling. I distill it down to its major points, including a description, a history, and if possible a few good examples from legends. Then I start brainstorming thumbnails and come up with the image I want to make to go along with the writeup.

I start with rough pencil sketches to create a composition I like. This is actually one of the most important steps, because it acts as the foundation for the entire image. Sometimes it takes many different sketches to come up with the one I'm going to use, but it's worth taking as much time as necessary at this stage. Every extra minute spent on sketching and designing saves an hour down the road. After I choose a sketch I like, I can generally see the finished product in my head. 

The next step is to scan it and put in into my computer. Then I digitally ink the piece. It's more than just tracing lines. The lines have to feel organic and capture the energy of the piece, which can be challenging when you're drawing on top of a sketch. The same line will look slightly different if it's drawn slowly or quickly, and it will subtly affect the final piece. So this stage requires focus and attention.

After inking, it becomes easy to tell if there are any problems you've overlooked in the sketch. If it looks unbalanced or incomplete in a black and white line drawing, then it will look even worse when painted. So at this step it's important to make sure I'm fully happy with the direction it's taking. In worse case scenarios, I'll scrap it and start over (that usually means that I didn't spend enough time on the sketch). In this case, it felt lonely. So I added a bunch of little kitsune statues like the ones you can see in the Kickstarter video.

Happy with the inking, it's time to move on to painting. If I did everything properly up until now, painting tends to be a breeze. I'll sometimes zone out for a whole day while painting, forgetting to eat or even go to the bathroom, and when I finally break out of that zone I'm sitting in front of a finished piece, feeling very hungry.

When painting digitally it helps to use a limited palette. I use a palette based on the traditional colors of Japan, which would have been the colors available to traditional woodblock print makers over a hundred years ago. I paint by blocking in major sections of similar colors, and then working my way up from layer to layer, just as a woodblock printers do. Since it's digital, I manually add textures which would have been naturally formed by the meeting of paper and wood grains in traditional formats. I also apply a little bit of rough texture to simulate aging. I'm not trying to exactly copy the style of woodblock prints, but it's where much of my inspiration comes from, so I want to pay homage to them in my own style.

And that's how we get from old Japanese text to modern illustration!

Kinko and ginko, silver and gold foxes
almost 4 years ago – Fri, Dec 04, 2020 at 11:59:39 PM

Greetings yokai fans!

We've looked at white foxes and black foxes so far. There are two other kinds of foxes that red foxes can "evolve" into as the grow. These are silver and gold foxes, or ginko and kinko.

While byakko are servants of Inari, and kokuko are incarnations of the Big Dipper, ginko and kinko are avatars of the moon and sun respectively. And while byakko are Shinto and kokuko are Taoist, ginko and kinko come from Buddhism.

Ginko and kinko serve a deity known as Dakini. She comes from a race of man-eating demon women from Hindu cosmology called the dakini. Because they were feeders of human carrion, they were associated with jackals, who hang out in graveyards and feed upon the dead. In Buddhism, the dakini eventually listened to Buddhas sermons and were so impressed that they gave up their man-eating ways and became fearsome holy warriors. As Buddhism traveled from India through Afghanistan, to China, through Korea, and eventually to Japan, it morphed along the way. Jackals are found in India, but not China, so when stories of them arrived in China, the readers looked at the description of the jackal and associated it with the closest animal it matched in appearance: the fox. In Japanese Buddhism, the dakini became a single figure, usually depicted as a woman riding a flying fox.

An interesting thing about Japanese Buddhism is that when it syncretized with local Shinto traditions, each Shinto god was assigned a Buddhist form, and it was said that the kami were all local emanations of Buddhist figures. So when monks assigned a buddha form to Inari, guess which one they chose?

That's right: Inari and Dakini are two forms of the same figure, just viewed from a different perspective! So while we say that byakko serve Inari and ginko/kinko serve Dakini, they really are all serving the same greater good.

And now, for the ginko & kinko illustration:

Kokuko, the black fox
almost 4 years ago – Fri, Dec 04, 2020 at 11:50:07 PM

Greetings yokai fans!

In contrast with yesterday's white fox, today I want to share with you the black fox (玄狐 or 黒狐). Sometimes called kokuko, kokko, or kurokitsune, these black foxes are more mysterious than their white counterparts. Which is fitting, because the color black is associated with mystery and the occult.

Folklore about black foxes is very rare. They're not a common animal in Japan; they live more in Siberia and colder climates. Although, there are some in Hokkaido.

Kokuko only appear during the reign on an enlightened ruler. Like their white fox cousins, they are good foxes and don't do anything to harm humans. They appear more closely connected with Taoism than with Shinto, although thanks to the syncretic nature of Japanese religion they aren't entirely disconnected from Inari worship either. However, they are seen more as incarnations of the Big Dipper, and part of a Taoist cult related to Big Dipper and North Star worship. In Chinese religion, the Big Dipper and the North Star were closely related to the imperial cult, and were also a source of the secret to long life. The incarnation of the North Star was an old man who had knowledge of peoples' lifespans, and so was a focus for people searching for the magical secrets to immortality. That tradition was have been brought over to Japan and mixed with the local imperial cult, taking on its own unique Japanese flavor. However, Taoism never really became a mainstream practice in Japan outside of the imperial cult. Many Taoist practices were subsumed into various Buddhist sects. And kokuko themselves, due to their association with a minor religion and their rarity on the Japanese islands, remained a minor footnote in Japanese fox lore.

Here is some of the process my illustration for kokuko went through:

And the final illustration for kokuko:

If you like closely, you should be able to find the winter Big Dipper and North Star, which this little black fox is gazing up at.