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Tamamizu Monogatari, a unique love story

This article, unlike most of my recent longer pieces, was not planned in advance. I learned about the subject very recently, and instantly realized I absolutely have to introduce it to more people, the previously posted schedule be damned. The Tale of Tamamizu (玉水物語, Tamamizu Monogatari) is a story about a fox turning into a human, but a rather unconventional one, filled with an unusual degree of sympathy for the eponymous protagonist and focused on a rather unique relationship. In addition to summarizing it in detail and explaining the possible inspirations behind it, I will also try to explain why the tale found a new life on social media as a, broadly speaking, lgbt narrative, and why I think there is a compelling case to be made for such an interpretation. Unless stated otherwise, all images used through the article are taken from the Kyoto University Rare Materials Digital Archive, on whose website you can view scans of the original Tamamizu Monogatari.

The Tale of Tamamizu, also known as The Contest of Autumn Leaves (Momiji Awase) is an example of otogi-zōshi, illustrated prose narrative. The story was presumably originally composed in the Muromachi period (1335-1573), and it survives in multiple copies dated either to the early Edo period or to the end of the Japanese “middle ages” directly preceding it. The identity of the author (or authors) is unknown. Despite its apparent popularity in the past, it seems no major studies of the tale of Tamamizu have ever been conducted. A streamlined translation (or rather an extensive summary) was published online by Kyoto University Library in 2001 and can be accessed here. In 2018, a full translation, as well as a brief introduction, were prepared for the anthology Monsters, Animals, and Other Worlds. A Collection of Short Medieval Japanese Tales. Still, it doesn't seem either sparked all that much interest in Tamamizu, despite the story’s obvious modern appeal. Since the tale of Tamamizu is not well known, I will start with a detailed summary. I am consistently using female pronouns for Tamamizu after she transforms, as does the older translation. The other English translation switches between female and male pronouns. I will explain in the final paragraph of the article why I made the decision to follow the former. The Tale of Tamamizu The story of Tamamizu does not start with the eponymous character, but rather with a certain mr. Takayanagi from Toba. He is troubled, as while he is already 30, he has no children. He decides the only choice is to pray to gods and buddhas. This actually does work, and his wife becomes pregnant, and after the expected period gives birth to a daughter. She doesn’t get a name at any point in the story. The girl’s birth is followed by a timeskip. As we learn, she was distinguished by twenty five features associated with beauty. This is apparently a reference to the belief that a buddha possessed thirty two specific physical traits; the number might have been altered to twenty five because of a popular group of twenty five bodhisattvas associated with Amida. By the time she reached the age of fifteen or so, she also developed great skill in composing poetry in both Japanese and Chinese. Her parents at some point decided that it would be ideal to send her to serve in the emperor’s court in the future. The girl spends most of the time in awe of the blooming of flowers, the wind and other similar phenomena, as one would expect from a literary character of similar status. She maintains her own flower garden, and spends much of her time there.

On one of the days when she visited it alongside her friend Tsukisae, the daughter of her nurse, she caught the attention of a fox. The fox is, at this point in time, not yet Tamamizu. He wishes he could introduce himself to the girl. He considers the standard method - transforming into a nobleman - but he realizes this would likely sadden the girl’s parents, and would tarnish her reputation. He falls into despair. It does not exactly help that his attempts at visiting the garden again end up poorly - on the way there, he gets pelted with stones and then, after trying again, shot with an arrow. Still, he continued to hope to meet with the girl. An opportunity finally arose through a lucky coincidence. Another family living in the same area had multiple sons, but no daughters, much to the parents chagrin. They loudly lamented that they wished they had at least one girl among the children. The fox overheard that and realized it might be an opportunity. He transformed himself into a teenage girl (curiously, the story specifically puts her at the exact same age as the unnamed second protagonist), and enters their house. She explains that she is an orphan, and while passing by she overheard the family’s woes. She offers to become their daughter. The couple instantly agrees.

