Kojiki

Rating:
Summary: Another neccesary book for Japan Studies students.
Review: The Kojiki is one of the most important works of both Japanese literature and history being that it is both the earliest surviving text composed in Japan on Japanese subjects and also that the stories contained their in formed a large part of the base of the Japanese self image for years to come.

I'll start with the problems with this particular text before getting in to the good parts.

The names and places which were not reformed into an english translation (in other words transliterations of the original Japanese) are done in a way that is meant to reflect how the words were likely to have been pronounced at the time. This in itself is not a problem in terms of scholarship, but it does not help when people are trying to read the text and perhaps communicate with Japanese scholars and students. Also, when comparing the Nihonshoki (sometimes Nihongi) in translation a person may need to hunt to find which names are identical. The modern pronounciation is provided in the glossary, which perhaps is enough, but most likely a person will remember what was in the text, not a footnote. There is also a problem with sacrificing communication for a try at scholarly theory (ancient pronounciation of Japanese was then and is now still in the theoretical stages as we have no actual transliterations of Japanese from back then) when just footnotes would do.

The second problem is the lack of a few basic points of information. For example, even though "historically" having a geneology of the gods as well as men may not have so much meaning, it can help people looking at the book as literature may have found meaning there. This is a fairly standard addition to Japanese works on the text of the same scale as this, bringing in to question why it was left out.

If you made it this far you now get to hear that, in fact, this is a rather good text in terms of both reading and study. Although it is set up in a pseudo epic-poem/biblical style (line numbers, chapters, etc., obviously absent from the original), this does not reduce the readability and having reference numbers will help people overseas work with the text more easily. There are a large number of footnotes to help those looking for more information, and the appendices are loaded full of reference material to get a person started on specialized research (it should be noted that in recent years, particularly with the huge amount of archelogical and historical discoveries, the study of Japanese myth and legend has been virtually reborn since the writing of this book; see Prehistoric Japan : New Perspective on Insular East Asia by Keiji Imamura for more information). The introduction as well offers a good summarization of scholarly thinking on the Kojiki (and in part Nihonshoki) from ancient times to when the book was written.

All in all, for those who cannot yet read the original this will be one volume to have handy if you are looking to start studying Japanese literature, history, or culture.