Hiruko

Summary

Hiruko is the first child that Izanami bore to Izanagi in Japanese myth, a child like a leech, whom his parents put in a reed boat and let drift away, and did not count among their children. From the Middle Ages he was worshipped as Ebisu, the kami of fishermen and good fortune.

The Kojiki tells that the couple went down to the island of Onogoro, set up a heavenly pillar, and agreed to go round it, she from the right and he from the left, and meet. When they met she spoke first: "Oh, what a handsome man!", and he after her: "Oh, what a beautiful woman!" Then he told her: the woman spoke first; this is not good. Nevertheless they joined, and the child she bore was a leech-child; they put it in a reed boat and let it float away. Next she bore the island of Awashima, and it too was not counted among their children. They went up to ask the heavenly kami, a divination was performed, and the kami said: because the woman spoke first, it was not good; go down and speak again. They went round a second time, he spoke first, and she bore the islands one after another.

The Nihon shoki puts him elsewhere. In its main text the couple bore the islands, mountains, rivers and trees, then said: why should we not bear one who will be lord of all under heaven? They bore the sun, then the moon, then Hiruko, who at three years old still could not stand, so they placed him in the rock-camphor-wood boat of heaven and abandoned him to the winds, and then bore Susanoo. In another account of the same book Hiruko came after the sun and moon, and was born so because the woman had spoken first when they went round the pillar and the law of male and female was broken; he was placed in the bird rock-camphor-wood boat of heaven and abandoned to the current.

The idea the story turns on is that making needs an order, and what is born before the order is right does not take shape. The woman spoke before the man, so the first child came like a leech, without firm shape, and the island after it was foam unfit to be land, and neither was counted among the children. The Kokugakuin editors of the Kojiki, with Kōnoshi and Yamaguchi, take "leech-child" as a figure for something shapeless that could not become an island. So it was returned to the water from which the land came. And the water that carried him did not lose him: centuries later Hiruko became the kami of the fortune that comes from the sea.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method, since neither essay reads it. The Kojiki writes it 水蛭子, Hiruko, "child of the water-leech". In Old Japanese the h of such words was a lip sound: the academic corpus of Old Japanese writes hiru, "daytime", as piru, and Amaterasu's other name Hirume as pirumye, so the name would have sounded close to pirukwo. We read it from Arabic farkh: f is the sister of p at the lips, r is r, and kh becomes k. Lane gives farkh as the young one of a bird, "farrakha al-zarʿ: the seed-produce put forth its shoots", and "farrakha al-qawm: the people became weak, like young birds". On this reading Hiruko is the weak young one: the first child who could not stand on his feet, the shoot that did not become land. The leech has its own Arabic name, ʿalaq, which Lane gives as the black or red worms found in water that suck blood, while ʿalaqa is also the clotted blood from which the embryo forms before it becomes flesh, a sense very close to a child not yet made whole; but its ʿ does not answer the lip sound at the start of the Old Japanese name.

Linguistic Root

Motoori Norinaga held that hiruko is not a name but a description of a child that looked like a leech: either without arms and legs, or with withered limbs, as the Nihon shoki says he could not stand at three. Matsumura Takeo, and before him Takizawa Bakin, read hiru as day or sun, making the name "sun-child" opposite Hirume, "sun-woman", Amaterasu's name in the Nihon shoki, pointing out that in the main text he is born after the sun and moon and that the rock-camphor boat is a vessel of heavenly kami. The Kokugakuin database objects that the Nihon shoki itself writes the name with the sign for leech and describes him as unable to stand. The name has also been linked with the old word hirumu, to be unable to walk, and Okinawan dialects say biru of one whose legs do not carry him.

Lane gives, under f-r-kh: "afrakhat and farrakhat, of a bird: she had a young one", "afrakhat al-bayḍa: the egg broke open from over the young bird, which came forth", "farrakha al-zarʿ: the seed-produce was ready to cleave open when it had come up, or put forth its shoots", "farkh: a sucker, offset or sprout of any plant or tree", and "farrakha al-qawm: the people became weak, like young birds"; the plural firākh is also said to mean worms found in herbs. The sound match: f answers the lip sound p of the old pronunciation, and in the Juthoor table Arabic f becomes f or p; r is r; and kh becomes k, as the table gives h, g or k for it. All three letters stand in order. What remains against this reading is that ko, "child", is a Japanese word in its own right, which the reading takes as a root letter.

