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Alexander Chee

Edinburgh

Prologue

After he dies, missing Peter for me is like swimming in the cold spot of the lake: everyone else laughing in the warm water under some too-close summer sun. This is the answer to the question no one asks me.

The time that I think will be the last time I see Peter, isn’t, as it happens. There’d be one more to come.

My grandfather lost his six older sisters to the Japanese during World War II. Gone and never heard from again. Comfort women was what the Japanese called those they stole for their soldiers. They were girls, though.

My grandfather tells me the first stories I hear about what a great animal the fox is when I am a child. Foxes rescuing children in danger, foxes with magic rings. Korean name, Yowu. Years later when I read in college about how the fox is a demon in Japan, I think of him. I ask him about it when I come home and see him next.

Anything kill Japanese, my friend, he says. Fox, bomb, Chinese. Anything. My friend. He’s a gaunt now, hollowed, a silver-haired hat rack, beautiful in the way of anything missing something else. He has a picture of his mother and sisters on his wall, beautiful women almost identical to each other in the manner of old families. Of his sisters my grandfather has one left, born after the others had been stolen. He’ll die still missing these sisters who used to run along the beach tossing him back and forth between them.

After his sisters were taken away, the Japanese occupying force sent my grandfather to Imperial Schools. My first language is Japanese, he tells me. English far away. But, okay.

Be like a fox, he says. Okay. Sometimes, right after he told me, I would look at him and wonder what it felt like, to have the print of your enemy all the way inside you, right into the way you shaped your thoughts. But I know now.

The fox-demon often takes the shape of a beautiful girl. You fall in love with her and she leaves and you live for thirty days more afterward and die of missing her. She can breathe a fireball, a will-o’-the-wisp of electric air. When she marries another fox the sun shines and rain falls, at the same time, for one day. It’s considered good luck, days like this, for the fox trouble ends for that day. Fox-demons can change their shapes at will, assuming the forms of lost loves long dead. There are stories of how noblemen and their wives in ancient Japan had picnics and watched the foxes change shape on the hillside, transforming from armies to castles and back again in ritual battles. When possessed by a fox-demon you can fly and walk through walls. You can hear the demon speak through you in a second voice.

The Lady Tammamo was a fox who fell in love with a man and took the shape of a woman in order to marry him. Her hair remained red and so she was feared, for at that time in Korea the only people with red hair were said to be demons. She was very beautiful, in the way of fox-demons, and her husband loved her. And she loved him.

She bore her husband children, all sons. After some trouble in their village, for which she was blamed, they left and moved to a tiny island between Korea and Japan where they settled and were accepted by the fishermen there, who had seen many things and were not afraid of her. I’ll be safe here, she told her husband. And she was. Rumored to be from Mongolia, she told people, when they asked her where her clan was from, that it was a place where the sky bent the earth.