Dragon Pearl

“Most foxes only used shape-shifting to pass as humans in ordinary society. My true form, which I hadn’t taken since I was a small child, was that of a red fox. I had one single tail instead of the nine that the oldest and most powerful fox spirits did. Even Great-Grandmother, before she’d passed several years ago, had only had three tails in her fox shape. When the aunties had told us stories about magic and supernatural creatures, and taught us lore about our powers, they had cautioned us to avoid shifting into inanimate objects. It was too easy to become dazed and forget how to change back into a living creature, they’d warned. I’d experimented with it on the sly, though, and was confident I could pull it off.”

This passage comes while Min transforms into a table to spy on the investigator, and it also serves to provide crucial information about the world of the novel, aspects of Korean mythology, and Min’s character. A nine-tailed fox, or kumiho, is mythological figure that may also appear as a beautiful woman in order to seduce men. In the world of the novel, the kumiho can live among people in human form and is not restricted to the appearance of a beautiful woman. In the author’s world, it is also quite rare for a fox to have nine tails while in fox form. More powerful foxes have more tails, and a fox may gain additional tails as they become stronger. As a child who has little experience with her Charm magic, Min has a single tail in fox form, and the description of her great-grandmother as a three-tailed fox shows how rare it is for foxes to reach nine-tailed status. The second portion of this quotation focuses on the potential pitfalls of Charm, such as using it to take the shape of an inanimate object, and it also illustrates Min’s innate cockiness, for she believes she can overcome this problem simply because she has tried this type of transformation a few times.