Tochigiとちぎ

This version turns to the events leading up to Tamamo-no-Mae’s unmasking and defeat. When the retired Emperor Toba’s illness grew at last grave, the onmyōji Abe no Yasunari (modeled on the historical Abe no Yasuchika), ordered to divine the cause, named Tamamo-no-Mae herself as its source. As Yasunari performed rites at court and cornered her, Tamamo-no-Mae could no longer hold her human shape; revealing her fox form, she fled eastward from the capital. The place she fled to was the Nasu Plain in Shimotsuke Province (the area around present-day Nasu in Tochigi Prefecture). To subdue the spirit-fox lurking in the wilds and harming people and livestock, the court dispatched warriors of the eastern provinces, Kazusa-no-suke Hirotsune and Miura-no-suke Yoshiaki. The warriors surrounded the plain, drove the fox out, and at last brought it down with arrows, so the tradition runs. The names of these warriors who slew Tamamo-no-Mae overlap with those of real Bandō warriors of the Genpei era—an intriguing case of legend and history told as one. In the story, Tamamo-no-Mae has usually been drawn as the very type of the “beauty who topples nations”—one who, through her beauty and wit, works her way to the summit of the realm and brings it down from within. Yet at the same time, once slain, she was enshrined in a small sanctuary and worshipped as a deity. Dreadful spirit-fox though she is, one cannot help being drawn to her. It is precisely this duality that keeps Tamamo-no-Mae from ending as a mere villain and makes her a figure beloved for ages.

The "white-faced, golden-furred nine-tailed fox" is exactly what the name says: a fox-spirit with a white face, golden hair, and nine tails. Today it is almost automatically understood as Tamamo-no-Mae's true form, but that image did not appear fully formed. It grew from several lines that merged over time: the nine-tailed fox of Chinese classics, the tale of Daji becoming a nine-tailed fox, the Japanese Tamamo-no-Mae legend, and the Sesshoseki tradition of Nasu. The older nine-tailed fox was not necessarily evil. The Shan Hai Jing makes the Qingqiu fox a man-eating beast, yet the nine-tailed fox was also treated in ancient China as an auspicious creature, and Japan received the idea that the nine-tailed fox could be a sacred beast. Nine tails, in other words, did not originally mark simple wickedness. They marked the extremity of otherworldly power. That power might bless kingship or destroy it; the uneasiness lies in that doubleness. Nor was Tamamo-no-Mae always the white-faced, golden-furred nine-tailed fox. Shinmei-kyo records her name, and Tamamo no Soshi gives the story of a beauty serving Retired Emperor Toba who is exposed as a fox. But in the older form the fox has two tails. Terashima Shuichi's account stresses that almost four centuries of rewriting stand between that tale and the tight identification of Tamamo with the Nine-Tailed Fox. Without that gap, the history of the legend's remaking disappears. The decisive change was the joining of Daji's fox to Tamamo. The story that Daji, beloved of King Zhou of the Shang, became a nine-tailed fox was amplified through Chinese commentaries and fiction and reached Japan early. In the late Edo period, Japanese yomihon connected Daji, the Indian Kayo-fujin, and Tamamo-no-Mae as previous bodies and incarnations of one fox. Ehon Sangoku Yofuden was especially important: it made a single fox-spirit bewitch rulers in India, China, and Japan, and fixed Tamamo-no-Mae as the Japanese manifestation of the white-faced, golden-furred nine-tailed fox. The Sesshoseki gave the fox a story after death. In the noh play Sesshoseki, the stone is not merely poisonous rock but the dwelling place of a fox-spirit still bound by obsession. A monk breaks and pacifies the stone through ritual power, changing fox-slaying into an act of salvation. Nasu Town's official tradition likewise says that the stone is the transformed fox that flew from India and China, joining the legend to the sulfurous landscape Basho described in Oku no Hosomichi. Tamamo-no-Mae does not end when she is exposed at court. She remains in Nasu as stone. Painting and performance made this doubleness visible. After the 1751 puppet play Tamamo-no-Mae Asahi no Tamoto, Tamamo appeared repeatedly in joruri and kabuki as a role that was both peerless beauty and fox-spirit. In Utagawa Kuniyoshi's Abe Yasuchika Praying over Tamamo-no-Mae, nine beams of light open behind the beauty, placing courtly grace and vulpine truth in the same image. Mirrors, reflected water, halos that become tails: all are devices for showing that Tamamo is a being who can be seen through. The terror of the white-faced, golden-furred fox lies not in teeth or claws, but in the fact that she first appears as beauty and intellect. She knows Buddhist texts, Chinese classics, waka, and court music; she answers questions without hesitation and earns trust and affection. She does not invade from outside. She is invited into the center. For that reason, force alone cannot expose her. Divination, prayer, mirrors, water, and the stories that keep retelling her are what bring the hidden fox into sight. At the same time, she is not an entirely foreign enemy. She arises from the same fox imagination as Inari's white fox, the hierarchies of tenko and kuko, the tenderness of fox-wife stories, and the fear of fox possession. As Tamamo-no-Mae she may tilt royal power; as the Sesshoseki she leaves poison in the land. Yet people pacify her, enshrine her, paint her, perform her, and keep her in memory. The white-faced, golden-furred nine-tailed fox is not evil that has been erased. It is evil that remains speakable after defeat.

This version looks at how the Sesshōseki, as a poison stone, has been told of on the noh stage and at sites of worship. In the noh play Sesshōseki, when the traveling priest Gennō approaches the stone on the Nasu Plain, a village woman appears and tells the stone’s origin; in time the stone splits open and the spirit of the fox emerges from within. The spirit repents of the evil deeds of its life, vows to attain buddhahood, saved by the priest’s ritual power, and vanishes. Here the Killing Stone is not merely a stone that kills, but something in which a lost soul dwells, to be quieted through memorial rites. Around the Killing Stone lies a desolate land where no plant grows and sulfurous smoke hangs in the air, called from of old the Sai-no-Kawara, lined with countless Jizō statues that mourn the dead. The Nasu Onsen Shrine stands close by, and at its Goshinka (Sacred Fire) Festival each May, a rite is said to be held in which the shrine’s fire is carried before the stone to quiet the mountain’s fire and the stone’s numinous power. Seen this way, the dread of the Killing Stone is rooted less in a stone that moves of its own will than in the sense of a boundary: “step past here and you lose your life.” The very zone filled with poison fumes was feared as a threshold between the world of the living and the world beyond, and it was believed that calamity reached only those who trespassed that boundary.

Grounded in the classic image from Toriyama Sekien’s Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro, it is understood as an aged leather or fur-covered utsubo quiver that raises its mouth and creeps along the ground. Its origin is not from a clear oral tale but from the tsukumogami belief that objects become ensouled with age. The accompanying text names the warrior who shot the field fox of Nasu no Hara (Tamamo-no-Mae), hinting that a quiver once emblematic of martial glory turns yokai after being forgotten. An earlier prototype is presumed in Muromachi-period Night Parade scrolls depicting object-spirits bearing bow and arrows, which Sekien reinterpreted and named. By night it slowly roams deserted roadsides and house shadows, said to make a sound like fletchings brushing. It is not strongly malicious, but when treated roughly it creaks and cries in warning, stirring memories of its former master.