The killing stone of Nasu and a fox with two tails

On the afternoon of 5 March 2022 a tourist posted a photo of the Sesshō-seki, the killing stone on the hillside above the Nasu Yumoto hot spring, and staff of the Nasu tourism association confirmed it on site: the stone had split in two. The Shimotsuke Shimbun reported that cracks had been visible in it for several years.⁶⁷ The stone has been a historic site of Tochigi Prefecture since 1957, and part of a national Place of Scenic Beauty since 2014.⁸

On 26 March the association held a memorial rite for the fox and a prayer for peace, attended by about 150 people.⁹ The association’s announcement, issued three days earlier, hoped the split would prove a good omen, from “蘇った瑞獣 神獣 九尾の狐”, the nine-tailed fox come back to life as an auspicious, divine beast, for an end to Covid and for world peace.⁹

That was the nine-tailed fox’s first meaning. The Engishiki, a Heian-period book of court procedure, lists “九尾狐 神獣也”: the nine-tailed fox is a divine beast. Terashima Shūichi, in a 2024 essay for the Japanese literature department at Mukogawa Women’s University, points out that it was originally a sign of good fortune, and Kyokutei Bakin, writing around 1810, cites Chinese books that treat it as a lucky omen.¹⁰ The fox of the killing stone was something else, and for most of the stone’s written history it didn’t have nine tails.

Eight texts, oldest first

The sections below take them backwards, from the novels to the chronicle.

Where the nine tails came from

None of the medieval texts calls Tamamo’s fox nine-tailed. Terashima notes that the Muromachi tale Tamamo no sōshi states plainly that the fox had two.¹⁷

The medieval fox had earlier lives, but not Daji’s. In the old texts it was first something in India, the tomb god of King Hanzoku in one version and his cruel queen in another, then Bao Si in China, then Tamamo in Japan.²⁰ The examiners of Feng Chaohong’s doctoral thesis at Waseda, a study of the Edo-period versions, summarise his finding that before 1766 the chain never goes further than that.²⁰ Hints came earlier: a puppet play that opened in 1751, Tamamo-no-mae asahi no tamoto, already mentions Daji at its opening.²¹ Then Kange hakkotsū, printed in 1766, put Daji into the chain, with what Terashima quotes as “金毛九尾の野干”, a golden-furred fox with nine tails.¹¹

The story was complete in Takai Ranzan’s illustrated novel Ehon Sangoku yōfuden, published in three parts between 1803 and 1805, where the fox is Daji, then Lady Kayō, then Bao Si, then Tamamo.¹¹ Nakayama Mikio, in the Heibonsha encyclopedia, says the tale of the golden nine-tailed fox grew above all after the Edo period began.¹¹

The diviner’s name moved too. The medieval texts call him Abe no Yasunari; the Nihon kokugo daijiten has Abe no Yasuchika.¹²

Sekien’s picture

Toriyama Sekien drew the stone in 1781 for Konjaku hyakki shūi. His caption says the stone is on Nasu moor in Shimotsuke, that an old fox turned into it, and that birds and beasts die if they touch it.¹³ Then it gives a date:

Ōei 2 is 1395.³ Gennō was a real monk. Gennō Shinshō, a priest of the Sōtō school of Zen, founded temples across eastern Japan, among them Senkeiji in the Nasu district in 1360.³ Hirose Yoshihiro, in the Nihon daihyakka zensho, gives 1385 as the traditional year he broke the stone.³ The reference works don’t agree on his life either: 1329 to 1400, or 1326 to 1396.³ Both years for the breaking fall inside either lifespan.

He left a word behind. Gennō is the Japanese name for a kind of iron hammer, and dictionaries trace it to this story; the earliest use the Nihon kokugo daijiten cites is from 1583.²²

What Bashō saw

The poet Matsuo Bashō came to the stone on the nineteenth day of the fourth month of Genroku 2, 6 June 1689. His companion Sora noted in his diary that the innkeeper, Gozaemon, showed them the way.¹⁸ In Oku no hosomichi, Bashō wrote:

He says nothing about the fox there. He had come across the story a week earlier, near Kurobane, where he went out to look at “犬追物の跡”, the site of the dog-shooting, and made his way through the bamboo grass of Nasu to “玉藻の前の古墳”, Lady Tamamo’s old tomb.²³ Sugiura Shōichirō’s edition places the dog-shooting site at Hachisu, north-west of Kurobane, and notes a fox mound in the grounds of the Shinohara shrine.²³

