Week 7 Reading Diary: Japanese Mythology, Part 1

(Susa-no-wo and the Serpent, via Wikipedia)

The language in this unit is beautiful! There were a bunch of stories that popped out at me this week--I suppose this is becoming a trend, but I think I come up with more story ideas every week, so choosing which to use is getting harder! Here were some of this unit's:

Izanagi and Izanami: what really struck me, halfway through this story, was that the story where Izanagi and Izanami circle the base of the earth and say hello to each other each time they cross paths is really cute. It reminded me of the modern-day flirtation between couples that you sometimes see and think is revoltingly cute. Likewise, I think that a scene like this, set in the modern-day, would also be revoltingly cute, and I want to write it! The only question is whether or not to foreshadow the awful stuff that comes later, where Izanami dies and Izanagi goes into eternal mourning. Maybe a series of vignettes of their life together, set in the modern-day, would work? Maybe not within the word count, though...

 The Eight-Forked Serpent of Koshi: As much as I loved this story, what I would really like to do is to rewrite this story so that the daughter has some kind of voice in it. Since she once had seven more sisters, and they all got eaten by the serpent, I feel like a story told from her perspective would actually be very poignant, and maybe a bit funny, because it can't really be all that fun to be turned into a comb and hidden in someone's hair? Even if that someone is trying to keep you safe...but, in any case, it would be interesting to try and figure out her thoughts! I think that the safest thing to do in that instance, though, would again be to switch the story to the modern-day, so that I wasn't projecting my values on her when that wouldn't be how she felt in a historical context...

The Rescue of the Princess: I don't really have much time to explain how much I loved this story--except the part where the princess gets locked up in the tower and doesn't get to join in the fun, but that's just one of my sticking points. Then it occurred to me: what is she doing in an attempt to make her own situation better? That might make an interesting story. But I would really like to do a scene where Yamato comes into that room in the palace dressed like a woman and she fails to recognize him for a moment, because I feel like that would be a little funny, and fun to write...

Source: Romance of Old Japan, Part I: Mythology and Legend by E. W. Champney and F. Champney (1917).