Lane gives, under ʿ-l-q: "ʿalaq: leeches, worms black or red, found in water, that suck blood and are applied to the throat and to swellings to draw their blood; one is called ʿalaqa", and "ʿalaq: clotted blood, ʿalaqa a piece of it, or the seminal fluid when it has become clotted blood, after which it passes to the stage of flesh". So Arabic names the leech with a word that matches the sense of hiru exactly, and the Kojiki writes it "water-leech", as Lane says it lives in water. But ʿalaq begins with ʿ, which in the Juthoor correspondences usually drops and sometimes becomes h, never a lip sound, so it meets the name in meaning and not in its oldest first letter.

Key Mythic Narratives

From leech to Ebisu

Aston notes on the Nihon shoki that the leech was identified in later times with the god Ebisu, and his translation prints a Japanese picture of the leech-child as Ebisu. The Encyclopedia of Shinto calls Ebisu a maritime tutelary and one of the seven gods of good fortune, and the Kokugakuin database says that from the Middle Ages he has been worshipped as a kami of fortune at the Nishinomiya shrine and in many other places. Before that, in the Heian period, the poet Ōe no Asatsuna wrote at a court reading of the Nihon shoki a verse of pity for him: do father and mother not pity him? The leech-child has turned three, his legs not standing. This later stage is unknown to both the Kojiki and the Nihon shoki.

The boat

The Kokugakuin editors of the Kojiki report that commentators disagree about the reed boat: some say a boat made of a single reed leaf, others reeds bound together. Some held that reeds were believed to drive away epidemics and evil, so that the boat sends away what is unfit, as in customs where harmful insects are sent off to sea in leaf boats; Saigō Nobutsuna heard in ashi, reed, the word ashi, bad. The rock-camphor boat of the Nihon shoki is a vessel of heavenly kami, which is why those who read "sun-child" make it the sun's boat. Aston notes that the boat recalls the Akkadian story of Sargon and his ark of rushes, and Moses as an infant.

Symbolic Reading

The Japanese rereading essay in this project reads the making of the islands as an account of how land forms: the drops that harden are lava cooling in the water, and the islands born one after another are the volcanic arc. The essay does not mention Hiruko, but on its reading he is the birth that did not become land: matter that came out of the water, did not hold together, and went back to it. The Semitic essay sets the couple beside Adam and Eve and finds an error at the start of their story; in the Kojiki that error first appears here, the woman speaking before the man, and its fruit is the leech. The Kokugakuin database notes that in myths of Southeast Asia and southern China a brother and sister survive a flood and marry, and their first child is misshapen or a lump of flesh, and that some scholars place Hiruko in this type, while others object that in those myths people come from the first child, and no one comes from Hiruko.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

In the Sumerian Enki and Ninmah, Ninmah makes flawed humans from clay, the first a man who cannot bend his weak outstretched hands, and Enki finds each of them work and bread. Then Enki makes a being called Umul, whose head, eyes and neck are afflicted, whose spine and head are dislocated, and whose weak hips and shaking feet cannot carry him, and Ninmah says: the man you have made is neither alive nor dead. In both stories a first birth is not complete and a being cannot be carried by its feet; they part in that Enki and Ninmah look for a place for him among people, while Izanagi and Izanami send him off on the water.

Acrisius put his daughter Danaë and her infant Perseus in a chest and threw it into the sea; the chest came ashore on Seriphos, and Dictys took the child and raised him. Hiruko is another child cast on the water, but he does not come back as a hero: he comes back centuries later as a kami of fortune from the sea.

The wrong order in the couple's circling of the pillar belongs to the sacred marriage; the child not fully made stands beside the flawed humans of the making of the first humans; the island that did not hold together goes back to the primordial waters; and afterwards Hiruko is one of the kami worshipped by the people of the sea.