Ōkuninushi

Summary

Ōkuninushi is the lord of Izumo, on the coast of Japan facing its western sea, and in the Kojiki a descendant of Susanoo in the sixth generation. The book gives him five names: Ōnamuchi, the Great-Name-Possessor; Ashihara-shikoo, the Ugly Male of the Reed Plains; Yachihoko, Lord of Eight Thousand Spears; Utsushi-kunitama, Spirit of the Living Land; and Ōkuninushi, Master of the Great Land, the name he receives at the end of his ordeal.

He had eighty brothers, each of whom wanted to marry Yakami-hime of Inaba. They set out together to court her and made him carry their bag like a servant. At Cape Keta they found a hare stripped of its fur and told it: bathe in the sea and lie on the slope of a high hill in the wind. As the salt dried, its skin cracked, and it lay weeping. Ōnamuchi, coming last, asked what was wrong. The hare told how it had been on the island of Oki and wanted to cross to the mainland, so it tricked the crocodiles of the sea: line up from the island to the cape and I will count you, to see whose tribe is larger. It ran across their backs counting them, and on reaching the shore said: you have been tricked. The last one seized it and stripped off its fur. Ōnamuchi told it to wash in the fresh water at the river mouth, scatter the pollen of the sedges growing there and roll in it, and its body was restored. The hare said: your brothers will not win her; you will, though you carry the bag.

When Yakami-hime chose him, his brothers set out to kill him. At Mount Tema they said: there is a red boar on this mountain; when we drive it down, catch it. Then they heated a great rock in fire until it looked like a boar and rolled it down, and he caught it, was burned and died. His mother wept and went up to heaven to beg Kamimusubi, who sent Kisagai-hime and Umugi-hime, Princess Cockle and Princess Clam. The first scraped and scorched her shell, the second carried water and smeared him as with mother's milk, and he rose a handsome young man. Again his brothers tricked him: they split a great tree, set him in the cleft and pulled out the wedge, and he was crushed to death. His mother found him, split the tree, took him out and revived him, and sent him away from them.

He went to Susanoo in the Nether-Distant-Land. Susanoo's daughter Suseri-bime came out, they exchanged glances and married. Susanoo made him sleep in the house of snakes, and his wife gave him a scarf to wave three times so that they grew quiet; then in the house of centipedes and wasps, and she gave him another scarf. Then Susanoo shot an arrow into the middle of a moor and sent him to fetch it, and when he had gone in set fire all round the moor. A mouse came and said: inside it is hollow, outside it is narrow. He pressed on the ground, fell into a hole and hid while the fire passed, and the mouse brought him the arrow in its mouth. Then Susanoo told him to pick the lice from his head, which was full of centipedes; his wife gave him muku berries and red clay, which he chewed and spat out, and Susanoo, thinking he was crunching the centipedes, grew fond of him and fell asleep. He tied Susanoo's hair to the rafters, blocked the door with a rock five hundred men could not lift, took his wife on his back, seized Susanoo's sword, his bow and arrows and his heavenly lute, and ran. The lute brushed a tree and the earth resounded. Susanoo woke, pulled the house down as he freed his hair, and chased him to the slope of Yomi, where he looked at him from afar and shouted: with this sword and this bow drive your brothers until they crouch on the slopes and the rivers sweep them away; become Ōkuninushi, Master of the Great Land, and Utsushi-kunitama, Spirit of the Living Land; make my daughter your chief wife, and build your house at the foot of Mount Uka with pillars in the bedrock and crossbeams to heaven, you villain! He drove out his brothers and began to make the land.