Gas from the ground

The ground there still gives off volcanic gas. Muramatsu Yōichi, in a 2021 study of the Nasu hot springs, cites measurements by Kamata and colleagues (1985) at the Sesshō-seki fumaroles: 69.7% carbon dioxide and 29.4% hydrogen sulfide, with sulfur dioxide at 0.1% or less.⁴ The Ministry of the Environment’s trail page says the hydrogen sulfide still keeps plants from growing around the stone.⁴

In the Heibonsha encyclopedia’s entry for the stone, Murai Isamu and Totsuka Hiromi suggest that legends of this kind probably arose because people thought the poison came from the rock itself.⁵ A local Edo-period writer, quoted in the Kurobane town history, had already rejected the fox: calling it the fox’s spirit was wrong, he wrote, and he judged it an arsenic stone.⁵ The medieval texts say nothing about gas. The Kagakushū speaks of the stone’s “殺氣”, its killing breath.²

Two tails

The printed tale Tamamo-no-mae monogatari survives in the National Diet Library in a Kanbun-era edition (1661 to 1673) that follows one of 1653. Its diviner, Abe no Yasunari, tells the court what it is dealing with:¹²

The Muromachi text that Terashima quotes gives different numbers, 80,000 years and seven shaku, but it too has two tails.¹⁷ So does the Nezu Museum’s scroll of the tale, which Wu Zhangdi (2019) says earlier studies take as the oldest form of the text, and so does the Suntory Museum of Art’s scroll, going by the museum’s summary.¹⁷

The tale is much older than the printing. Wu Zhangdi gives a copy made in 1470, once in the Akagi Bunko, as the oldest dated manuscript of the tale, and, following Kawashima Tomoko, a diary entry of 1433 as the first mention of a “Tamamo monogatari”.²⁴

On stage by 1503

On the nineteenth day of the ninth month of Bunki 3, in 1503, the courtier Sanjōnishi Sanetaka noted in his diary a programme of twelve plays by boy actors. Sesshōseki is on the list.¹⁶ Its author is unknown; it is sometimes attributed to Saami.¹⁶ In the play a travelling monk, Gennō, performs a rite at the stone, it splits in two, and the fox appears and promises to do no more harm.¹⁴ Neither of the two older texts has Gennō in it.

A dictionary entry about dogs

The Kagakushū, a dictionary of everyday words compiled in 1444, tells the story under a word that has nothing to do with foxes: inuoumono.² That was a samurai exercise in which riders shot at dogs let loose in a fenced ring, using blunt arrows meant not to injure them; it is first recorded in the early 1200s.²⁵

In the dictionary, the fox was first the cruel queen of King Hanzoku in India, then Bao Si in China, then Tamamo in Japan.²⁰ When the people of the time set out to drive it off, they practised first by chasing dogs from horseback, and the white fox, knowing it, turned into a stone.²¹⁵ The entry ends:

This is the 1617 printing; the National Diet Library also has a late-Muromachi manuscript copy with the same entry.² The whole entry is transcribed and translated. The compiler says he had the story from talk. A written version already existed.

The oldest text

The Shinmeikyō is a chronicle of Japan’s reigns. Sakurai Yoshirō, in the Heibonsha encyclopedia, dates it to the late fourteenth century; the Britannica Japan edition says it was compiled at the end of the Nanbokuchō period and continued to 1430.¹ Terashima calls it the first appearance of the Tamamo story.¹ The National Diet Library’s copy was written out in 1540.¹²

The story sits in the entry for Toba’s reign. It happens “in the time of the Konoe emperor”, in the first year of Kyūju, 1154, at the retired emperor’s palace.¹² The Noh libretto and the Nihon kokugo daijiten make her Toba’s favourite.¹² Most of the later tale is already there: the beautiful, learned Lady Tamamo, the emperor’s illness, the diviner Yasunari, the flight to Nasu.¹² Yasunari names her earlier lives, the tomb god to whom King Hanzoku offered a thousand heads, and Bao Si.²⁰ Miura-no-suke and Kazusa-no-suke hunt the fox on Nasu moor and bring it back to the capital. The delighted court has them shoot a red dog in their hunting clothes, and the chronicle says that is how one-rider inuoumono got its name.¹³¹⁵

The ending is not the one people know. In the fox’s belly the hunters find a golden jar of the Buddha’s relics; on its forehead, a white jewel; at the tip of its tail, two needles.¹³ Then:

The whole passage is transcribed and translated. In this version nobody turns into a stone. The body went to Uji, and only the spirit stayed on the moor.