FOUR centuries previous, a shapeshifting fox, a kitsune, swore loyalty to his master.
Tachibanayama Castle guarded a strategic location in Chikuzen Province’s city of Hakata. Dōsetsu Bekki—vassal to the Ōtomo clan based in Buzen Province—governed the castle. He had a single daughter named Ginchiyo.
The kitsune’s master was handmaiden to Lady Ginchiyo.
Ginchiyo was one of the few female castellans to officially inherit a castle from her father during the Sengoku period. After her father’s death, she married Muneshige Tachibana, a man hailed as an unrivaled warlord of the western realms.
Until that union, Ginchiyo had full control of her late father’s domain, army, and fortune. Once married, however, Ginchiyo—like most wives of military commanders—retired from the battlefield. She devoted herself to household management rather than war, and then her duties as a political hostage. But she had also inherited a cadre of retainers and their kitsune from her father. Due to her spiritual prowess, she continued to oversee that asset for the rest of her life.
Eventually, Muneshige was deprived of his territory, property, and status as a samurai. Around the same time, Ginchiyo died in a land far from Hakata, and few accounts of her later years remain. According to a few surviving anecdotes, she worshipped the deity Inari with the same fervor as her father. She was additionally said to have dispatched a shapeshifting fox to greet Muneshige when he returned from battle. And on her deathbed, she prayed to one of the kitsune for her husband’s safety and reinstatement as an officer.
Thus, Ginchiyo’s ill-fated life as lady castellan ended. But what happened to her handmaiden? Furthermore, what happened to the handmaiden’s vulpine familiar?
Alas, not a single record or mention of the handmaiden and her fox survived.