Stories
the narratives it tells itself
Izanagi in the underworld.
He goes to bring her back and she tells him not to look at her. He lights a tooth from his comb as a torch, sees what she has become, and runs; she sends the hags of the underworld after him. At the pass he seals the way with a boulder, and they say the words that divorce them — she will kill a thousand a day, he will cause fifteen hundred to be born.
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Amaterasu and the cave.
Offended by her brother's outrages, the sun goddess shut herself in a cave and the world went dark. No god could force the door — until Uzume danced, the gods roared with laughter, and curiosity did what strength could not.
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The eight-headed serpent.
Susanoo, exiled, finds an old couple weeping over the last of eight daughters. He has them brew sake eight times over and set out eight vats; the serpent puts a head in each, and he kills it while it sleeps. In its tail he finds a sword, which he sends up to his sister and which becomes one of the three regalia.
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The hare of Inaba.
A hare tricks the crocodiles into forming a bridge, is caught out and skinned. The eighty brothers, passing, tell it to bathe in seawater and dry in the wind, which is agony. Ōkuninushi, coming last with the baggage, tells it to wash in fresh water and roll in cattail pollen. The hare recovers and tells him he will get the girl.
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The handing over of the land.
Heaven sends envoys to demand the country and Ōkuninushi agrees, on condition that a shrine be built for him with pillars deep in the bedrock. His son Takeminakata refuses, is defeated in what the text describes as a wrestling match, and is chased to Suwa. The chronicle is written by the side that won, and Izumo tells it with different weight.
⚖ contested within
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The descent, and the three things.
Amaterasu sends her grandson Ninigi down onto a peak in Kyushu with a mirror, a sword and a curved jewel, and the imperial house descends from him. Between 1890 and 1945 this was taught in Japanese schools as history. The regalia still exist, no one alive has seen the mirror and the jewel, and the accession rite still uses them.
⚖ contested within
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Yamato Takeru.
A son too violent for his father, sent east to conquer in the hope he would not return. Caught in a grass fire, he cuts a firebreak with the sword from the serpent's tail. He wins everything he is sent to win, dies of exhaustion and illness far from the capital, and becomes a white bird. It is the tradition's clearest story about being used.
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Michizane, and the lightning.
A brilliant minister of no great family, promoted past the Fujiwara and then destroyed by them, exiled to Kyushu and dead in two years. Then plague, then drought, then a bolt of lightning into the imperial palace that killed several of the men responsible. The court restored his rank posthumously, burned the decree of exile, and built him a shrine.
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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.
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The Kojiki & Nihon Shoki.
The age of the gods written down — myth, genealogy, and the birth of the islands.
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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
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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
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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.
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