centres in the necessity of pacifying the great god of Idzumo; and this, with details of internecine strife in the Imperial family, of the sovereign’s amours, and of the importation of the orange from the “Eternal Land,” brings us to the cycle of traditions of which Yamato-Take, a son of the Emperor Kei-kō, is the hero. This prince, after slaying one of his brothers in the privy, accomplishes the task of subduing both western and eastern Japan; and, notwithstanding certain details which are unsavoury to the European taste, his story, taken as a whole, is one of the most striking in the book. He performs marvels of valour, disguises himself as a woman to slay the brigands, is the possessor of a magic sword and fire-striker, has a devoted wife who stills the fury of the waves by sitting down upon their surface, has encounters with a deer and with a boar who are really gods in disguise, and finally dies on his way westward before he can reach his home in Yamato. His death is followed by a highly mythological account of the laying to rest of the white bird into which he ended by being transformed.
The succeeding reign is a blank, and the next after that transports us without a word of warning to quite another scene. The sovereign’s home is now in Tsukushi, the south-western island of the Japanese archipelago, and four of the gods, through the medium of the sovereign’s wife, who is known to history as the Empress Jin-gō, reveal the existence of the land of Korea, of which, however, this is not the first mention. The Emperor disbelieves the divine message, and is punished by death for his incredulity. But the Empress, after a special consultation between her prime minister and the gods, and the performance of various religious ceremonies, marshals her fleet, and, with the assistance of the fishes both great and small and of a miraculous wave, reaches Shiragi[1] (one of the ancient divisions of Korea), and subdues it. She then returns to Japan, the legend ending with a curiously naïve tale of how she sat a-fishing one day on a shoal in the river Wo-gawa in Tsukushi with threads picked out of her skirt for lines.
The next section shows her going up by sea to Yamato,—another joint in the story, by means of which the Yamato cycle of legends and
- ↑ 新羅.
