with a complete flaying, who, when asked his name, replied not; moreover the Deities who accompanied him, though asked, all said that they knew not. Then the toad[1] spoke, saying: “As for this, the Crumbling Prince[2] will surely know it.” Thereupon [the Deity Master-of-the-Great-Land] summoned and asked the Crumbling-Prince, who replied, saying: “This is the Little-Prince-the-Renowned-Deity,[3] the august child of the Deity-Producing-Wondrous-Deity.”[4] So on their then respectfully informing[5] His Augustness the Deity-Producing-Wondrous-August-Ancestor, he replied, saying: “This is truly my child. He among my children is the child who dipped between the
- ↑ The original word is tani-guku. Its derivation and the name of the species which it denoted are alike unknown. Indeed we might equally well translate by “frog.”
- ↑ Kuye-biko. The interpretation of the name here adopted is Motowori’s. Tominobu takes Kuye to be the name of a place, and the personage in question to have been the inventor of scarecrows, whence the tradition connected with his name.
- ↑ Sukuna-biko-na-no-kami, or without the nigori, Sukuna-hiko-na-no-kami. The interpretation of the name here followed is that proposed by Motowori, but not followed by Hirata and Moribe, who prefer to consider it antithetical to that of Oho-na-muji, “the Great-Name-Possessor.”
- ↑ First mentioned in Sect. I, Note 6. Immediately below, his name is given in the lengthened form.
- ↑ Motowori (who, strange to say, is followed by Hirata,—conf. Sect. XVIII, Note 18) interprets the two characters 白上 (here in accordance with general usage taken to signify “respectfully informed”) as “informed and took up,” thus making it appear that the diminutive deity was personally taken up to Heaven. Surely a recollection of the parallel passage in the “Chronicles,” which says that “a messenger was sent up to inform the Heavenly Deities,” should have preserved the commentators from thus offending against both grammar and common sense.
be a copyist’s error; but there is no agreement as to the character which should be substituted for it. Hirata reads 鷯, “wren,” changing the phonetic. “Wren” also is the reading in “One account” of the “Chronicles,” and Moribe, commenting thereon in his “Idzu no Chi-Waki,” thinks that “wren” must have been the bird originally intended by the framers of the tradition. Motowori, following a suggestion of the editor of 1687, prefers to consider the radical for “bird” to have been put by mistake for the radical for “insect,” and reads 蛾 which signifies “moth,” especially the “silkworm moth.” Motowori, however, proceeds to give to the character in question the Japanese reading of hi-mushi (lit. “fire-insect,” i.e. “ephemera”), which is not warranted. The proper Japanese reading is hihiru. The best would seem to be to adopt the reading 蛾, “moth.”
