JL 02 — Origins of Japanese Literature: Oral Tradition, Myth and Writing

Origins of Japanese Literature: Oral Tradition, Myth and Writing

Before a story belonged to a book, it belonged to someone’s voice. Japan’s earliest chronicles preserve fragments of that older world: songs, memories of ancestors and quarrels among gods. Reading them brings us close to the people who chose what later generations would remember. 

1. Introduction: Before the First Surviving Book

Kojiki (古事記; 712) and Nihon Shoki (日本書紀; 720) are landmarks in the early historyof Japanese literature. Both bring divine narratives, genealogies and songs into substantial written compilations. Much of their material draws on traditions already circulating before the books took shape.

A quarrel between gods can hold our attention through anger, loss or an unexpected turn of events. Linking the story to the imperial family’s origins gives it a political purpose. A compelling story can also support a claim about the past.

2. Oral Tradition: Stories That Needed a Listener

Songs, ritual utterances and accounts of ancestry could connect a family with its forebears, explain a place name or accompany a ceremony. Their ties to memory and performance belong to the broader roots of world literature. Much depended on who spoke and who was there to listen.

Repetition helped listeners follow a genealogy or recognize an important action. Familiar phrases could steady a performance while the teller adjusted its emphasis. The surviving texts leave much of this activity beyond our reach, including the sound of a voice and the response of its audience.

By the time a song appears in a chronicle, someone has chosen where to place it and how to introduce its singer. That setting helps us understand the words while leaving its relationship to earlier performances uncertain.

3. Writing Arrives Through Cultural Exchange

Writing spread through sustained connections with China and the Korean peninsula. Objects bearing inscriptions reached the archipelago before substantial texts were produced locally, although their presence tells us little about how widely people could read. Surviving inscriptions provide evidence of writing produced in Japan by the fifth century.

Migrants, scribes and religious specialists helped develop written culture. The transmission of Buddhism during the sixth century and afterward brought further texts and practices of study. During the seventh and eighth centuries, writing became increasingly important to government, diplomacy and religious institutions.

Using Chinese characters to represent Japanese required considerable ingenuity. A character could convey a meaning associated with a Japanese word or be used for its sound. A single text might combine these methods. From the perspective of semiotics, these choices show how written signs connect sound, meaning and a reader’s expectations.

Writers also composed in literary Chinese. The poetry collection Kaifūsō (懐風藻; 751) preserves work in that language by poets in Japan. From an early stage, Japanese literary history included writing shaped through participation in a wider East Asian culture.

4. Kojiki: Giving the Past a Connected Shape

The Kojiki’s preface traces its formation to a project begun under Emperor Tenmu (reigned 673–686). It describes Hieda no Are, whose life dates remain uncertain, learning inherited accounts and imperial genealogies. Under Empress Genmei (reigned 707–715), Ō no Yasumaro (birth unknown–723) compiled the work and presented it in 712.

The preface gives recitation an important role in the book’s formation. It also explains why inherited records needed correction. Its account therefore asks us to consider how memory worked alongside documents and editorial judgment. The process was more involved than the familiar picture of one person reciting while another simply wrote everything down.

Across three books, divine beginnings lead toward rulers and their descendants. Genealogies establish relationships through which claims to power can appear legitimate. Then a song interrupts the succession of names and someone seems to speak from a more immediate need: desire, grief or resentment. These shifts give the narrative some of its liveliness.

Preserving a name’s sound could require a different choice of characters from conveying a passage’s meaning. The Kojiki also shows the work involved in putting Japanese into written form.

5. Nihon Shoki: History With More Than One Account

Completed in 720 under imperial sponsorship, the Nihon Shoki uses a predominantly literary Chinese style and a chronological framework indebted to Chinese historical writing. It extends beyond the Kojiki to the end of Empress Jitō’s reign in 697.

In its accounts of the divine age, alternative versions appear beside a principal narrative. An event that seems settled in one passage can receive another explanation nearby. The compilers preserved differences even as they assembled a chronicle intended to carry historical authority.

Reading the chronicles together makes their choices easier to notice. The Kojiki often draws its material into a connected narrative while the Nihon Shoki sometimes pauses to offer another telling. Narratology, the study of how narratives are constructed, helps us examine what these arrangements emphasize and how they guide a reader.

6. One Goddess, Different Beginnings

Amaterasu’s birth offers a useful comparison. In the Kojiki, the sun goddess emerges when Izanagi washes his left eye during purification after returning from Yomi, the realm of the dead. Her arrival follows an encounter with death and ritual pollution.

