The Fox Wife is a new novel by Malaysian Chinese author Yangsze Choo, who previously received acclaim for her novels "The Ghost Bride" and "The Night Tiger". I'd only read the Night Tiger but I didn't quite love its tale that sort of featured a Chinese kind of Magical Realism and a couple of main characters whose plots didn't really intersect. That said, when a couple of my favorite authors gushed about a new book from Choo, I couldn't resist giving this book a try.
And The Fox Wife is a really interesting tale that is certainly both more overtly fantastical and a little more cohesive, featuring two main characters whose plotlines more expressly intersect: a fox woman named Snow who is seeking revenge on a human photographer and an older human man Bao who is an investigator who can always tell lies and is on an investigation in which that photographer's name and foxes keeps popping up. Set in the year 1908 and largely in China (other than flashbacks and a trip to Japan), the story features a trio of foxes with differing temperments, humans from different social classes and locales (rural vs urban), superstitions affecting families for generations, and people acting in a time where great change in rulership is on the horizon. And with its two pretty good main characters, Bao and Snow, we have a tale of regret about choices in their pasts - some they made deliberately, some they made because society made them - that haunts them until events here force them to come to terms with them (kinda). There's a lot here, and it's hard to explain, but I'll try more after the jump.
Plot Summary:
China, 1908.
Snow, a fox woman, uses her charm to get on a train to Dalian, where she hopes to track down a Manchurian human photographer named Bektu Nikan...and to get revenge upon him for the death of her child. When she gets there however her search puts her into the service (under cover as an ordinary peasant woman) of an old lady who is the eldest of a family of medicine makers - a woman who fears people without shadows and who has feelings about foxes. But Snow's search for Bektu Nikan and her work for her mistress bring Snow into contact with a pair of dangerous fox men from her past, who massively complicate her quest for revenge.
Bao is an older human man who, since he was a child and his nanny prayed for him at a shrine to the Fox God, has had a supernatural ability/curse to always know when someone is lying. He's always had a fascination with foxes ever since and when a restaurant owner calls him to investigate the strange death of a smiling woman in the snow, he finds himself on a case that constantly seems to intersect with the mention of foxes. Bao's quest will feature two common elements: the photographer Bektu Nikan, whose name always pops up interacting with the women whose deaths he's investigating, and a strange beautiful bedazzling woman who always makes an impression but no one can quite remember....
The Fox Wife alternates each chapter between Snow's first person perspective (the odd numbered chapters) and Bao's third person perspective (the even numbered ones). Its narrative is thus told from a pair of people who are essentially now outsiders to common Chinese society - Snow as a fox woman who merely tries to survive among humans and Bao as an older human man who didn't enter into the reputable service as expected of him and who is a widow and now serves in the unique and atypical role outside of society as a private investigator. The results of this perspective allow the Fox Wife to paint a fascinating picture of Chinese/Manchurian society at this historical time, when the Qing Dynasty is about to fade away and people are unsure what to do about the stability, where poor rural woman are frequently stolen away to become sex workers and courtesans, where even more financially stable people are superstitious and act in deadly ways on account of those superstitions, and where well established rich men can act seemingly in impunity. I'm benig a little simplistic here, but know that this novel paints a very strong and interesting picture of its historical setting through these two characters, who view themselves largely as seeing it from outside.
This sets the stage for what are really two different character arcs, even as they are connected through the shared plot (Bao is very obviously from the beginning on Snow's tail but quite a bit behind from the start, and the two will inter-connect finally in the final act). And they're rather interesting ones with interesting characters to lead them. For Snow, you have a fox woman who has lived life carefully, so as to not come to bad attention from humans, and who has tried to stay on the 1000 year path she believes will lead to a better fate. But the death of her child has led her to be willing to cast that away if she can get her hands on the man who killed that child....and yet she's still the same careful person who tries to avoid getting into the trouble she knows can get foxes killed. And it's also led her to try to stay away from her past, which becomes difficult when two other male foxes from her past show up - ones named White and Black (or Chinese/Japanese aliases that include the words for those colors, just as she uses an alias that includes "snow") - both of whom have different approaches to how they live as foxes: for White, that involves not giving a damn about the damage he does to humanity, using his charm power very liberally and being mischeivous, and causing chaos as he goes almost for the sake of it (it's mentioned he's started several wars). For Black, that involves being very insular and quiet and introspective, even as he's himself used his charm a little to charm himself a nice house to stay at and a cover as a writer. The chaos of Snow trying to work out her revenge scheme while also dealing with these two foxes and White's schemes, plus the genuine goodnatured beliefs of her new human mistress (for whom she kind of feels obligated to), result in Snow being put into more dangerous situations than she was hoping...and forces her to undergo a character arc where she confronts her past and what really matters to her in the future. It's really well done.
Bao's story is also interesting in its character arc, although it's less involved because he's largely coming to places to pick up pieces of the puzzle - first of what happened to the dead girl and then what happened to the woman that the reader will know is Snow - after the fact until the final act. Bao's childhood connected him with foxes due to the act of his Nanny in praying to the "fox god" that both gave him seemingly health conditions and the ability to always hear a buzz when people lie. It also found him forced into a role and life that he didn't ever want - he fell in love as a child with a Mongolian girl who his family arranged for him to be friends with but found unsuitable for anthing else and that girl found herself married off and he found himself going through exams, getting a job he didn't want lower than his family hoped (in part due to him embarrassing himself) and finding a wife who died before him and who he didn't dislike but didn't really love either. And so in this journey we see for him, we see him reliving his fox-based memories as a child, putting together the pieces, and eventually reuniting with his true love years later. It's a story about a man whom society sort of dictated he go on a path he didn't care or love and now finds himself in this investigation finding himself back to the path he should've had, which to be honest is quite nice in the end.
Notably however, this is not a story that seeks to payoff anything except for those arcs I mentioned above, and those looking for certain payoffs - answers to certain mysteries posed for example - will have to settle heavily for ambiguities that point in a certain direction but leave it short of certainty. So if you're curious to know the final answers to say Bao's investigations or Snow's vengeance - well, you aren't going to get finality to those in this book. But it works as what it is, and I enjoyed The Fox Wife as a result. Recommended.
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