Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters) · 162 of 191

[Sect. CLV.—Emperor Yū-Riyaku (Part VI.—He Makes a Progress to Yeshinu).]

When the Heavenly Sovereign made a progress to the palace of Yeshinu, 1 there was on the bank of the Yeshinu river a girl of beautiful appearance. So having wedded this girl, he returned to the Palace. Afterwards, when he again made a progress to Yeshinu, he halted where he had met the girl, and in that place raised a great august throne, 2a seated himself on that august throne, played on his august lute, and made the maiden dance. Then he composed an august Song on account of the maiden’s good dancing. That Song said:

Context

Yū-riyaku’s progress to Yeshinu (modern Yoshino in Nara prefecture) is the chronicle’s quiet recognition of a place that would become one of the most poetically charged sites in Japanese culture. By the Heian period Yoshino was the standard pilgrimage destination for cherry-blossom viewing; by the medieval period it was the site of the Southern Court during the Northern-Southern Court division of 1336-1392; by Bashō’s seventeenth century it was the obligatory stop on the poetic landscape circuit. The detail that Yū-riyaku built a great throne there and praised the maiden’s dancing — calling himself, with what Chamberlain notes is uncharacteristic frankness, ‘the Deity seated on the throne’ — registers the place as already, in the fifth century, a site where the sovereign came to be in some heightened sense of his own dignity. The Kojiki’s instinct for the geographically loaded place-name is consistently accurate.

“Oh! that the maiden dancing to the lute-playing, of the august hand of the Deity seated on the throne might continue for ever!” 3

Footnotes 395:1 See Sect. XLVI, Note 3.

396:2a See Sect. CXII, Note 2.

396:3 This Song presents no difficulties. In it the Emperor speaks of himself as a Deity, and is enthusiastically praised by the commentator Moribe for so doing.