Fox spirits are having a moment in fiction right now, in books such as Yangsze Choo’s “The Fox Wife.” In Asian cultures, these mischievous shape-shifters are venerated but also viewed as avatars of enticing deception. “Ninetails,” a new collection of nine fox-related short stories, plays with this dichotomy beautifully.
Sally Wen Mao has won widespread acclaim for her poetry, but “Ninetails” is her first work of fiction — and it not only plays with language and imagery, it also brings a surreal, poetic logic to the narrative itself. Some of these stories feature fox spirits as a motif, while others feature foxes as major characters. What unites them is a focus on women trying to make sense of a world that makes unreasonable demands while projecting various archetypes onto them.
Mao sets the tone with a story about a sentient “love doll” whose rich owner likes to dismember his toys, and follows it with other stories of women in unbearable situations, including a running series of vignettes about Chinese immigrants trying to enter San Francisco in the early 20th century. When one woman cries, flies come out of her eyes instead of tears; a teenage girl is accused of causing a plague that makes boys’ penises disappear. These stories dance around fertility and sexuality, seduction and rage, and the final tales reach for a kind of shared transformation or redemption.
Often, even a great collection blurs into undifferentiated sameness after you finish — but each must-read story in “Ninetails” remains fresh and distinct long after you close the pages.
