Yamato Takeru is the closest thing in the material to a tragic hero and the Kojiki tells his story with unusual sympathy. He is a prince so violent that after he kills his own brother over a trivial matter his father sends him west, alone, to subdue the Kumaso — which he does by dressing as a woman to get into a banquet and stabbing the chieftain. Barely returned, he is sent east. He stops at Ise to see his aunt, the high priestess, and says plainly that his father must want him dead. She gives him the sword from the serpent's tail and a bag she tells him to open in emergency. Trapped in a burning grass plain, he cuts the grass around him and the bag proves to hold a firestriker, and he burns back — which is why the sword is called Kusanagi, grass-cutter. He wins everything, loses his wife when she drowns herself to calm a sea, sickens on the way home, and dies composing a poem about the mountains of Yamato that he will not see again. His spirit becomes a white plover and flies away.