Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East, Vol. 13: Japan

The “Kojiki” is written, as are all early Japanese works, in Chinese characters. Consequently, it is read in columns from the top of the page to the bottom, with the opening column on the right rather than the left. The “Kojiki,” being almost, if not entirely, the earliest Japanese book, is a puzzling medley of Chinese and Japanese. Sometimes the Chinese character functions as a picture of an object or a concept, just as it does in the Chinese language; at other times, it is merely a sound or syllable forming part of a Japanese word, entirely divorced from its original Chinese meaning. Thus, the “Kojiki” is very difficult to read.

When Japanese scholars of the seventeenth century—living under the peace established by IyeyasuTokugawa Ieyasu, the founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate.—began to study the old books preserved in the temples, they encountered great difficulty with the “Kojiki.” They held the work in high esteem and wrote commentaries on it, much as the Hindus and Chinese had written commentaries on their own ancient scriptures. However, to a Western scholar who understands the context and limited historical knowledge of these Japanese commentators, their explanations appear of little value, as they refused to accept the book as the simple, straightforward collection of barbaric myths that it appears to be to modern eyes.

The “Kojiki” itself explains how it came to be written. There had been an earlier, similar work composed around A.D. 620—almost a century before—which was destroyed by fire. After that, the records existed only in the memories of trained reciters who knew the legends by heart. Eventually, the most skilled of these reciters was officially summoned before the Chinese-educated writer Yasumaro, who transcribed the old tales from the reciter’s narrative. How old these stories really were, or how often they had been recorded previously, no one can say.