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The Emergence of Amaterasu (Public Domain Image) |
The Kojikitranslated by Basil Hall Chamberlain[1919] |
The Kojiki is one of the two primary sources for Shinto, the Japanese national religion. It starts in the realm of myth, with the creation of Japan from foam. Innumerable gods and goddesses are described. The narrative moves from mythology to historical legends, and culminates in a chronology of the early Imperial line.
The book is densely footnoted, almost to the point where the text is buried in apparatus. However, even this cannot shroud the wonderful story-telling. There are supernatural episodes, and tales of murder, passion and betrayal, all interspersed with extemporaneous poetry, reminiscent of Icelandic sagas.
Production notes: I worked on this for four years, on and off. I searched for a long time to locate a copy of the Tuttle reprint of the Chamberlain translation, which, despite being published in the 1970s is out of print and hard to obtain. In 2000, a copy fortuitously turned up in a local used bookstore. However, limitations of OCR technology at the time made it difficult to proof the text, so I put it aside. In 2005, I rescanned the book using more recent OCR software with better results, and managed to complete the proof. Even still, it took quite a bit of work to finish the job, particularly creating bitmaps of hundreds of images of Chinese and Japanese characters.