He made it with a small partner who came over the sea, Sukunabikona, until the partner left for the Everlasting Land. Then Amaterasu wanted the land for her son. She sent two envoys, each of whom stayed with him, and then Takemikazuchi, who came down on the beach of Inasa in Izumo, stood his sword upside down on the crest of a wave, sat on its point and asked: what is your heart? Ōkuninushi said: my son will answer. His son Kotoshironushi agreed and vanished; his second son Takeminakata fought, lost, fled to the sea of Suwa and then submitted. Ōkuninushi gave up the land, asked for a house with pillars in the bedrock and crossbeams in heaven like that of the heavenly grandson, and said: I will hide in the eighty bends of the road. A house was built for him on the shore of Tagishi in Izumo, and then Ninigi came down.

The idea the story turns on is that the land is won through ordeal and handed over by word. The young man who carried his brothers' bag knew how to heal the hare; he was killed twice, revived the first time, at his mother's plea, by a remedy of seashell and mother's milk, and the second time by his mother's own hands; he went down to his father-in-law in the deep land and came back with the sword, the bow, the lute and the name that made him lord of the land. He is the one who made the land firm, and the one who gave it to the sun's line when it was asked of him, keeping the high house and the hidden things.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method, since neither essay reads his name. It is written 大国主神, Ōkuninushi-no-kami. We remove no kami, the title, and ō, "great", and nushi, "master", two titles found in many names. What remains is kuni, land or country. We read it from Arabic q-n-w: q becomes k because Japanese has no q, n stays, and the final w becomes a Japanese vowel. The Tāj al-ʿArūs gives "al-qunwa, with i or u: what one earns", and "his flock is qunwa, his own and fixed to him"; Lane gives iqtanā, "he made it to be in his possession, not to depart from his hand". In Hebrew the same root describes God as the one who owns and makes heaven and earth. On this reading kuni is the qunwa, the land one owns and makes and that does not leave one's hand, which is what Susanoo orders him to do: to own it and make it. The story ends with it leaving his hand for the sun's grandson.

Linguistic Root

The names and their forms

The Kokugakuin database records disagreement over how to divide the name. Some divide it ō + kuninushi, "the great land-ruler"; others ōkuni + nushi, "master of the great country", citing a story in the Harima fudoki that a place was called "Great Country" because many people's houses stood there. The database notes that the Man'yōshū and the fudoki do not know this name and call him Ōnamuchi, so many scholars take it for a name made at court, a rank that Susanoo confers on the young man. The Nihon shoki calls him Ōnamochi in most of its accounts.

Kuni and qunwa

Lane gives "qanā ghanaman and iqtanāhā: he took sheep or goats for himself, for a permanent possession, not for sale", and iqtanā, "he made it to be in his possession, not to depart from his hand; he acquired it for himself permanently". The Tāj al-ʿArūs has "al-qunwa, with i or u: what one earns" and "his flock is qunwa: his own, fixed to him". Brown–Driver–Briggs gives Hebrew קָנָה / qānâ, "get, acquire", used of God as "originating, creating", qōnēh of heaven and earth in Genesis 14:19 and 22, and lists the same root in Phoenician, Sabaean and Akkadian.

The sound match runs like this. The q of qunwa answers the k of ku, as q answers k in the readings of Tsukuyomi and Kusanagi; the u after it stays; n is n; and the root's final w becomes the i with which Japanese closes the syllable ni. The sense meets the story twice: in Susanoo's order to become lord of the land and to make it, since the Hebrew verb holds owning and making together, and in his surrender of the land, the qunwa that should not have left his hand. What remains against the reading is that kuni is the everyday Japanese word for land and country, so the reading has to hold for that word itself, not only for the god's name.

Key Mythic Narratives

The songs of Yachihoko

The Kojiki keeps an exchange of songs under the name Yachihoko. He stands at the door of Nunakawa-hime in the land of Koshi, pushing it and pulling it while she does not open, and the birds cry the dawn. His wife Suseri-bime grows jealous, and he makes ready to leave for Yamato with one hand on his horse's saddle; she brings him a cup of wine and sings: you are a man, with a wife on every cape and shore; I am a woman, with no man but you. They pledge each other over the cup, his hand on her neck, and live together. Yakami-hime came to him but, afraid of Suseri-bime, set her child in the fork of a tree and went back, and the child was called the Tree-Fork kami.

