The Engishiki.
A fifty-book administrative code completed in 927, and book eight contains twenty-seven norito — the oldest sustained liturgical Japanese in existence. Its register of shrines is still how a shrine demonstrates it is ancient, and priests today read prayers descended from these texts.
Open the book — context →
The Kojiki & Nihon Shoki.
The age of the gods written down — myth, genealogy, and the birth of the islands.
Open the book — context →
The Fudoki.
In 713 the court ordered every province to report its produce, soil, place-name origins and old stories. Only the Izumo report survives close to complete, with fragments of four others. It is the counterweight to the Kojiki — the provinces describing their own kami before the capital edited them into a single family tree.
held by most
Open the book — context →
Motoori Norinaga's commentary.
Nobody could read the Kojiki by the eighteenth century; the script was a wreck of Chinese characters used for sound and for sense at once. Norinaga spent thirty-four years reconstructing it. He also invented the argument that there is a native Japanese way underneath the Chinese overlay — an idea the state later put to uses he did not anticipate.
⚖ contested within
Open the book — context →
The shrine's own story.
The engi: which kami, why here, and what happened in the year of the flood. Painted on a scroll, printed on the leaflet by the offering box, or simply known by the oldest man in the parish. This is the text that governs what actually happens at a given shrine, and there are eighty thousand of them.
Open the book — context →