In one story, a fox spirit seeks revenge. The spirit, named Snow, takes the form of a beautiful woman or an otherworldly white fox. She, like all fox spirits, can beguile and seduce humans, but is also vulnerable to human suspicion and physical strength. Despite the danger, the heartbroken Snow ventures into the city to take her revenge on the man who killed her daughter.
In the other story, a sixty-three-year-old detective named Bao is hired to solve the murder of a woman. He is observant, kind, and shrewd, even as his aging body has begun to fail him. Bao has been fascinated by stories of fox spirits since he was a boy, but he shoves his belief to the side, no longer hoping for such a magical world. Still, his case continues to bring up rumors of foxes, and soon he begins to wonder if he is on a fox’s trail.
Yangsze Choo’s The Fox Wife is a delightful blend of genres set at the turn of the twentieth century in Manchuria, Mongolia, and Japan. Bao’s tale is a classic detective story, with flashbacks that blend coming-of-age with romance. The Fox Wife is part fairy story, part revenge thriller, and part comedy of manners as Snow takes on the role of a household servant (fox schemes, as it turns out, often involve a lot of unexpected complications and improvisation). The novel’s refusal to settle into one genre is fitting, since, as Snow relates to her readers, “the mark of a fox is to disrupt order.” And, as it turns out, there is more than one fox in this story.
Although Snow’s story originates in a great tragedy, Choo’s novel does not wallow in darkness. Its playful sense of humor is demonstrated when Snow relates fox-facts such as, “Foxes are incurably nosy. That’s why you’ll often find us at festivals, riots, and other people’s birthday parties.” There is also a sense of something other, something that refuses to settle in light or dark, just beneath the surface of Snow’s quest for vengeance and Bao’s pursuit of a killer. This is the nature of a fairy story – or here, of a fox story – since “Humans and things are different species, and foxes lie between humans and things; darkness and light take different paths, and foxes lie in between darkness and light.”
Snow is aware that the magic of foxes is fading in the face of modernity. Hiding and living in the margins is becoming more difficult in a world of rapid population growth, train travel, and photography. Bao, meanwhile, knows he has lost something essential when he grew beyond his “childish” hope to meet a fox one day. He “can’t quite bring himself to embrace such superstition, yet neither can he abandon it. At the edge of his raging curiosity lurks the possibility of the divine, an unknown veil that Bao longs to pierce.” This is where The Fox Wife’s excellence lies: in Choo’s insight into the longing for enchantment – and in her ability to tell an entertaining, wily, and unpredictable tale.