Week 7 Reading Diary: Japanese Mythology, Part 2

(Japanese dragon, via Wikimedia Commons)

There were so many cool moments in this unit too--as usual, I'll only pick three, though, because the aim is to make it easier to choose story ideas, not harder...

The Grass-Cleaving Sword: Basically, I adore Princess Tacibana; she's brave and loyal as anything, and while I might not have made the choices that she does, she is the real reason why Yamato achieves anything in any of the myths, and he really doesn't even appreciate her until the end--and then she dies trying to save him again! In any case, I think that this story--or even a series of vignettes about her life and choices--would make for a good retelling from her perspective. It might even work for a modern-day retelling; with her being an unlikely hero--we don't usually think about unusually devoted people being heroes, but she really cares about not only her husband, but her kingdom, and her powers for forgiveness are amazing. In this story, she follows behind her husband in secret with his sacred sword--in case he needs her help/the sword--after he leaves to go on a quest so he can win the favor of another woman!--and then she runs through a burning field in order to get his sword to him when he needs it. That's devotion--like I said, not my kind of devotion, but if nothing else I can appreciate her incredible bravery when it comes to protecting the things she cares about.

The Dragon: This story is even more amazing than the last one--in this story, Princess Tacibana puts herself at incredible risk by staying in her palace, which is under attack by a dragon (the dragon is attacking because Yamato can't stop getting himself in trouble, but that's old-hat news by now), in order to perform a ritual that will help protect her people as they escape. Yamato may be the one that fights the dragon--after arriving back in the nick of time, because he gets captured getting into trouble again--but she's the real reason why he wins, and I think that's awesome. There's some retribution at the end: Yamato does figure out that the sorceress he's been pursuing was using him, and realizes, all of a sudden, that Princess Tacibana is awesome. But it's too late, because in the next part of the story he goes off to war again (for the last time, he assures his wife) and when she begs him to go along he laughs at her and says yes. But the joke's on him (the joke's always on Yamato; there's a really interesting trickster component to all of these stories), because she ends up dying while saving him from his own trouble. 

So yes. If anyone asks, in my opinion Princess Tacibana is the real hero in these stories...and no one can convince me otherwise...

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