Choosing His Ninja Way
How Understanding the Kyuubi’s Folklore Helps Earn Naruto’s Ending
Spoiler warning for all content that follows, though Naruto ended like 7 years ago. Go catch up if you haven’t already!
Any first impression of the Naruto series is that of a standard shounen manga. The story tells the journey of the titular protagonist Naruto, an aspiring ninja who was imbued at birth with an evil and destructive spirit.
As a result, he begins the story shunned, reviled, and even abused by other villagers. This treatment inspires his dream to become Hokage – the leader of the village – “so everyone will acknowledge me (-dattebayo)!”
In keeping with the shounen genre, Naruto advances towards his goal through sheer determination, the power of friendship, and hype fight sequences, along with healthy doses of plot armor. Even the ending is standard shounen: he becomes Hokage.
The growth of Naruto from beginner ninja to Hokage.
But what differentiates Naruto is the choice of a nine-tailed fox, or Kyuubi, as the spirit he was imbued with. In my view, understanding the folklore behind this very specific choice of spirit can help demonstrate why Naruto’s ascension to Hokage was truly earned, as opposed to just being a function of a shounen manga. I’ll present my take on the origins of the Kyuubi as an “evil and destructive” spirit, and explain how the Kyuubi as a symbol underpins Naruto’s ultimate lesson on choosing to never giving up despite having a literally “monstrous” burden thrust upon him.
The Kyuubi as it appears in Naruto, as an evil and destructive spirit.
Given that stories of fox-spirits are central features in East Asian folklore, especially those with nine-tails, the choice of the Kyuubi as Naruto’s sealed beast must be a deliberate symbol for Japanese audiences. These stories of fox-spirits (a.k.a. kitsune), usually fall into two categories. One revolves around the “good” fox-spirits. In Japanese folklore, these spirits serve the deity Inari, the god of prosperity and rice cultivation, hence why shrines to Inari are dotted with fox statues.
The other category tells of “evil” fox spirits. Most of these stories involve transforming into beautiful women and seducing men with food and frolicking. Their victims usually wake up alone, missing all their possessions and chewing on rotting leaves or straight-up feces.[1] Though these deeds are more mischievous than harmful, these stories already establish the lesson of distrusting and shunning fox-spirits.
However, the fox-spirit’s reputation becomes more sinister in a subset of these “evil” fox-spirit stories, which is where I believe the portrayal of Naruto’s Kyuubi draws its inspiration. These tales tell of courtesans, specifically Dá jĭ (妲己) and Bāo-sì from China, and Tamamo-no-mae from Japan, who supposedly drove their own empires to ruin through their malice.
These three figures actually existed in the historical record, but they only became associated with fox-spirits centuries after their respective deaths. Dá jĭ lwas a concubine to King Zhòu of Shang – the last king of China’s Shang Dynasty.[2] Bāo-sì was also a concubine, pledged to King Yōu of Zhou – the last king of China’s Western Zhou Dynasty. Finally, Tamamo-no-māe served as a courtesan to Japan’s Emperor Toba, whose death kicked off Japan’s slide into a national civil war a few decades later.[3] You’re not crazy if you notice a pattern.
Left: Dá jĭ as depicted in the Hokusai Manga. Center: Bāo-sì as depicted in the Hundred Poems of Beautiful Women (Bai Mei Xin Yong Tu Zhuan 百美新詠圖傳). Right: Tamamo-no-mae as depicted in the New Forms of Thirty-Six Ghosts series.
All three stories follow a similar structure. In Dá jĭ’s story, the original concubine was possessed by an evil nine-tailed fox-spirit. Using this form, the fox-spirit seduced China’s King Zhòu and used his power to satisfy her gruesome pursuits. She forced victims to run inside red-hot bronze cylinders until they burned alive, laughing as they suffered.[4] Once this reign of terror pushed the people to rise up and overthrow the king and his dynasty, this nine-tailed fox-spirit fled.
The spirit reappeared few hundred years later by possessing King Yōu’s concubine Bāo-sì. This time, she would only smile if the king summoned all the armies of his allies to answer false alarms. King Yōu obliged again and again, until one day his kingdom was truly threatened by invading nomads and revolting citizens.[5] I think the ending of the story is obvious, and the spirit fled once more.
