Come back when you please you will always be welcome." "You may be a fox," Ono called after her, "but you are the mother of my son and I will always love you. At last one day the dog attacked her so furiously that she lost courage, resumed vulpine shape, leaped over a fence and fled. She begged her husband to kill it, but he refused. Simultaneously with the birth of their son, Ono's dog was delivered of a pup which as it grew up became more and more hostile to the lady of the moors. He met her one evening on a vast moor and married her. 545), spent the seasons longing for his ideal of female beauty. Ono, an inhabitant of Mino (says an ancient Japanese legend of A.D. This appears to be tied to a specific story it is one of the oldest surviving kitsune tales, and unlike most of those in which a kitsune takes the form of a human woman and marries men, this one does not end tragically. Kitsu is now archaic in modern Japanese, a fox's cry is transcribed as kon kon or gon gon.Ī widely known folk etymology of the word relates to sleeping and returning home: in classical Japanese, kitsu-ne means 'come and sleep', and ki-tsune means 'always comes'.