Tamamo-no-Mae

Who is Tamamo-no-Mae?

Tamamo-no-Mae is the most famous fox in Japanese legend. She was a court lady of extraordinary beauty and learning who won the heart of the retired emperor Toba in the twelfth century. She was then exposed as a fox with golden fur and nine tails that had already brought ruin to kingdoms in India and China. Driven out of the capital, she was hunted down on the plain of Nasu in Shimotsuke Province, today's Tochigi Prefecture. There her spirit entered a great boulder, the Sesshō-seki or "Killing Stone", which killed any bird, beast or person that came near.

Her story belongs to legend, not history. Toba was real, and so was the stone, which still sits on a volcanic hillside above the hot-spring village of Nasu-Yumoto. The court lady herself has no place in the historical record. What makes the legend unusual is its scale. Most Japanese fox tales are local affairs, but Heibonsha's World Encyclopedia notes that this one stretches across India, China and Japan.

Appearance and powers

In her human form Tamamo-no-Mae is above all brilliant. The Noh play Sesshōseki has her answer every question put to her without hesitation, and her name is linked to that brilliance. One night, the play says, an autumn wind blew out the lamps of the palace, and light streamed from her own body to fill the hall. From that time the ruler fell ill. A diviner was summoned and declared that she was not human. In the play this is the onmyōji Abe no Yasunori. Japanese encyclopedias also give the name as Abe no Yasunari or Yasuchika, a sign of how the story changed between tellings.

Her true form is the kinmō kyūbi no kitsune, the golden-haired, nine-tailed fox, sometimes described as white-faced as well. Her powers are those of the great fox spirits: perfect disguise, bewitching charm, and the ability to drain a ruler's health and judgement. After death her malice lived on in the stone. Nasu's real volcanic vents made that idea easy to believe. Hydrogen sulphide and other gases seeping from the ground kill insects and small animals, and the encyclopedias suggest the legend grew from people blaming the rock itself.

Origins and history

The Nihon Kokugo Daijiten dictionary gives 1477 as the earliest dated use of the word sesshō-seki it records, in a commentary on the Chinese Records of the Grand Historian. That passage already mentions the killing stone of Nasu. By the Muromachi period (1336–1573) the full story had taken literary form in two works. One is the illustrated prose tale Tamamo no Sōshi, one of the short narratives later grouped as otogi-zōshi. The other is the Noh play Sesshōseki. Its author is unknown, though it is sometimes attributed to Sa'ami. Even in the Noh text, the fox already recalls troubling the courts of India, China and Japan.

Heibonsha's encyclopedia notes that the legend grew enormously in the Edo period (1603–1868). The best-known works include Takai Ranzan's illustrated novel Ehon Sangoku Yōfuden ("The Wicked Women of Three Lands", 1804) and Shikitei Sanba's Tamamo-no-Mae Sangoku-den-ki (1809). For the puppet theatre there was Ehon Zōho Tamamo-no-Mae Asahi no Tamoto (1806). The kabuki playwright Tsuruya Nanboku made his own version in 1821. These retellings filled in the fox's earlier careers abroad, where she was a royal consort who drove kings to cruelty and their kingdoms to collapse.

The Noh play Sesshōseki

The Noh play remains the classic telling. The high priest Gennō is crossing the plain of Nasu when he sees birds drop dead from the sky above a large stone. A village woman warns him away and tells him the story of Tamamo-no-Mae. She explains how the lady was unmasked, fled to Nasu, and was shot down by hunters led by the warriors Miura-no-suke and Kazusa-no-suke. Then she reveals that she is the stone's spirit, and vanishes. Gennō performs a Buddhist rite for the stone. It splits in two, and the fox spirit appears and acts out its own hunt in a fast, vigorous dance. At the end it promises, now that it has received the Buddhist law, never to do harm again.

The priest is modelled on Gennō Shinshō, a Zen monk of the fourteenth century. Legend says he broke the stone with his staff, or with a great shout, and that its fragments flew all over Japan. The legend also holds that the heavy two-faced hammer called a gennō in Japanese takes its name from him.

The Sesshō-seki at Nasu

The stone lies in a small valley at the foot of Mount Chausu, just upstream from Nasu-Yumoto Onsen. A wooden boardwalk loops through ground where sulphurous gas still rises and little grows. The poet Matsuo Bashō came here in 1689 on the journey he described in Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Deep North). He wrote that the stone's poison had not yet died, and that dead bees and butterflies lay so thick on the ground that the sand beneath could not be seen. The site is designated a national Place of Scenic Beauty. Its valley also holds rows of Jizō statues and the Sai no Kawara, the riverbed of lost children's souls.

What happened in 2022

In early March 2022, visitors found the Sesshō-seki split cleanly in two, with its sacred straw rope fallen away. A photograph posted on social media on 5 March spread around the world under headlines about a demon fox set free. The Nasu Town Tourist Information Center told the Yomiuri Shimbun that rain and freezing temperatures had probably seeped into cracks that had been visible in the rock for years, until it finally broke.

The town answered with a ceremony. On 26 March 2022 the Nasu Town Tourism Association held a memorial service and prayer for peace at the stone, with Shinto rites performed by Nasu Onsen Shrine. Its announcement described the revived nine-tailed fox as an auspicious sacred beast, and expressed the hope that it would help bring an end to the pandemic.

Regional traditions

Because the stone was said to have shattered, pieces of it turn up in legend far from Nasu. Heibonsha's encyclopedia mentions stones said to be fragments of the Sesshō-seki on Mount Murazumi in Aichi and at Kaseiji temple in Maniwa, Okayama. People avoid touching them for fear of illness or death. An Edo-period essay in the Nichibunken database describes a fenced-off stone in central Kyoto, also said to be a piece of it, that killed any bird that landed on it.

Folk reports collected in the twentieth century add further twists. In Yamanashi, people said that pain in the soles of the feet came from stepping on a fragment of the stone. In Wakayama, stepping on a fragment was said to cause blisters. In Kanagawa, the stone's breaking was said to have released thousands of invisible kuda-gitsune, the tiny pipe-foxes blamed for possessing people. Not everyone saw nine tails as evil, though. The Edo scholar Ōta Nanpo pointed out that in Chinese tradition the nine-tailed fox was an auspicious beast, and Japanese dictionaries likewise note that it was once a creature of good omen.

In art, theatre and pop culture

Tamamo-no-Mae has never left the stage. The Noh Sesshōseki is still performed by all five schools. Her story fed the Tamamo-no-Mae plays of the puppet and kabuki theatres, and in 1819 an Edo kabuki dance about her formed one of nine quick-change pieces performed by the actor Nakamura Shikan. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the figure of a beautiful woman who is secretly a nine-tailed fox has become a familiar character type in manga, anime and games, and Tamamo-no-Mae is often seen as its most important Japanese source.