Kaya no Yoshifuji fears he is a failure. After not receiving an appointment to the court, he retreated, perhaps dishonorably, to the country, where the "perfect" wife, Shikujo, is unhappy, though socially incapable of expressing her displeasure. Yoshifuji's country home, like his life, is in disarray and must be organized, but in his time and in his way. The laws of society that have followed him home in the form of Shikujo and her serving women is almost unbearable; nor can Shikujo fathom her husband's unconventional behavior toward things of the wild though she must pretend that it is proper and respond correctly. Meanwhile, a young fox has spied Yoshifuji on his return and finds herself falling in love. Just as foxes have used foxfire to lure men astray into the woods, so Kitsune uses fox magic to alter reality.

The flaws are minimal, if not insignificant. The diaries and journals are less authentic in feel than in constructs to maintain an actual narrative. The meditation in this work is no more than that of a traditional narrative. Fast-paced, this novel is not -- if such could be named a flaw -- but the author on rare occasion may have felt the lack and tried to inject unnecessary and narratively-unfelt tension. Kitsune, for instance, "demands" and the grandfather fox pounces on her for it. The advantage of a slower pace is more intensely felt action scenes. Who could forget the violence in such leisurely paced films as Oscar and Lucinda and The Piano? Still Johnson takes every advantage of such pacing and soundly scores the music of her style upon the reader's mind.

Good debut novels are usually a mixed bag: painfully flawed yet marvelous in the discovery of a new voice. Kirsten Bakis' Bram Stoker award-winning first novel, Lives of the Dog Monsters, contained stunning passages told in the voices of dogs but fell short of human when the human voices narrated. Johnson, however, does not falter. Her humans are as empathetically human as her foxes. If there are better first fantasy novels that appeared in the year 2000, I haven't read them and someone had better recommend them -- though that someone will have the difficult chore of proving it.