Kitsune Name Generator

Kitsune are the foxes of Japanese folklore: long-lived, clever, and able to take human form once they reach fifty or a hundred years, gaining a tail each century until the nine-tailed kyubi no kitsune. Tradition splits them into zenko, the good foxes who serve the rice deity Inari and are sometimes called myobu, and yako or nogitsune, the wild field foxes who possess and deceive. Names in the old tales are the human names foxes took when they married or served: Kuzunoha, the fox mother of the onmyoji Abe no Seimei; Tamamo-no-Mae, the courtesan whose true form was a nine-tailed fox; Osan and Otora, foxes of Edo-period comic tales.

A strong kitsune name usually does one of three things. It borrows a rank or color term (Tenko for a celestial fox, Byakko for a white one, Kuko for an air fox). It uses a Japanese given name whose kanji hint at the character's nature, such as Homura (flame) for a fox that carries kitsunebi foxfire, Tsukiko (moon child), or Kagerou (heat haze, or a shimmer that vanishes). Or it plays on the fox itself with ko or kon (the fox's cry) folded in, as with Kohaku, Konkon, or Kogitsunemaru.

The list covers legendary foxes, Shinto and Buddhist fox lore, and popular-culture kitsune from Naruto's Kurama to League of Legends' Ahri, plus Japanese names suited to shrine maidens, tricksters, and yokai OCs.