The two envoys before the cession

Heaven first sent Ame-no-hohi, who curried favour with Ōkuninushi and brought no report for three years. Then it sent Ame-waka-hiko with a bow and arrows; he married Ōkuninushi's daughter Shitateru-hime, plotted to take the land, and brought no report for eight years. When he shot heaven's messenger, a pheasant, the arrow flew up to the council of heaven; Takagi, that is Takamimusubi, sent it back down, saying: if his heart is foul, let this arrow kill him, and it struck him in the breast as he slept.

In the Nihon shoki

The Nihon shoki calls him Ōnamochi; its main text makes him the son of Susanoo and Kushinadahime, while its other accounts place him several generations after them, differing over how many. In one account he says alone: it is I who now govern this land; is there anyone to share it with me? A light shines over the sea, and a spirit says: but for me you could not have subdued this land; I am your guardian spirit, the wondrous spirit, and asks to dwell on Mount Mimoro in Yamato, becoming the god of Ōmiwa. In another, Takamimusubi offers that the grandson should take the public affairs and he the affairs of the kami, with a palace built for him; he answers: I will retire and direct secret matters, and "became concealed for ever".

The Kokugakuin database names his famous shrine, Kitsuki in Izumo, known today as the Grand Shrine of Izumo, beside the house built for him at the cession in both books, and notes that the Kojiki tells, in the reign of Emperor Suinin, how the god of Izumo came to the emperor in a dream and said that his mute son would speak if the god's house were built like the emperor's palace.

Symbolic Reading

The Japanese essay in this project reads Izumo through its river: the eight-headed serpent Susanoo killed is the Hi River with its branches and floods, and the killing is the taming of the river by shared labour. Ōkuninushi is the one who makes the land of this province after Susanoo, so on this reading the land he owned and made is a land whose river had been tamed. The essay reads the cave story politically: Amaterasu is the ancestor of the ruling house, so the sun's return is the return of authority, and the cession of the land is where the books tell outright how rule passed to that line. The Kokugakuin database records two readings of the cession: as an echo of Yamato's subjugation of Izumo, Izumo keeping religion and rite when it lost the sword, or as originally a rite to quiet the kami of the land before the son of heaven came down. Both fit the fact that in both books Ōkuninushi keeps a high house and the hidden affairs.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

In Plutarch's account Set kills his brother Osiris; the sea casts the chest ashore at Byblos, where a heather tree grows round it and encloses it in its trunk, and Isis cuts the tree open and takes him out. Ōkuninushi's brothers kill him and a split tree closes on him, and his mother splits it and revives him. In both the killing comes from brothers, the body lies inside a tree, and a woman opens it and restores him; they part in that Osiris remains a king among the dead, while Ōkuninushi rises alive and returns to the land. The Kokugakuin database cites Yoshida Atsuhiko's comparison of him with Adonis: a death by boar in both, and a birth or revival from a tree. His killing and return are a case of the dying-and-rising god. Plutarch, Isis and Osiris 15–16; Kokugakuin name database.

In the Library attributed to Apollodorus, Medea helps Jason through her royal father's ordeals, giving him an ointment that keeps fire from harming him, then wins him the fleece and flees with him, and her father pursues them. Suseri-bime likewise gives her husband the scarves and the berries, so that he survives the snakes and the fire and escapes with her and her father's treasures, and her father chases him to the edge of his land. His descent to Susanoo in the deep land, and his return from it with a wife and weapons, makes him a case of the descent to the underworld, unlike Izanagi, who came back along the same road without his wife.

The hare's trick on the crocodiles, and Ōkuninushi's trick on Susanoo with the berries, the clay and the tied hair, are cases of the trickster. His making of the land, and the methods of healing for people and beasts he laid down with Sukunabikona, belong with the culture heroes.