Kojiki-den

Norinaga's 1798 'Kojiki-den' (Commentary on the Kojiki) — 44-volume magnum opus, founding modern Kojiki scholarship

Tradition: Kokugaku (Japanese National Learning) / shintō hermeneutics / Japanese philology

Norinaga's 1798 'Kojiki-den' — 44-volume magnum opus commentary on the Kojiki, completed after 34 years' work

Composed across 34 years (1764-1798, Norinaga began the project at age 35 and finished at 69) and completed in 44 volumes, 'Kojiki-den' (Commentary on the Kojiki) is Motoori Norinaga's magnum opus and the defining work of Japanese Kokugaku scholarship. The Kojiki (712, 'Records of Ancient Matters') is the oldest surviving Japanese chronicle, compiled by Ō no Yasumaro from oral traditions; by the eighteenth century the text had become almost unreadable, written in a mixed-script that combined Chinese characters used for their sound (man'yōgana), Chinese characters used for their meaning (kun-yomi), and a system of phonetic transcription whose conventions had been lost. Norinaga's 44-volume Kojiki-den reconstructs the text's pronunciation and grammar (working from internal evidence and from comparison with the Man'yōshū and other ancient sources), supplies commentary on every line, identifies the deities and their relations, traces the geography of the mythological narratives, and reads the text as the principal historical-religious record of the ancient Japanese 'Way of the Kami' (kami no michi — the 'Way of the gods/spirits'). The work is methodologically distinctive: Norinaga's philological-historical method anticipates modern textual criticism by a century; his religious-philosophical reading of the Kojiki shaped subsequent Japanese self-understanding (Kokugaku continued through Hirata Atsutane in the early nineteenth century into the State Shintō of the Meiji and pre-war periods; Norinaga's specific philosophical readings are still read in contemporary Japanese intellectual history). The work was published serially as Norinaga completed each volume (the first volume appeared in 1790, the last in 1822 — after Norinaga's 1801 death); it remains the standard reference commentary on the Kojiki.