The fox spends some time living with her adoptive family, though she gets sad easily and keeps bursting into tears. After some time, they offer that they will find her a husband in due time, but she reacts to that poorly, and eventually suggests she would prefer to become the servant of a noble lady. Her adoptive mother agrees this isn’t a bad idea, and reveals that her younger sister is a lady-in-waiting of the daughter of a local noble, mr. Takayanagi. She suggests the fox could become her attendant too. She is overjoyed at this prospect, and is soon sent to Takayanagi’s mansion to meet with his daughter. The girl receives her new attendant warmly, and gives her a nickname, Tamamizu-no-mae (Tamamizu for short). They get along really well, and Tamamizu gets to partake in her various activities, serves her food and drinks, and even sleeps in the same bed (Tsukisae does too, though). While Tamamizu does remarkably well as a human, some of her fox habits remain. Most notably, she is really afraid of dogs. Her lady sympathizes with her plight, and actually bans dogs from her household. This is a much welcome change from Tamamizu’s point of view, though apparently some other members of the staff start to view her as a coward because of this, and simultaneously resent her closeness with the girl. The bond between Tamamizu and the girl reaches a new level when on a moonlight night they spontaneously compose a poem together. It deals with longing. We are told it was followed up by multiple other poems, which are not quoted in the story. Eventually the girl gets tired and heads to her room. However, Tamamizu remains outside gazing at the moon and eventually starts crying, unsure what fate awaits her. Tsukisae, who was inside all along, actually becomes concerned about Tamamizu, and says she feels sorry for her, correctly identifying the cause of her sorrow as love for an unidentified party. She shares her thoughts with their lady (in the form of a poem, of course). The latter summons Tamamizu inside, and soon all three go to bed together. Tamamizu is still overwhelmed by her feelings and can’t fall asleep, though. Tamamizu continues to serve the girl for the next three years. She also remains in touch with her adoptive mother, who sends her letters and new clothes every now and then. One day, many visitors arrived in the house for a friendly competition. The winner will be the person with the most beautiful collection of autumn leaves. Tamamizu decides she must find some for her mistress to give her an advantage. To accomplish that, at night for the first time in years she turns back into a fox, and leaves to visit her siblings. Not the adoptive ones, though. As it turns out, she has two fox brothers, one younger and one older. She actually hasn’t visited them in so long they assumed she died and held funerary services for her in the meanwhile. They are overjoyed to learn that is not the case, and after learning about her current life agree to help her with finding unique leaves. She tells them to leave them on the veranda of her mistress’ mansion, and reassures them it’s safe for foxes to be there thanks to the earlier decision to not allow dogs on the premises. After the visit Tamamizu returns home in her human form. Tsukisae and her mistress ask her where she has been, and she jokes about meeting with a “dubious fellow” (which, to be fair, is not even a lie, given the typical folkloric portrayal of foxes). This in turn leads to more jokes, revolving around Tamamizu no longer thinking about her mistress. She feels distressed by this suggestion.

Tamamizu’s brothers in the meanwhile succeed in their search for thrilling leaves. One of them found a branch with five-colored leaves decorated with the Lotus Sutra (as you probably know, one of the main religious texts in the Mahayana Buddhist tradition). Tamamizu is overjoyed, and instantly brings them to her mistress. The girl received plenty of leaves from other people in the meanwhile, but all of them pale in comparison. She is so happy about the gift that she requests Tamamizu to also write poems meant to accompany the presentation of the collection. She protests that she is unsuitable, but eventually accepts this honor and gets down to work. The parents of the girl came along to watch her write, and both of them concluded she is exceptionally skilled. She ends up providing five poems, one for each color of leaves gathered. They are subsequently combined by these the girl wrote herself.

Obviously, the main characters’ joint entry wins the competition. This grants the girl such fame that the emperor declares she should come to his court. Since her father is not affluent enough to pay for traveling there, he bestows additional estates upon him to make that possible. Even Tamamizu gets her own estate, Kakuta in Settsu Province. However, she decides it will be for the best to give it to her adoptive parents. Shortly after that, Tamamizu’s adoptive mother falls sick. She leaves her mistress to attend to her, but it did not help much and her condition kept worsening. Therefore, her stay had to be extended over and over again. This predicament worries her mistress, who sends her a letter to let her know that it is boring and gloomy without her around, and implores her to return as soon as her mother’s condition improves. Tsukisae is similarly concerned. Both of them voice their concerns through poems, which at this point should not be surprising for the reader.

Tamamizu of course appreciates these displays of sympathy, but she cannot return, so in response she only reassures both of them that she will meet with them again as soon as possible. Shortly after that, the mother’s condition worsened yet again. The entire family laments through the entire day, but eventually everyone manages to fall asleep - save for Tamamizu. In the middle of the night Tamamizu notices that an old, hairless fox entered the house. She quickly realizes that he was her paternal uncle (a fox uncle, that is. Not a relative of her adoptive parents). The illness was his doing, as she quickly realizes. Tamamizu requests him to leave her adoptive mother alone. However, the old fox says he cannot do that, as the illness is his act of revenge against her family, since her father killed his child. He concluded it is only right to make his daughter sick so that she dies too.

