them into the mountains, where they cut down a large tree, inserted a wedge in the tree,[1] and made him stand in the middle, whereupon they took away the wedge and tortured him to death.[2] Then on Her Augustness his august parent again seeking him with cries, she perceived him, and at once cleaving the tree, took him out and brought him to life, and said to him:[3] “If thou remain here, thou wilt at last be destroyed by the eighty Deities.” Then she sent him swiftly off to the august place of the Deity Great-House-Prince[4] in the land of Ki.[5] Then when the eighty Deities searched and pursued till they came up to him, and fixed their arrows [in their bows], he escaped by dipping under the fork of a tree, and disappeared.
[Sect. XXIII.—The Nether-Distant-Land.
[The Deity Great-House-Prince spoke to him[6]], saying: “Thou must set off to the Nether-Distant-Land where dwells His Impetuous-
- ↑ The original of this clause, 茄矢打立其木, or according to another reading 茹矢, etc. is a great crux to the native commentators, who can make sure neither of the exact sense nor of the Japanese reading of the first two characters, which seem to be ideographic for three others occurring immediately below, 氷目矢, which are themselves of doubtful import. An elaborate discussion of the question will be found in Hirata’s “Exposition of the Ancient Histories,” Vol. XVII, pp. 25–27. The general sense at all events is that here given.
- ↑ The characters 拷殺也, here rendered “tortured him to death,” are by the modern commentators read uchi-koroshiki, which simply means “killed [him].”
- ↑ Literally “to her child.”
- ↑ Oha-ya-biko-no-kami. This Deity is identified with the Deity I-dakeru mentioned in the “Chronicles” as a son of Susa-no-wo (the “Impetuous-Male Deity”), and as the introducer into the Island of Tsukushi in particular and into all the “Eight Great Islands” of Japan of the seeds of plants and trees. Motowori’s note on this name in Vol. X, pp. 28–29, is worth consulting, though his idea of connecting the agricultural and arboricultural renown of the Deity bearing it with the name of the province of Ki is doubtless quite fanciful.
- ↑ I.e., “the land of trees” (木國). Later the character 木 was replaced by 紀, which in Sinico-Japanese has the same sound ki, while a second one, 伊, was added in order to conform to an edict of the Empress Gem-miyō (A. D. 713) to the effect that all names of places were to be written with two Chinese characters, as was usual in China and Korea. The second character in this case simply carried on the i sound with which the first ends, so that the name became Kii.
- ↑ Literally, “to the child.” The words placed in brackets, and which are not
