Four animals share the transformation license, and the tradition itself wrote the comparison: "the fox has seven disguises, the tanuki has eight." The full bench:
The fox (kitsune) — transforms to tempt. The aristocrat of the bench: Inari's 40,000-shrine bureaucracy behind it, a possession complex that reached the psychiatric literature, a court-toppling star, a priest-impersonator exposed by his own cry, a devoted mother with a forwarding address, and weather of its own. Tells: the tail, the reflection, the dogs, the drink.
The tanuki (tanuki) — transforms to fool. The comedian with named executives: Sado's banker, Awaji's theatergoer who died at the box office, Yashima's war-memorial illusionist, Matsuyama's sealed political operative. Signature effects: the teakettle, phantom drumming, and (attributed) the invisible wall.
The mujina (mujina) — transforms to unsettle. The taxonomy dispute in fur (badger? tanuki? — the Supreme Court heard the case in 1924); authorship of the faceless prank that Hearn made world-famous under its name.
The kawauso (kawauso) — transforms to play. The forgotten fourth: child-shapes in big hats, nonsense answers, sake errands — and the bench's tragedy: the real animal is extinct (1979/2012), leaving folklore as its only habitat. The okuri-inu's wolf shares that fate (1905).
The fox's named individual. The bench has an asymmetry worth correcting: the tanuki's members get names and biographies, while the fox is usually a type. There is one exception, and it is the sharpest case on the page. The Otora-gitsune was a servant fox of the Inari shrine at Nagashino Castle. After the battle of 1575 the shrine was abandoned, and the fox turned vengeful. It had been struck by stray gunfire — left eye lost, left foot lamed — and in every person said to be possessed by it, the left eye discharges and the left foot sickens. The tradition's only possession diagnosed by the spirit's injuries rather than the victim's symptoms. The possessed were reported to talk about the Battle of Nagashino and about the fox's own history: a dead battle narrated through farmers' mouths three centuries on. The prescribed cure was to invoke Yamainu-sama, the dog deity of Akiha Mountain, who "would consume only the fox possession while sparing the host" — one animal cult deployed against another's stray. It ended as such cases end: re-enshrined at the castle's Inari, later relocated to Daiōji. A shrine employee, laid off by a war, given an address again.
The bench's licensing rules, as the stories record them: age grants the power (fox at 50–100; cat at a lifetime's end — bakeneko/nekomata sit as the bench's feral auditors); transformation has tells (tail, shadow, cry, drink); and every animal's disguise fails at its nature — Hakuzōsu hearing his own kind, the fox at the dog's bark. The bench's verdict on disguise, in one line: you can borrow a shape, but not a self.