shape to be delivered. Pray look not upon me!” Hereupon [His Augustness Fire-Subside], thinking these words strange, stealthily peeped at the very moment of delivery, when she turned into a crocodile[1] eight fathoms [long], and crawled and writhed about; and he forthwith, terrified at the sight, fled away. Then Her Augustness Luxuriant-Jewel-Princess knew that he had peeped; and she felt ashamed, and, straightway leaving the august child which she had borne, she said: “I had wished always to come and go across the sea-path.[2] But thy having peeped at my [real] shape [makes me] very shame-faced,”[3]—and she forthwith closed the sea-boundary,[4] and went down again.[5] Therefore the name by which the august child whom she had borne was called was His Augustness Heaven’s-Sun-Height-Prince-Wave-limit-Brave-Cormorant-Thatch-Meeting-Incompletely.[6] Nevertheless afterwards, although angry at his having wished to peep, she could not restrain her loving heart, and she entrusted to her younger sister Jewel-Good-Princess,[7] on the occasion of her nursing
- ↑ According to the parallel passage of the “Chronicles,” she turned into a dragon. “One account” however agrees with our text.
- ↑ The original of this passage is rather confused; but the interpretation here adopted from the Old Printed Edition is more natural than Motowori’s, according to which the Verbs are to be taken in a Causative sense, to the following effect: “I had always wished to let people come and go across the sea-path.” Probably it was only in order to make this clause fit in better with the following sentence, in which we are told that the crocodile-princess “closed the sea-boundary,” and with the fact that there is at present no path leading to the Sea-God’s palace, that Motowori was induced to sanction such a view of the grammar of this passage.
- ↑ This is Motowori’s interpretation of the clause, he having emended 作, “action,” “doing,” which is found in the older editions, to 怍, “shame-faced.” (The edition of 1687 mentions 恠, “strange,” as an alternative reading.) If we followed the older reading, we should have to translate thus: “thy having peeped at my [real] shape is an outrageous action.”
- ↑ I.e., the boundary dividing the dominions of the Sea-God from the world of men.
- ↑ Viz., to the Sea-God’s palace.
- ↑ Ama-tsu-hi-daka-hiko-nagisa-take-u-gaya-fuki-ahezu no mikoto. The older editors read ahasezu for ahezu, i.e. “causing to meet,” instead of “meeting.” Moribe, in his Critique on Motowori’s Commentary, would have us believe that the name comes from umi-ga kayohi fuki-ahezu (海陸往來乳養不得), i.e. “going and coming on sea and land and being unable to suckle”!
- ↑ Tama-yori-bime.
