Plains,[1] and another name is the Deity of Eight-Thousand-Spears,[2] and another name is the Deity-Spirit-of-the-Living-Land.[3] In all there were five names.[4]
[Sect. XXI.—The White Hare of Inaba.]
So this Deity Master-of-the-Great-Land had eighty Deities his brethren; but they all left the land to the Deity Master-of-the-Great-Land. The reason for their leaving it was this: Each of these eighty Deities had in his heart the wish to marry the Princess of Yakami[5] in Inaba,[6] and they went together to Inaba, putting their bag on [the back of] the Deity Great-Name-Possessor, whom they took with them as an attendant. Hereupon, when they arrived at Cape Keta,[7] [they found] a naked hare lying down. Then the eighty Deities spoke to the hare, saying: “What thou shouldest do is to bathe in the sea-water here, and lie on the slope of a high mountain exposed to the blowing of the wind.” So the hare followed the intructions of the eighty Deities, and lay down. Then, as the sea-water dried, the skin of its body all split with the blowing of the wind, so that it lay weeping with pain. But the Deity Great-Name-Possessor, who came last of all, saw the hare, and said: “Why liest thou weeping?” The hare replied, saying: “I was in the Island of Oki,[8] and wished to cross over to this land,
- ↑ Ashi-hara-shiko-wo-no-kami. The “reed-plains” are doubtless put by metonymy for Japan.
- ↑ Ya-chi-hoko-no-kami.
- ↑ Utsushi-kuni-tama-no-kami. The name must be understood to mean “Spirit of the Land of the Living,” and to be antithetical to that of one of his fathers-in-law, the Impetuous Male-Deity (Susa-no-wo) who became the god of Hades.
- ↑ Or “he had five names.”
- ↑ Yakami-hime. The etymology is uncertain.
- ↑ The name of a province not far from that of Idzumo. The word may possibly, as Motowori suggests, be derived from ina-ba, “rice-leaves.”
- ↑ Keta-no-saki. The etymology of the name seems uncertain. The meaning of the word keta is “the cross-beams of a roof, the yards of a sail.” But perhaps Keta and keta may be nothing more than homonyms of independent origin.
- ↑ Not far from the coast of Idzumo and of Inaba.
destruction (see Sect. XXIII). But the interpretation followed in the translation is the most likely as well as the orthodox one, this Deity being entitled the possessor of a Great Name or of Great Names on account of his renown in Japanese mythic story.
