A kitsune is a shapeshifter, and usually when it reaches the age of 100 years, it learn the ability to take on a human form. Thus, they have to be a fox for a hundred years before it can shapeshift from a fox to a human and back again. It is also said that a kitsune can duplicate other human beings, in other words shapeshift into the look-a-likes of different people.
Kitsune can be either male or female, and usually take the form of young Japanese girls, beautiful women and older men.
Kitsune are believed to possess superior intelligence, long life, and magical powers. They are a type of spiritual entity, and the word kitsune is often translated as fox spirit. However, this does not mean that kitsune are ghosts, nor that they are fundamentally different from regular foxes. Because the word spirit is used to reflect a state of knowledge or enlightenment, all long-lived foxes gain supernatural abilities.
Other supernatural abilities commonly attributed to the kitsune include possession, mouths or tails that generate fire or lightning (known as kitsune-bi; literally mean fox-fire), willful manifestation in the dreams of others, flight, invisibility, and the creation of illusions so elaborate as to be almost indistinguishable from reality. Some tales speak of kitsune with even greater powers, able to bend time and space, drive people mad, or take fantastic shapes such as a tree of incredible height or a second moon in the sky. Other kitsune have characteristics reminiscent of vampires or succubi and feed on the life or spirit of human beings, generally through sexual contact.
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