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, especially in otogizōshi tales such as the Tamamo no Sōshi and in nō and kabuki theater. According to the fully developed legend, it is the same millennial fox that successively incarnated in different courts of Asia: in China as Daji, the concubine who ruined the last king of the Shang dynasty; in India as the consort of a legendary prince (identified with the figure of Hua Yang or «Lady Kayō»); and finally in Japan of Emperor Toba, around the 12th century, under the name of Tamamo-no-Mae. This chain of incarnations, proper to the late Japanese tradition, makes her the supreme archetype of the fatal seductress.

In the court of Emperor Toba, Tamamo-no-Mae presented herself as a lady of incomparable beauty and erudition, admired for her knowledge, until the sovereign fell ill without apparent cause. The onmyōji (yin-yang master) Abe no Yasunari (in some versions, a descendant of Abe no Seimei) discovered through divination that the lady was in reality a nine-tailed fox that was draining the life of the emperor. Unmasked, the creature fled to the Nasu plains, where it was pursued and killed by the warriors Miura no Suke and Kazusa no Suke. Tradition attributes to her immutable beauty, the transformation into a golden nine-tailed fox and the power to manipulate an entire court, draining the vital energy of the monarch she served.

After her death, according to the legend, the spirit of Tamamo-no-Mae transformed into the Sesshō-seki (殺生石), the «stone that kills», a volcanic rock from Nasu that emanated poisonous gases and killed all who approached it, until the monk Gennō exorcised it and split it. The stone, a real place, fractured naturally in March 2022, a fact that revived the fame of the legend. Tamamo-no-Mae appears represented in the work of Toriyama Sekien and in countless pieces of Japanese theater and art as an emblem of the imperial seductress. She maintains 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.