Happy New Year, everyone!
I’m a bit behind on this final December yokai due to the hardware failure earlier this month. But I just finished her and wanted to share. I will put a longer writeup on yokai.com a little later.
This is kitsune tsuki, or fox possession. We looked at myobu and Kuzunoha, two examples of good foxes… well kitsune tsuki is done by bad foxes. They possess people, causing sickness or mental illness. In fact, up until modern medicine was introduced to Japan, many illness were blamed on foxes! And virtually all mental illness was blamed on them!
Foxes can possess the weak-minded, and are especially good at possessing women (yes, Japanese folklore is very sexist). They enter through a number of places, particularly under the finger nails. There is a long laundry list of symptoms, and the long and short of it is that you need an onmyoji to get the fox spirit out of you.
I will be posting a January yokai plan soon, so if you have any yokai you’d like to see, please leave a comment here. Otherwise, you can leave it up to me and I will choose some fun ones! 🙂 I’ll post the hi-res files separately, and I will post again when the writeup for this one is on yokai.com.
Happy New Year!
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