Tamamizu admits that this makes sense in theory, but she points out that acting upon desire for revenge will only bring bad karma, and bad karma from previous lives is why both of them were born as foxes in the first place. She offers the old fox a crash course in Buddhist ethics, and warns him that accumulating even more bad karma might lead to someone eventually killing him too, and to yet more rebirths in one of the three realms which are best to avoid (animals, hungry spirits, hell).

The old fox notes following buddhas is for humans, not for those born in other realms of rebirth (he’s not entirely wrong, humans are generally held to be in the optimal condition to seek enlightenment; animals must follow instinct and thus end up accumulating bad karma, devas are to preoccupied with celestial bliss), but eventually he relents and agrees that it would be wrong to kill the woman because of the actions of her father. He concludes that it would not even make him feel better, since his child would remain dead. He tells Tamamizu that evidently he was able to meet her because of good karma acquired in a past life, asks her to pray for his deceased child, and leaves, announcing he shall become a monk reciting nenbutsu from now on. Tamamizu did what he asked for, and even performed a funerary service for her late cousin. With the problem solved, her adoptive mother returned to good health. She was therefore free to meet with her mistress again. She was elevated to the rank of chujo no kimi, the foremost among servants. However, despite her mistress’ best efforts to make her feel appreciated, she was suffering from persistent bouts of melancholy. She wished she could confess her love and consummate the relationship, but she concluded that since she kept her identity secret for so long, it would be no longer possible to reveal it without losing the acceptance of the girl. She decides she must disappear. However, before that she prepares a long poem explaining her predicament.

She placed it in a box, and gave it to her mistress, explaining that it should only be opened if something happens to her. She then broke down in tears.

Tamamizu’s mistress does not fully understand what is happening, and asks if she perhaps is worried about their planned relocation to the imperial court. However, Tamamizu denies that and guarantees she will accompany her on the journey there. Her mistress starts crying too, and says she has hoped they will always be together. Shortly after, the day of the journey came. Tamamizu’s mistress and mr. Takayanagi, now recognized as a lord, were certain that she went with them, but as soon as they reached their destination it turned out she was nowhere to be found. Days upon days of grieving followed. Eventually, the girl realized that she had no choice but to open the box. From the poem contained within, she learned everything about Tamamizu, from the day they first met all the way up to the disappearance. It explained how she hoped to protect her mistress through her current life and beyond, but had to give up after realizing it was all in vain. In the final words of the poem, she firmly refers to her with the name she was given by the girl - Tamamizu.

The poem moves her deeply, but the story does not have a happy ending - we never learn what happened to Tamamizu afterwards.

Tamamizu’s forerunners

It is agreed that much like the considerably more famous Tamamo no Mae, Tamamizu in part depends on earlier Chinese literature about foxes. Not exactly on the same sort of stories, though - she is not exactly a malevolent seductress, to put it lightly. The key to finding her forerunners is the scene in the beginning when the still nameless fox considers transforming into a male suitor at first, before settling on the form of a female attendant, and the erudition she displays through the story. An argument can be made that this is conscious engagement with a very specific type of older fox story, largely forgotten today. In Tang China, fox stories enjoyed considerable popularity. You may remember that I mentioned this in passing a few months ago in another fox-themed article. One of the genres popular at the time was focused on fox suitors. There are many stories like that, but they largely follow a similar plot: a male fox falls in love with a human girl, takes the form of a dashing literatus and requests marriage. The girl’s family rejects the proposal, as despite charm and erudition the fox is ultimately an outsider with no family, and doesn’t depend on the well established institution of matchmaking. Afterwards, he typically tries to win the girl over with some sort of trick, and fails in the process, thus meeting his demise when his real identity is inevitably exposed.

In some cases, twists are introduced and the fox is effectively exploited by the family: for example, in the story about a certain mr. Hu (a common surname which is a homonym for the word for fox) and the granddaughter of the official Li Yuangong, the Li family agrees for the girl to be taught by the fox, and even asks him for advice on various matters, just to kill him once he outlived his usefulness.

Zhou Wenju's painting A Literary Garden (文苑图, Wenyuantu), showing a group of discouring Tang literati (wikimedia commons)

Many literati came from humble backgrounds, and only attained high positions thanks to success in the imperial examinations. However, their advances were often frowned upon by nobles, who saw them as upstarts. Therefore, faking a more notable origin was widespread to secure a better position in the high strata of society. All of this is reflected in the stories of the fox suitors. Xiaofei Kang, who wrote my favorite monograph about Chinese fox beliefs, notes that the stories might have effectively been a way to cope with everyday anxieties. In other words, perhaps the fox self insert fails so that the real person sharing his precarious status can succeed.

