What is the nine-tailed fox?
The nine-tailed fox is a fox yokai with nine tails. It appears in the ancient Chinese geography Classic of Mountains and Seas, and in China it was sometimes even considered an auspicious sign. Later, however, it came to be described as an evil yokai that takes the form of a beautiful woman and brings ruin to nations. One legend says it bewitched kings in India and China before crossing over to Japan.
Tamamo-no-Mae and the Killing Stone
In Japan, the best-known legend says that Tamamo-no-Mae, a woman of extraordinary beauty who served the retired Emperor Toba at the end of the Heian period, was really a nine-tailed fox. When the emperor fell ill with a mysterious disease, an onmyoji diviner exposed Tamamo-no-Mae’s true identity. The fox fled to the plain of Nasu (Tochigi Prefecture) but was killed there, and its grudge is said to have become the Sessho-seki (Killing Stone), a rock that gives off poison.
The Killing Stone splits
The Sessho-seki still stands in Nasu, Tochigi Prefecture, in an area where volcanic gas seeps from the ground, and the poet Matsuo Basho visited it on his journey recorded in The Narrow Road to the Deep North. In March 2022 the stone was found split in two, setting off a wave of posts on social media asking whether the nine-tailed fox had been revived.
