Six Hundred and Fifty-nine Years of Silence

The Kojiki was presented to the Japanese court in 712. The oldest copy of it that anybody has is this one, made by a monk in Nagoya in 1371 and 1372. Between those two dates there is almost nothing.

The manuscript itself supplies the one link. Its colophon says that Ken'yu, a monk of Shinpuku-ji, copied the first and third books in 1371 from a manuscript written in 1266 by the court aristocrat Onakatomi Sadayo, that Shin'yu oversaw the work, and that the second book followed in 1372. Sadayo's manuscript is lost. So is everything between 712 and 1266. The chain of transmission for Japan's oldest surviving book is a copy of a copy, with five and a half centuries represented by a single sentence about a manuscript nobody can consult.

That is not unusual for an early text, but it is worth stating plainly, because the Kojiki is often discussed as though the eighth-century wording were directly available. It is available only through this book and the later copies collated against it. Every modern critical edition takes the Shinpukuji manuscript as its base and works outward. The consequence is that a question about what the Kojiki says in a particular passage is, in the first instance, a question about what a fourteenth-century monk wrote down.