Another aspect of the Tale of Tamamizu which offers a clue about its origins is the focus on Buddhism, and its role in the lives of non-humans in particular. Tamamizu evidently attains a considerable familiarity with Buddhist doctrine, to the point the old fox basically seems to perceive her as thinking more like a human than a fox. Evidently, she doesn’t think being an animal should prevent one from seeking good karma. This seems to reflect a medieval Buddhist phenomenon. Roughly from the Insei period (1086-1185) up to the eighteenth century, and especially between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, the dominant esoteric schools of Buddhism propagated the doctrine of hongaku (本覺), “original enlightenment”. This idea originates in an earlier Buddhis text, Awakening of Faith in the Mahāyāna. According to proponents of this idea all living beings, even plants, possessed an innate “Buddha nature”, as did natural features like mountains. They were innately capable of attaining enlightenment, or innately enlightened outright. Religion influences art, so it has been argued that the spread of new stories about animals behaving like people in the Muromachi period had a distinctly Buddhist dimension.

The modern reception of Tamamizu

Despite the fascinating themes of the story of Tamamizu, it only found a greater degree of modern recognition in 2019, outside of academic circles at that. I'm surprised it took so long, since when you think about it, the sensibilities of the author indeed seem surprisingly modern. The narrator even reassures us Tamamizu’s human form is the same age as the object of her affection, anticipating what sorts of shipping discourse could arise 700 years later. Anyway, in 2019 a fragment of the story was the subject of one of the classical Japanese literature questions from the National Center Test for University Admissions, a standardized university entrance exam held across Japan each January from 1990 to 2020. This obviously exposed an enormous number of people to it, not just exam-takers. Following this event, a Tamamizu fad seemingly swept social media and pixiv (curiously, there’s a single piece of art there which predates the phenomenon by six years; op actually updated the description in 2019 to say they are happy more people learned about the story). There’s even a Tamamizu Monogatari tag on Dynasty Scans as a result. It’s worth pointing out the wikipedia entry of the story was written in 2019 as well. Most curiously apparently a research project focused on Tamamizu, Kahoko Iguru’s Border transgression between species and gender as observed in “Tamamizu Monogatari”, received a grant in the same year too (source; more info here). It doesn’t seem the results have been published yet. I will keep you updated if that changes, obviously. I am actually surprised I didn’t notice the Tamamizu phenomenon back then, even though 2019 Antonia was distinctly more terminally online than 2023 Antonia is. It’s worth noting that Tamamizu’s fame didn’t fade away. The online following the story gained was referenced in an Asahi Shimbun article a year later. A quick survey of social media will show you there are people still talking about Tamamizu today. People who aren’t me, that is. What made Tamamizu so unexpectedly popular - arguably more than the story has been in the past few centuries - in recent years? Most of the linked sources relatively neutrally state that people perceive it as a “unique love story”. Social media posts are often considerably more direct: for many people, the appeal lies in the realization the Tale of Tamamizu is probably the closest to a lesbian love story in the entire corpus of medieval Japanese literature. I won’t deny this is in no small part its appeal for me too. Note this is not an universal sentiment by any means, though. It is difficult to tell if this was the intent of the medieval author(s), of course. It is obviously impossible to deny that women attracted to women existed in medieval Japan, as is the case in every society since the dawn of history. However, they left little, if any, trace in textual sources. As pointed out by Bernard Faure, in Japan in the past as in many other historical societies “sexuality without men is properly unthinkable” and therefore received no coverage. While there is plenty of Japanese Buddhist literature dealing with male homosexuality (trust me though, you do not want to read it; I’ve included a brief explanation why in the bibliography), there is basically nothing when it comes to women. The only possible exception is what some authors argue might be a medieval depiction of a lesbian couple in Tengu Zōshi, a work I plan to discuss in more detail next month, but note that this would be only an example of condemnation, since this work is a religious polemic dealing with vices of the clergy.

The supposed lesbian couple from Tengu Zōshi; image from Haruko Wakayabashi's The Seven Tengu Scrolls: Evil and the Rhetoric of Legitimacy in Medieval Japanese Buddhism; reproduced here for educational purposes only.

