Beyond the Inari cult, kitsune carry a far more ambivalent reputation in Japanese folklore, and later tradition sorted them broadly into zenko, benevolent celestial foxes serving Inari and protecting households, and yako or nogitsune, wild field foxes prone to mischief, deception and outright malice, capable of possessing a person, a condition called kitsunetsuki that folk healers and some Buddhist and Shinto ritualists were called on to treat. Age and wisdom were thought to increase a fox's power and its tails, with the most formidable kitsune growing as many as nine tails, a motif shared with related fox-spirit traditions across China and Korea, where the huli jing and kumiho occupy comparable folkloric ground, suggesting a long history of cultural exchange around the fox as a liminal, shape-shifting figure rather than a purely Japanese invention.
A shapeshifting kitsune was said to favor the form of a beautiful woman, and the folk tale genre of a man unknowingly marrying a fox wife, the story of Kuzunoha being the best known example, recurs throughout premodern Japanese literature and theater. Modern Shinto practice keeps only the Inari-serving, protective side of this inheritance in active cultic use; the trickster and possession lore survives mainly as folklore and popular culture rather than shrine ritual.