Finally, the fox-spirit resurfaced in Japan at the side of Emperor Toba as the alluring courtesan Tamamo-no-mae.[6] [7] Yet almost immediately after meeting her, Emperor Toba fell deathly ill with no cure in sight. Only after a priest performed an exorcism was Tamamo-no-mae exposed to be draining the emperor’s life force. Though the fox-spirit was finally sealed by two legendary samurai, the emperor never fully recovered and the dynasty began its descent into ruin. Three concubines, three kingdoms destroyed, and one fox-spirit at the center of it all.
Of course, I must mention that these stories are heavily influenced by the patriarchal suspicion of powerful women in East Asian history, as well as the use of women as a scapegoat for the failures of state administration. But that’s a discussion for another time. While the Kyuubi in Naruto has the literal destructive strength to reduce kingdoms to nothingness, these stories of Dá jĭ, Bao-si, and Tamamo-no-mae imply that the image of a nine-tailed fox-spirit is deeply rooted in East Asian folklore not just as a trickster to be wary of, but at worst as a symbol of political destabilization and personal cruelty.
This symbolism of the nine-tailed fox-spirit lends a deeper dimension to Naruto’s typical shounen trait of “never giving up.” Throughout the manga’s 700-chapter history, Naruto almost never wavered in his conviction to become Hokage. On the one hand, this trait is standard for an action-based manga whose target audiences are pre-teen and teenage boys. But on the other, the symbolism of being the host of the Kyuubi – a monster that invokes the mythos of the wicked Dá jĭ, Bāo-sì, and Tamamo-no-mae – signals that Naruto’s attitude was an active defiance of his supposed destiny.
When the Kyuubi’s power takes over Naruto, usually when he’s overcome by anger
He was supposed to be a monster, and was treated as such for much of his childhood. In fact, there were multiple instances when the Kyuubi’s power indeed took over Naruto and he became a monster unable to distinguish between friend or foe. But during almost every occurrence, the Kyuubi only emerged when Naruto was overcome by anger and lost control of his emotions. These story developments imply that Naruto fought every day to overcome both others’ expectations of him and his own temptation to become the monster that the Kyuubi represented. In other words, Naruto never gave up because he chose to never give up.
Naruto’s confrontations with his major adversaries further underline the significance of his choice to “never give up.” Some of Naruto’s best fights were against the likes of Zabuza, Neji, and Gaara. All these characters had accepted their destinies as monsters without questioning if they had a different choice. Admittedly, the circumstances leading up to these adversaries becoming “monsters” were brutal and/or tragic. But when Naruto beat them with both his fists and good ol’ “Talk no Jutsu,” his opponents realized that Naruto carried a similar burden as host to the Kyuubi, and yet still chose to pursue his dream of becoming Hokage.
Once again, the choice of the Kyuubi as a symbol bestows even greater weight behind Naruto’s victories, because the folkloric precedents suggest that he should have gone down the same destructive paths as his adversaries. Instead, Naruto pushed himself to transform the Kyuubi’s “evil” into his own power-ups during each confrontation, eventually taming the monster within to give himself godlike abilities by the time he became Hokage at the end of the series.
When Naruto transforms the Kyuubi’s power into his own strength, showing he has full control over his “darkness”
The choice to imbue the Kyuubi into Naruto is no accident because the symbol of the Kyuubi is steeped in cultural weight. The tales of Dá jĭ, Bao-si, and Tamamo-no-mae have emphasized again and again how nine-tailed fox-spirits are destined to destroy kingdoms and inflict untold suffering. Naruto was supposed to follow this path, just as each of his adversaries did. Yet during each confrontation, Naruto overcame his challenges because he chose to never give up on his “ninja way.”
I believe that without the Kyuubi’s cultural weight as a symbol for destruction, the series would not have been able to efficiently communicate the significance of Naruto’s choice to “never give up.” Thus, the conclusion of Naruto’s character arc – his final ascension to Hokage - no longer feels like it was given just because he’s the main character, but instead feels rightfully earned as a result of the immense weight of the Kyuubi mythos that Naruto chose to surmount.
Sources:
[1] https://asianethnology.org/downloads/ae/pdf/a266.pdf , pg 44-45
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daji
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamamo-no-Mae
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daji
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bao_Si
[6] https://yokai.com/tamamonomae/
[7] https://japanesegallery.com/kuniyoshi-utagawa-lady-kayo-the-magic-fox-of-the-three-countries
