Kojiki: Record of Ancient Matters
Japan’s oldest surviving book, presented to the throne in 712 and never since displaced. It begins before there is anything to stand on: three deities come into being in the Plain of High Heaven and hide their persons, and a brother and sister stir the brine with a jewelled spear until an island forms from what drips off the point. It ends, many generations of genealogy and song later, in the sixth century, with a court that has become recognisably a court.
In between: Izanagi follows his wife into the land of the dead and looks at her by the light of a comb-tooth he has set alight, and runs. Amaterasu shuts herself in a rock-cave and the world goes dark until a goddess dances on an upturned tub and the gods laugh so loudly that she looks out. Susanoo makes the eight-forked serpent drunk on eight vats of sake, cuts it to pieces, and finds a sword in its tail. A hare flayed by crocodiles is healed with cattail pollen. Yamato Takeru is sent by his father to kill everyone who will not submit, kills them by trickery and by dressing as a woman, and dies as a white bird on the plain of Nobono, singing of the mountains of Yamato.
The complete work in a new English translation, all three books and Yasumaro’s preface: the myths, the imperial genealogies as Yasumaro recorded them, and one hundred and thirteen songs set as verse. Two hundred and thirty-one endnotes cover the deities, the puns the compiler is preserving, the readings that are still disputed, and the places where the chronicle is quietly making a political case.
