Tamamo-no-Mae

This is the fox story at imperial scale, and it ends with a rock that killed everything that touched it — a rock that exists, and that split open in 2022 to a national media event.

The favourite

At the court of Emperor Konoe, in the 1140s, there is a woman called Tamamo-no-Mae.

She is flawlessly beautiful. She is uncannily learned — she can answer any question put to her, on any subject, which at a court that valued erudition above almost everything made her irresistible.

She becomes the emperor's favourite.

And the emperor falls ill. Mysteriously, and worse each night, and no physician can name it.

The diviner

They call in Abe no Yasuchika — an onmyōji of the Abe line.

Which is Seimei's line. And Seimei, by the most famous version of his own legend, was born of a fox.

So this is the fox-born diviner's descendants hunting a fox, four generations on, in the same court.

Yasuchika runs the divination and exposes her: a nine-tailed fox, golden.

The hunt

She flees east.

And the court sends cavalry after her — the warriors Kazusa-no-suke and Miura-no-suke — who run her down on the Nasu plain, in Tochigi.

Dying, her spirit enters a stone.

The Sesshō-seki — the Killing Stone — which thereafter released poisonous gas continuously, killing everything that touched it.

And here's the part that makes the legend land: Nasu is volcanic. There is genuinely a stretch of ground there that vents sulphurous gas, where birds and small animals do die.

The legend didn't invent the killing ground. It explained one.

Generations later the monk Gennō exorcises the stone and frees the spirit, which is the Noh play Sesshōseki.

Her CV

The medieval elaborations give her previous lives, and they're audacious.

She was Daji — the concubine who brought down the Shang dynasty in China.

She was Lady Kayō, in India.

And then Japan.

Which makes her a transnational force of dynastic collapse, working her way east across the known world, one civilization at a time.

That's medieval Japan writing itself into world history through a monster — claiming a place on the same list as China and India by having been attacked by the same fox.

And there was probably a real woman

The scholarly conjecture — offered as conjecture — proposes historical models.

Fujiwara no Nariko, an empress consort entangled in a succession conflict. Or Fujiwara no Tokuko, Toba's politically formidable consort.

Read that way, the nine tails are court-faction polemic. A real woman's real influence, demonized.

And it's the grandest example in all of fox-lore of a pattern that runs right through it: power explained as fox-power.

Except that usually the accusation goes downward — at a farm family whose fortunes improved suspiciously, at a village household nobody would marry into.

This one is aimed upward, at a consort, at the top of the state.

Same weapon. Different target.

The stone split in 2022

March 5, 2022. The Sesshō-seki at Nasu broke in two.

The sober cause: pre-existing cracks, water penetration, freeze-thaw.

The national reaction: *the fox is free.*

It trended. It was a delighted, entirely tongue-in-cheek panic, and it went around the world.

And then, on March 26, 2022, local priests performed an appeasement ceremony at the fractured site — prayers and ritual objects.

Which is worth stating plainly: a spirit-pacification rite, for a fox demon, conducted in the twenty-first century, three weeks after a rock cracked.

Whatever anybody actually believed, the ceremony happened.

Bashō had visited that stone centuries earlier and written about it in Oku no Hosomichi.

The legend isn't historical. It's current.