118
“Ko-ji-ki,” or Records of Ancient Matters.
[Vol. XVI.
“If the child with which I am pregnant be the child of an Earthly Deity, my delivery will not be fortunate. If it be the august child of the Heavenly Deity,[1] it will be fortunate;”—and thereupon she built a hall eight fathoms [long] without doors,[2] went inside the hall and plastered up [the entrance] with earth; and when the time came for her delivery, she set fire to the hall and was delivered.[3] So the name of the child that was born when the fire was burning most fiercely was His Augustness Fire-Shine[4] (this is the ancestor of the Hayabito, Dukes of Ata);[5] the name of the child born next was His Augustness Fire-Climax;[6] the august[7] name of the child born next was His Augustness Fire-Subside,[8] another
- ↑ I.e. “thy child and the Sun-Goddess descendant.”
- ↑ That is to say that it remained doorless after she had, as stated immediately below, plastered up the entrance.
- ↑ Viz. of child, not from the flames. There is no ambiguity in the Japanese expression.
- ↑ Ho-deri-no-mikoto.
- ↑ Hayabito-ata-no-kimi. Ata is, as has been already stated in Note 2 to Sect. XXXVII, the name of a place in Satsuma. Haya-bito (“swift men,” “bold men,” literally, if we follow the Chinese characters “falcon-men”) was an ancient designation of the inhabitants of the south-western corner of Japan which was subsequently divided into the provinces of Satsuma and Ohosumi, and came by metonymy to be used to denote the province of Satsuma itself, for which reason it remained as the Pillow-Word for the word Satsuma even after the exclusive use of this latter name had been established. In after times the hayabito (also contracted to hayato and haito) were chiefly known as forming the Infantry of the Imperial Guard, a curious choice of provincials for which mythological sanction was invoked. They are also said to have furnished the performers of a symbolic dance mentioned at the end of Sect. XLI (see Note 3 to that Sect.). In later Sections of this work, the translator has ventured to render hayabito by “man-at-arms.”
- ↑ Ho-suseri-no-mikoto.
- ↑ The Honorific is doubtless prefixed in this case and not in the others, because it was to this prince or deity that the Imperial House traced its descent. Motowori’s kana reading, which prefixes Honorifics to all such names indifferently, obliterates this delicate distinction.
- ↑ Ho-wori-no-mikoto. The derivation of this name is less clear than that of his elder brothers. Motowori’s proposal to consider it as a corruption of ho-yohari, “fire weakening,” is however plausible; and as this triad of names is evidently intended to paint the stages in the progress of the conflagration, the import of the
