Kojiki

The Kojiki, meaning roughly records of ancient matters, is arranged in three books that narrow steadily from cosmos to court. The first opens with the emergence of deities in the plain of high heaven and moves to Izanagi and Izanami, the pair who stir the sea with a jewelled spear and generate the islands of Japan. Izanami dies giving birth to fire; Izanagi pursues her into the land of the dead, breaks a prohibition by looking at her decaying body, flees, and purifies himself. From that washing come Amaterasu, the sun deity, and her brother Susanoo.

The central episode of the first book is Amaterasu's retreat into a rock cave after Susanoo's violence in heaven, which extinguishes the light of the world until the other deities lure her out with a mirror, a jewelled string and the ribald dance of a goddess before the cave mouth. Susanoo is expelled and lands in Izumo, where he kills an eight-headed serpent and founds a divine line whose descendant Okuninushi builds up the land and is later pressed into ceding it to the heavenly deities. The book closes with the descent of Ninigi, Amaterasu's grandson, carrying the mirror, sword and jewel that remain the imperial regalia.

Books two and three cover the sovereigns, beginning with Jimmu's campaign eastward and ending with Empress Suiko in the early seventh century. The tone shifts as it goes: the later reigns are lists of names, consorts and tombs, interspersed with love songs and revenge narratives. The whole structure argues one thing, that the ruling house descends unbroken from the sun.

The Kojiki was set down in a form that made it awkward from the day it was finished. Japanese in 712 had no writing of its own, and the available system was Chinese. Yasumaro's preface admits the difficulty directly: writing purely in Chinese would lose the sense, writing purely by sound would make the text unbearably long. What he produced uses Chinese characters sometimes for their meaning and sometimes purely for their sound, switching between the two without marking the switch, with songs and names transcribed phonetically and narrative prose written in a Chinese that is bent towards Japanese word order. The result preserves archaic Japanese vocabulary that would otherwise be lost, and is also genuinely hard to read.

That difficulty helps explain the book's long eclipse. The Nihon Shoki, written in proper classical Chinese, was the text the court lectured on and cited; the Kojiki circulated thinly, and the oldest surviving manuscript, the Shinpukuji copy made by the monk Ken'yu in 1371 and 1372, is more than six centuries later than the original.

Its recovery was the work of one scholar. Motoori Norinaga, a physician and philologist of the school of national learning, worked on the Kojiki from 1764 until 1798, some thirty-five years, producing the forty-four scroll commentary Kojiki-den, which reconstructed a reading for the whole text. Norinaga argued that the Kojiki, precisely because it was not dressed in Chinese, preserved something native that the Nihon Shoki had overwritten. Almost every later reading of the book stands on his.

Norinaga's argument had consequences he did not live to see. His claim that the Kojiki carried an authentic Japanese antiquity, uncontaminated by Chinese and Buddhist thought, was taken up in the nineteenth century by scholars and then by the state. Under State Shinto, the arrangement by which shrine practice was administered as a non-religious civic duty from the Meiji period to 1945, the descent of the imperial line from Amaterasu was taught in schools as historical fact, and the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki supplied the narrative. The mythical founding date of 660 BCE was made a national holiday. Textbooks presented the age of the gods as the opening chapter of Japanese history.

Scholars who questioned this paid for it. Tsuda Sokichi, who argued from the 1910s onward that the mythological sections were court compositions of the sixth and seventh centuries rather than records of events, saw his books banned and was prosecuted in 1940.

After 1945 the arrangement was dismantled. The occupation directives separated shrines from the state, the emperor publicly disclaimed divinity, and the mythic chronology left the curriculum. Tsuda's approach became the mainstream position. The Kojiki is now read as literature, as the foundational document of Japanese mythology, and as evidence for how an eighth-century court wanted its own origins understood. Shrines draw on its deities and its narratives, and it is quoted at festivals and in shrine literature, but no Shinto body treats it as revealed or binding in the way scripture functions elsewhere.