Songs Set Into the Narrative

The middle scroll carries more song than any other part of the Kojiki, and the songs are the oldest layer of Japanese poetry to survive in writing. They stop the narrative rather than decorating it. A general sings before dying; a woman sings to a man who has come or failed to come; a sovereign sings on seeing a landscape or a girl by a river. The prose around them often exists to explain who was singing and why, which suggests that in some cases the song came first and the story was fitted to it.

They also explain the book's strange orthography. Old Japanese had no script of its own, and the compilers had only Chinese characters to write with. For most of the text they could write in a Chinese-influenced style that a trained reader could construe. For the songs they could not, because a song depends on its exact sounds, so the characters are used phonetically, one to a syllable, with meaning set aside. The result is a text that switches between two ways of reading the same signs, and it is the phonetic passages that let modern linguists reconstruct the sound of eighth century Japanese at all.

That preservation was not the purpose. The compilers were recording what had been recited, and a recitation cannot be summarised. The scroll's songs survive because the only honest way to write them down was the difficult way.