Page:Kojiki by Chamberlain.djvu/57

Rh with a backward flaying.” The consequences of this act were so disastrous, that the Sun-Goddess withdrew for a season into a cave, from which the rest of the eight hundred myriad (according to the “Chronicles” eighty myriad) deities with difficulty allured her. The “Impetuous Male Deity” was thereupon banished, and the Sun-Goddess remained mistress of the field. Yet, strange to say, she thenceforward retires into the background, and the most bulky section of the mythology consists of stories concerning the “Impetuous Male Deity” and his descendants, who are represented as the monarchs of Japan, or rather of the province of Idzumo. The “Impetuous Male Deity” himself, whom his father had charged with the dominion of the sea, never assumes that rule, but first has a curiously told amorous adventure and an encounter with an eight-forked serpent in Idzumo, and afterwards reappears as the capricious and filthy deity of Hades, who however seems to retain some power over the land of the living, as he invests his descendant of the sixth generation with the sovereignty of Japan. Of this latter personage a whole cycle of stories is told, all centering in Idzumo. We learn of his conversations with a hare and with a mouse, of the prowess and cleverness which he displayed on the occasion of a visit to his ancestor in Hades, which is in this cycle of traditions a much less mysterious place than the Hades visited by Izanagi, of his amours, of his triumph over his eighty brethren, of his reconciliation with his jealous empress, and of his numerous descendants, many of whom have names that are particularly difficult of comprehension. We hear too in a tradition, which ends in a pointless manner, of a microscopic deity who comes across the sea to ask this monarch of Idzumo to share the sovereignty with him.

This last-mentioned legend repeats itself in the sequel. The Sun-Goddess, who on her second appearance is constantly represented as acting in concert with the “High August Producing Wondrous Deity,”—one of the abstractions mentioned at the commencement of the “Records,”—resolves to bestow the sovereignty of Japan on a child of whom it is doubtful whether he were hers or that of her brother the “Impetuous Male Deity.” Three embassies are sent from Heaven to Idzumo to arrange matters, but it is only a fourth that is successful, the final ambassadors obtaining the submission of the monarch or deity of