This sort of absence of evidence is a recurring pattern through history - you might recall my own attempts to find out what Bronze Age Mesopotamian sources have to say on this matter. Before the Meiji period, when the term dōseiai (同性愛) was coined as a calque of Charles Gilbert Chaddok’s freshly invented label “homosexual”, there wasn’t even a distinct Japanese term which could be applied to lesbian relationships. Once again, this does not indicate this phenomenon did not exist - but it does indicate that due to extreme levels of sexism in the perception of both sexuality and relationships it was difficult to even imagine for the average author. Faure suggests the prevailing attitude was presumably similar as in continental Buddhism, in which lesbian love “was at best perceived as a poor imitation of heterosexual relations—or a preparation for them—and as such condemned” at least in monastic rules. To put it bluntly, only penetrative sex was regarded as real.

And yet, in spite of this, I do not think it is wrong to wonder if perhaps what seems like subtext to a modern reader is actually intentional. This is obviously a reach, but given that relationships between women - not even romantic ones - were historically not a major concern of most authors, I would argue it is not impossible that a work which revolves virtually entirely around the relationships between female characters was written by a woman. Perhaps a woman romantically interested in other women, even. Even more boldly, I’d ponder if perhaps the ambiguous gender of the fox before transformation was meant to make the romance palatable to general audiences. Note that while foxes transforming is a mainstay of both Japanese and Chinese literature, the change of gender is actually quite uncommon in such stories, making this single reference all the more unusual. Granted, gender change is hardly a major focus in the story of Tamamizu. The only real indication the fox is male is the decision to take a male human form at first, but beyond that, things get muddy to the point the matter of gender in the story evidently warranted an actual study, as I pointed out earlier. As you’ve noticed, this matter was approached in different ways by translators too. I personally think the most important factor is the fact Tamamizu refers to herself with this name in the final poem. This name is intimately tied to the distinctly female identity she took. Whoever she was in the beginning, by the end of the story she is clearly Tamamizu. If one felt particularly bold a case perhaps even be made that Tamamizu can be read as a trans woman based on this, perhaps. I think simply disregarding the brief reference to a male form is valid too, though. Even if these arguments were to be refuted fully, I would argue that there is a further reason why at the very least reinterpreting the story as dealing with a gay relationship is not against the spirit of the original work. As I outlined, the tale of Tamamizu seems to draw inspiration from a very specific genre of fox stories, in which foxes are essentially a metaphor for people seeking relationships which were frowned upon. Obviously, the fact that Tamamizu is not a human by default makes any relationship she would be involved in somewhat unusual and frowned upon, but that does not assign a different metaphorical meaning to her struggle. Is Tamamizu even really fully a fox and not a human at all by the time she writes the confession of her love, though? The old fox seems to basically dispute if she still thinks like an animal. We also know that she maintained her human form for so long her biological relatives assumed she had passed away. She also found acceptance of virtually every single human character in the story - save for herself, that is. It’s also not like it’s hard to reinterpret her struggle specifically with the inability to consummate the relationship through the lens of the medieval Buddhist views of female sexuality, rather than through the lens of the general view that relationships between human and transformed foxes were doomed to failure. To paraphrase Cynthia Eller’s evergreen quote about futile search for nonexistent matriarchal prehistory in ancient texts, I do not think an invented wlw past can give anyone a future, but at the same time I do not think it means we should conclude that nobody ever had similar experiences in the past, or that we can relate with works even in ways their authors did not intend. For this reason, I would ultimately argue in favor of embracing the Tale of Tamamizu as a narrative which can be read as a lesbian love story.

Bibliography

Bernard Faure, The Red Thread. Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality (please note: read this book very cautiously since multiple content warnings apply. Faure is a remarkably progressive author, so it’s not about his personal attitude or anything. The problem is that it is not possible to deny much of the Japanese Buddhist discourse about homosexuality had little to do with modern notion of gay relationships, and essentially amounts to explaining when exploitation of children is a pious act)

Rania Huntington, Alien Kind. Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese Narrative (some sort of explicit content warning applies here too, though mostly because some of the discussed works are trashy Qing period erotica. More funny than anything.)

Xiaofei Kang, The Cult of the Fox: Power, Gender, and Popular Religion in Late Imperial and Modern China

Keller Kimbrough and Haruo Shirane (eds.), Monsters, Animals, and Other Worlds. A Collection of Short Medieval Japanese Tales

Jacqueline Stone, Medieval Tendai hongaku thought and the new Kamakura Buddhism: A reconsideration

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Michael E.