Tamamo no Mae

Tamamo-no-Mae (玉藻前) is the most celebrated of the malevolent kitsune of Japanese legend, a nine-tailed fox whose story was fixed in the medieval period, above all in otogizōshi tales such as the Tamamo no Sōshi and in nō and kabuki theatre. According to the fully developed legend, it is one and the same millennial fox that incarnated successively in different courts of Asia: in China as Daji, the concubine who ruined King Zhou, last of the Shang dynasty; in India as Lady Kayō (華陽夫人), consort of the legendary prince Hanzoku; and at last in the Japan of Emperor Toba, around the twelfth century, under the name Tamamo-no-Mae. That chain of three countries is not ancient: it was arranged by the popular literature of the Edo period, and its most widespread version is Takai Ranzan's Ehon Sangoku Yōfuden, printed between 1803 and 1805, which gathered the three realms into a single biography. The figure is therefore the supreme archetype of the fatal seductress and at the same time a fine example of a legend that grows by accretion.

In the court of Emperor Toba, Tamamo-no-Mae presented herself as a lady of incomparable beauty and erudition, admired for her learning, until the sovereign fell ill for no apparent cause. The onmyōji (yin-yang master) Abe no Yasunari, whom some versions make a descendant of Abe no Seimei, discovered through divination that the lady was in reality a nine-tailed fox draining the emperor's life. Unmasked, the creature fled to the plains of Nasu, where she was hunted down and shot with arrows by the warriors Miura no Suke and Kazusa no Suke. Tradition credits her with unchanging beauty, transformation into a golden nine-tailed vixen and the power to govern an entire court while draining the vital energy of the monarch she served.

After her death, according to the legend, the spirit of Tamamo-no-Mae turned into the Sesshō-seki (殺生石), the «stone that kills», a volcanic rock at Nasu that gave off poisonous gases and killed all who approached it, until the monk Gennō Shinshō exorcised it and split it in the fourteenth century. The stone is a real place and so are its vapours: sulphurous emanations from the volcanic field that still kill birds and insects. It fractured naturally in March 2022, a fact that revived the fame of the legend. Toriyama Sekien engraved it in 1781, in the Konjaku Hyakki Shūi, under the name of the stone rather than of the fox. Tamamo-no-Mae holds a relationship of cultural variant with the Chinese huli-jing through Daji, and embodies, within the nine-tailed fox family, the pinnacle of the path of seduction and ambition, in opposition to the ascetic and benevolent forms of the archetype.