There's a scene in Kurosawa's film Dreams where a boy sneaks off to the edge of a forest, against his mother's warning, and sees a fox wedding — spirits moving through the mist in procession. When he gets home, his mother won't let him in the house. The foxes saw him, she says. He has to go find them and beg forgiveness. I didn't understand that scene the first time I watched it. It just stuck with me — the door closing on a kid who went looking for something he wasn't supposed to see.

I'm a Japanese American daughter of an immigrant. My mother raised me in the 60s and 70s, when a lot of immigrant parents believed assimilation was how you got ahead. So the old stories didn't get passed down. I went looking for them later, on my own, without anyone to guide me through it.

The kitsune is what pulled me in — a fox spirit that moves between worlds, more powerful the older it gets, each tail standing for centuries earned. The young ones haven't figured that out yet. Their magic misfires. They're mischievous because they don't know their own strength, not because they mean any harm.

This collection grew out of that. The kitsune keeps changing shape across it — a bull, a cat, a biker and friends on a motorcycle chasing dim sum, a figure alone on a boat, fishing. I don't see these as costumes. They're closer to attempts — the fox trying on different forms, the way I've spent years trying on pieces of an inheritance I was never handed whole.