Tamaki Sakai

Tamaki Sakai is a minor character starring in the third episode arc of Ayakashi: Japanese Classic Horror, "Bake Neko". While her role is relatively small compared to that of the other characters, her history and connections have a huge impact on the story and prove influential in revealing the dark history of the Sakai family.

Appearance
Tamaki has long, straight black hair worn in a hime-cut, a style popular since the Heian Era. She has black eyes and very pale skin. Tamaki's outfit consists of white clothes in the anime, though her character image (see right) has her wearing a pink and red kimono with a large white robe over them.

Tamaki was relatively young and beautiful for a woman her age, and was the object of Yoshiyuki's lust twenty-five years ago. Her imprisonment and her abuse at the hands of her captor, however, eventually gave her a frail, emaciated appearance.

Personality
When she was alive, Tamaki was a very caring and self-sacrificing person, willing to help others at her expense. Her companionship with a young cat led her to giving it her food while saving none for herself, and forcing it to flee to protect the cat from her abusers. Her sorrow, combined with the cat's regret of not being able to save Tamaki, turned the cat into a bakeneko.

History
Tamaki was a young and beautiful maiden about to be sacrificed by people from her village. Yoshiyuki, then the head of the Sakai household, encountered Tamaki by chance and, overcome with lust, abducted her and imprisoned her in a secret basement where he abused her, both physically and sexually. Tamaki was also subjected to emotional and mental abuse by the ladies of the household like Sato and Lady Mizue Sakai. Her only companion was a young orphaned cat whose mother and her kittens were killed after Yoshiyuki discovered their hideout in the basement.

Hoping the cat would eventually escape in her stead, Tamaki gave it her food, suffering starvation in the process. One day Yoshiyuki's elder son, Yoshikuni, went inside the basement in secret and attempted to rape her, but he was caught by his father. Yoshiyuki construed his son's rape of Tamaki as evidence of her seduction and beat her to death. The cat Tamaki befriended tried to protect her but was forced to escape at her behest. After her death, her body was discarded in a well outside in the court grounds by a younger Sasaoka.

The memory of Tamaki began to haunt the Sakai family twenty-five years later when Tamaki's cat reappears in the form of a bakeneko. Overcome with grief and regret over the cruel death of its master, the bakeneko began killing off the family one by one in revenge, starting with Mao Sakai, the family's sole daughter. Kusuriuri, an exorcist posing as a medicine seller, eventually discovers the truth behind the bakeneko's murderous rampage and kills it out of mercy, liberating its soul and turning the cat back to normal in the process.

Two survivors, a young maidservant named Kayo and a young samurai, Odajima Sakai, erect a burial shrine in honor of the bakeneko and Tamaki to atone for their family's sins, and depart for a new life. Before leaving, Kusuriuri manages to catch a glimpse of the spirits of Tamaki and the bakeneko (now a young kitten) emerging into the outside world.

Trivia

 * Mao Sakai, the young daughter of the Sakai household, bears a similar appearance to Tamaki when her hair is down.


 * Tamaki's name is composed by combining two words: "Tama" (means jewel) and ki (means spirit or mind). When put together, it means "treasured spirit".


 * While in western states the color white is a symbol of innocence and purity, in Japan and other Asian countries, white represents death, which fits Tamaki's fate in Bake Neko.
 * Mao's corpse is disposed of in a well on the Sakai compound. The word 'Sakai' is variously written, most usually with the characters for 'rice wine (sake)' and 'well', and the Sakai clan's Kamon, or emblem, is a an encircled well (maru ni igeta).