KOJIKI

Kojiki: translation

(Record of Ancient Matters)

(ca. 712)

The oldest surviving written text in Japanese, theKojikiwas first presented at the emperor’s court in Nara in 712, two years after the founding of that imperial city. It is basically a chronicle in three parts, divided into 114 shorter sections, covering the gods and the mythological creation of the world (with particular attention to Japan itself ) moving through the deeds of legendary emperors down to those of more recent history. In a preface written in Chinese prose, the apparent compiler of the chronicle, Ō no Yasumaro, says that the emperor Temmu required that such a work be assembled after his victory in the Jinshin War in 672. Yasumaro says that he recorded the text from material memorized and transmitted orally by Hieda no Are.Most scholars believe that Are, and probably Yasumaro as well, also had access to sixthcentury written sources now lost, one being theTeiki(a genealogy of Japanese emperors), and the other theKyūji(a compilation of stories and anec-dotes of the imperial court). But it is also certain that theKojikicontains some material that was in existence orally before the introduction of writing to Japan—in particular some of the manyuta, or songs and poems, embedded in the text. The Japanese text makes use of Chinese characters in ways that became conventional in later Japanese writing. Sometimes the Chinese characters are used as ideograms, the symbol standing for the concept, pronounced as a Japanese word rather than a Chinese word. Sometimes the symbols are used as phonograms, so that the sound associated with the symbol was what the writer intended, and a number of Chinese characters might be strung together to form a multi-syllable Japanese word. This occurs chiefly in theutaor songs. Sometimes a combination of the two styles is used, as when the name of a god is spelled out phonetically in the context of a prose anecdote made up mainly of ideograms.

The first part of theKojiki, sections 1–46, depicts the age of the gods and the myth of creation.The heaven and the earth are created. Then Izanagi (the male principle) and Izanami (the female principle) are chosen by the gods to generate the world, an act depicted as procreation and described with a good deal of sexual imagery. Their coupling gives birth to the Japanese islands. The text moves on to explore the relationships among the gods. The second part of the text deals with the 15 legendary emperors, beginning with Jinmu in 600 B.C.E. and ending with Ōjin in 310 C.E. The third volume of theKojikibegins with the reign of Nintoku in 313 and ends with the historical reign of the Empress Suiko, the 33rd sovereign, from 592 to 628. The second and third parts of the text follow a pattern of first presenting genealogical material in prose, then includingutaassociated with the time, then adding anecdotes or other stories that had been collected by the editors or handed down orally. The third part of the text deals largely with the historical struggle in the fourth and fifth centuries between the Imperial Yamato clan and other local Japanese clans. The gods who are shown taking part in the action are basically clan gods. Thus the third part of theKojikipresents what is essentially a political myth. The gods represented are gods of Izumo (from Japan itself) and the gods ofTakamano-hara(the “Plain of High Heaven”). The Izumo gods represent the clans who fought the Yamato and are ultimately subjugated by the high gods, chief among whom is the sun goddess Amaterasu, presented as the progenitor of the Yamato emperors. With this it becomes clear that one of the chief purposes of theKojikiis to legitimize imperial power, specifically the right of the Yamato to rule over other Japanese groups. Having broken their tributary relationship with China in the seventh century, the Japanese rulers were intent on establishing a new imperial worldview modeled on the Chinese system, and in order to do so they needed a myth that legitimized their sovereignty by tracing the ancestry of the Yamato emperor to the gods themselves.

TheKojikiwas not well known in the early centuries of its existence, but since the 18th century in particular it has been seen as the sacred book of the Shinto religion. But its importance for Japanese culture goes far beyond that distinction. It preserves ancient Japanese stories and myths and provides valuable information about the reigns of some of the earliest historical emperors. Many more recent works of literature allude to the legends of theKojiki, while the poems and stories it contains are also valuable and respected as early literary texts in their own right. The poems of theKojikiare Japan’s first recorded poetic expressions, and from them ultimately are developed the later forms of Japanese poetry orwaka. Finally, the form of the text, containing prose interspersed with poetry, would be a typical feature of Japanese literature throughout the Middle Ages.

■ Keene, Donald.Seeds in the Heart: Japanese Literature from Earliest Times to the Late Sixteenth Century. Vol. 1 ofA History of Japanese Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

■ Kato, Shuichi.A History of Japanese Literature: From the Man’yōshū to Modern Times. New Abridged Edition. Translated and Edited by Don Sanderson. Richmond, U.K.: Japan Library, 1997.

■ Miner, Earl, Hiroko Odagiri, and Robert E. Morrell.The Princeton Companion to Classical Japanese Literature. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985.