In the Nihon Shoki’s main account, Izanagi and Izanami deliberately produce a divine ruler after creating the land’s deities. Alternative accounts include a birth through eye washing and another through a mirror held by Izanagi. The goddess has several beginnings within the surviving tradition.

Read in this sequence, the Kojiki episode brings the arrival of light close to the need for cleansing after death. The main account in the Nihon Shoki places greater emphasis on the deliberate creation of divine authority. This is one way to interpret the contrast. Reading the versions separately allows us to consider meanings that disappear when a retelling merges them into a single story.

7. Myth, Political Authority and Local Memory

Ancestry mattered because an account of the past could support a claim in the present. Linking rulers with divine predecessors placed succession within a sacred order. Even a seemingly dry list of names could help establish who belonged near the center of power.

Grief, rivalry and fear give these stories an emotional force beyond their dynastic purposes. A reader unfamiliar with a ruler’s genealogy may still recognize the distress within a scene. Such moments invite sympathy even as the larger account asks us to accept a particular arrangement of power.

The provincial records known as fudoki (風土記) widen the picture. A government order in 713 called for reports that included local resources, place names and traditions. An explanation of a settlement’s name could preserve a story about a deity or a remembered encounter, connecting the landscape with a local past.

These records bring places outside the central court narrative into view. Their compilers were describing provinces for the government, so administrative interests helped determine which local traditions reached the page.

8. From Recorded Songs to Later Literature

A song can change the scale of a narrative. An account of public events gives way to words attributed to someone who longs for another person, voices a complaint or answers a companion. The prose surrounding the song helps us understand why those words matter at that moment.

The Man’yōshū (万葉集; compiled in the eighth century) gives poetry a much larger space. Its poems range across love, mourning, travel and public ceremony. Names, introductory notes and arrangement influence how we hear each voice. The feeling can be immediate even when the circumstances behind it remain difficult to reconstruct.

The later development of kana opened further possibilities for writing Japanese. Literary Chinese continued alongside these changing practices. The letters, diaries and fiction of Heian court literature emerged from this overlapping world. Their achievements belong to a long history of adapting inherited forms to experiences that writers wanted to express.

9. Conclusion: Reading the Act of Preservation

The origins of Japanese literature bring together remembered stories, imported writing practices and the ambitions of a developing court. Its compilers preserved much that might otherwise have vanished while shaping the past available to later readers. These works also belong to the wider history of literary exchange across cultures.

Begin with one episode and follow it across the two chronicles. Notice who acts, which relationships matter and where the versions part company. A difference as small as the manner of a goddess’s birth can alter the meaning of the scene. The early texts become more engaging when we notice how their versions differ.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Did Japanese literature begin in 712?

No. That year dates the completion of the Kojiki. Songs, narratives and written practices existed earlier. The origins of Japanese literature involve a longer history than the survival of any single compilation.

Are Kojiki and Nihon Shoki simply collections of myths?

Both include divine narratives alongside genealogies, songs and accounts of rulers. Their organization reflects literary choices and political purposes. Their different sections need to be read with attention to genre and evidence.

Why do the two books tell some stories differently?

They select and arrange inherited material differently. The Nihon Shoki also preserves alternative accounts within its own text. Comparing these versions reveals differences that a single continuous retelling can hide.

Can their earliest narratives be used as historical evidence?

They offer evidence about traditions, political authority and the circumstances of compilation. Divine ancestry alone cannot establish a historical genealogy. Claims about early events require comparison with other texts and archaeological findings.

References

1. Aoki, Michiko Yamaguchi, trans., Records of Wind and Earth: A Translation of Fudoki, with Introduction and Commentaries (Ann Arbor: Association for Asian Studies, 1997).

2. Aston, W. G., trans., Nihongi: Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D. 697, 2 vols. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1896).

3. Duthie, Torquil, Man’yōshū and the Imperial Imagination in Early Japan (Leiden: Brill, 2014).

4. Keene, Donald, Seeds in the Heart: Japanese Literature from Earliest Times to the Late Sixteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).

5. Lurie, David B., Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011).

6. Ō no Yasumaro, comp., The Kojiki: An Account of Ancient Matters, trans. Gustav Heldt (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

7. Ooms, Herman, Imperial Politics and Symbolics in Ancient Japan: The Tenmu Dynasty, 650–800 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009).

8. Shirane, Haruo, ed., Traditional Japanese Literature: An Anthology, Beginnings to 1600 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

9. Shirane, Haruo, Tomi Suzuki and David Lurie, eds., The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).