Week 6 Reading Notes: Japanese Mythology, Section B

Japanese Mythology, Section B

The Labors of Yamato:

- The Grotto of Love
Yamato, growing bored of his wife went on an adventure where he became enthralled with the Goddess of Deathless Love. Enraptured by her spell he begs for her love, her response “To win my love thou must dare death,” is almost poetic and she sends Yamato on a quest to prove his worth.

The descriptions and situations used in this story almost remind me of Beowulf. 

• "Descending the jutting cliff to the ever-seething waters, he beheld a great grotto from whose hidden depths glowed a wondrous emerald light. While he pondered upon this, he heard again the eerie music and saw a flitting of faint shadows as of strange celestial damsels."
• "Upon a couch of coral bowered mid glittering sea-blooms, reclined his lost siren, singing softly the whiles she gently fingered a gold and amber lute."

- The Golden Apple

Basically Japan's story about the Fountain of Youth

- The Demon Boar

 "Like rain upon a parching flower Thy presence is to me;

But grieving lone for many an hour
I withered without thee." - The poetry in this section is on point...

Yamato sad that he cannot find the Golden Apple takes it upon himself to slay the demon boar, with a band of huntsmen they enter the forest to find it.

• "Valiantly the pack drove upon him, only to be tossed instantly in air and to fall, tusked through the entrails, in pools of gore. Whereat the bowmen let fly a cloud of arrows, but their shafts rebounded like hail from the boar’s invulnerable hide."
• "Hoping to spear him as he passed, Yamato sprang behind the trunk of a tree. But the boar had halted and, with cruel cunning, bided his time." - I like the intelligence that the boar possesses.

- The Sacred Sword

Yamato returns to the Goddess and tells her of his failure. She sees the sword and tricks him, she steals it while he sleeps.

Another Goddess helps him to retrieve it by hunting and killing a demon stag.

- The Dragon

Yamato realizes that he was beguiled by the Goddess and not actually in love with her. He goes to confront the goddess but is instead attacked, he is saved by his wife who later defends a city with her magic. She seemed so helpless before, but now she seems so powerful...

In the end, throughout Yamato's infidelity, Tacibana sacrifices herself to save Yamato. She is the true hero of this myth.

Tacibana sacrificing herself to the Goddess of  Deathless Love