The Fox Wife

By Yangsze Choo
Fiction/Quercus/Hardcover/390 pages/$32.36/Amazon SG (amzn.to/42lZ7qe)
Four stars

There are humans and there are things, wrote 18th-century Chinese scholar Ji Yun, and then there are foxes.

“Darkness and light take different paths, and foxes lie in between darkness and light.”

This liminal quality infuses Malaysian author Choo Yangsze’s third novel, The Fox Wife, which is set in 1908 Manchuria and Japan, and cites Ji Yun, among many others.

Choo’s oeuvre is marked by a fascination with liminal beings and the shadowy borderlands they slip across, from her effervescent otherworldly debut, The Ghost Bride (2013), to The Night Tiger (2019), about harimau jadian, or were-tigers, in 1930s colonial Malaya.

It seems natural that she has progressed to fox spirits. These seductive shape-shifters from East Asian mythology have long captivated the cultural imagination, from Qing dynasty author Pu Songling’s Strange Tales From A Chinese Studio to the recent slew of South Korean dramas about kumiho, or nine-tailed foxes.

Much like The Night Tiger, The Fox Wife has two strands, which gradually come together to unravel a supernatural mystery.

The first of these is narrated by a female fox spirit, Snow, who is working her way across China to exact vengeance upon the man responsible for her child’s death.

The second follows Bao, a detective in his 60s who has been hired to uncover the identity of a young woman found dead but smiling in the snow.

Since a childhood illness, from which he may have been cured by a fox spirit’s intervention, Bao has had the uncanny ability to tell when someone is lying. His gentle but dogged pursuit of the truth places him on Snow’s trail.

Snow gets by on guile and glamour. She can vanish from a locked room or charm her way into nearly any situation, but despite her gifts, she remains vulnerable to the predations of men.

She may be an immortal shape-shifter with eternal beauty, but that just means she has centuries of sexism to survive.

This is starkly evident in her encounters with two male fox spirits from her past: Shiro, a hedonistic huckster who delights in causing chaos; and the noble, brooding Kuro. Their personas are wealthy men of leisure, while she plays servants and concubines.

The novel’s multiple mysteries make for a convoluted plot that is more slippery than satisfying. Still, Choo has woven a beguiling tale of a bygone era, and it is a pleasure to watch her heroine outfox the strictures of her time.

If you like this, read: The Memory Eaters by Janice Tay (Straits Times Press, 2017, available at National Library), a historical fantasy set in samurai-era Japan. Sudare is a kuyin, an immortal “memory eater” who lives in disguise among humans. In a moment of hunger, she devours the memories of a hapless passer-by and, guilt-stricken, decides to help the now-amnesiac man discover who he used to be.