When the sorcerer had exorcised the fox spirit it was discovered that the gem had disappeared, which was taken as a proof that it belonged to the wer-fox, and was connected with some mysterious power.
The fox kept its promise, for when the young man was going home late one night in the dark, he became suddenly very frightened and called the fox to help him. The animal appeared and led him by a narrow footpath instead of by the usual road. Afterwards he discovered that highwaymen were hidden in ambush near the road, and if he had passed that way he would surely have been killed.
The cunning of the fox turns to learning in a man, for intellectuality appears to be regarded as a fox-like trait by the Japanese, and many tales tell of scholars becoming animals and vice-versa.
A learned old man called Hu suddenly disappeared from the college in which he held a professorship, and was found by his students in the shape of a fox explaining logic out of an old book to a pack of foxes who were drawn up in ranks before him in an empty grave.
Two foxes, in another story, were over a thousand years old and lived in the tomb of a king. They transformed themselves into students, giving proof of extraordinary learning, and having fine personalities and handsome, open countenances. Mounted on horseback they rode to the house of a talented minister to argue with him on theological questions connected with the spirit of the glorification tree which stood before a tomb. The minister could not get the better of them in discussion, and after three days he became suspicious and set his dogs loose upon them, but they showed not the slightest fear. "To be sure," he exclaimed, "they are spectres of the true sort. If a hundred years old, they must change their shape at the sight of hounds; if they are spooks of a thousand years, they must change when they see the glow of fire produced from a tree of the same age." Reasoning thus, the minister sent some servants to the tomb in order to fell the glorification tree. The spirit of the tree was a young child dressed in blue garments, and he was sitting in a cleft in the side of the tree. When the child was told of the matter he wept, and lamented the ignorance of the old foxes and his own fate. Then he vanished. When the servants felled the tree, blood gushed forth from it. They took the wood home and set fire to it, and as soon as it was kindled the foxes resumed their original shape. Then the minister had them captured and cooked.
The power possessed by the fox of bewitching men is clearly shown in the following story quoted by Dr. Visser in "The Fox and Badger in Japanese Folklore."[59]
In the eighth year of the Kwambei era (896) a man called Kaya Yoshifuji resigned the post of a high official in the Bizen province and went to live in Hongo Ashimori. His wife ran away to the capital and he kept house quite alone. One day he went out of his mind and began to recite love poems to an imaginary woman. After a month passed in this manner he disappeared and his relatives searched high and low but could find no trace of him, so they concluded that he had committed suicide, and vowed they would make an image of the eleven-faced Kwannon if they found the unhappy man's corpse. They cut down an oak tree and began to carve the life-size image of Yoshifuji, bowing before the unfinished statue to repeat the vow they had taken. This went on for about a fortnight, when to their intense surprise Yoshifuji crept from under his go-down as thin and pale as though he had passed through a serious illness. The floor of the go-down was only half a dozen inches from the ground, so that it was held to be impossible that a man could have been beneath it. When he had recovered his senses sufficiently to give an account of his adventures, he said that a beautiful girl had come to him, bringing love letters and poems from a princess, and that he had replied to them in the same vein in which they were written.
"At last," he continued, "the girl came with a magnificent carriage and four postilions to take me to the princess.
"After a drive of about ten miles we arrived at a splendid palace, where an exquisite meal and a very hearty reception from the princess soon made me feel quite at ease. There I lived with her as inseparably as two branches growing together on the same tree. She gave birth to a son, a very intelligent and beautiful child, whom I loved so much that I thought of degrading my son Jadasada and putting this child in his place as son of my principal wife—this in view of the high rank of the princess. But after three years a Buddhist priest suddenly entered the room of Her Highness, carrying a stick in his hand. The effect of his appearance was astonishing. Chamberlains and Court ladies all fled left and right and even the princess hid herself somewhere. The priest pushed me from behind with his stick and made me go out of the house through a very narrow passage. When I looked back I discovered that I had just crept from under my own go-down!"
The curious point of this story is that those who listened to it rushed to the go-down and demolished it without delay. As they did so, twenty or thirty foxes came from beneath it and scattered in all directions, hastening to the mountains. Yoshifuji, bewitched by these wizard-foxes, had been lying under the go-down for a fortnight, believing in his trance that he was spending three years in a palace. The priest who broke the spell was a metamorphosis of Kwannon.