The (古事記伝) is a 44-volume commentary on the written by the ''

kokugaku was an academic movement, a school of Japanese philology and philosophy originating during the Edo period. scholars worked to refocus Japanese scholarship away from the then-dominant study of Chinese, Confucian, and Buddhist texts in favor of ...

'' scholar

Motoori Norinaga was a Japanese people, Japanese scholar of active during the Edo period. He is conventionally ranked as one of the Four Great Men of Kokugaku (nativist) studies. Life Norinaga was born in what is now Matsusaka, Mie, Matsusaka in Ise Province ...

Overview

The is a commentary on the , an eighth-century work of

Shinto , also called Shintoism, is a religion originating in Japan. Classified as an East Asian religions, East Asian religion by Religious studies, scholars of religion, it is often regarded by its practitioners as Japan's indigenous religion and as ...

historiography and mythology, by the

Edo period The , also known as the , is the period between 1600 or 1603 and 1868 in the history of Japan, when the country was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and some 300 regional ''daimyo'', or feudal lords. Emerging from the chaos of the Sengok ...

'' scholar

Background

Motoori Norinaga was attracted to Shinto, as well as '' waka'' and ''

monogatari is a Literary genre, literary form in traditional Japanese literature – an extended prose narrative tale comparable to epic (genre), epic literature. ''Monogatari'' is closely tied to aspects of the oral tradition, and almost always relates ...

'', from a young age. While studying in

Kyoto Kyoto ( or ; Japanese language, Japanese: , ''Kyōto'' ), officially , is the capital city of Kyoto Prefecture in the Kansai region of Japan's largest and most populous island of Honshu. , the city had a population of 1.46 million, making it t ...

in the seventh month of the sixth year of Hōreki (1756), he purchased a copy of the

Kan'ei was a after '' Genna'' and before ''Shōhō.'' This period spanned the years from February 1624 through December 1644. The reigning emperors and single empress were , and .Titsingh, Isaac. (1834) ''Annales des empereurs du japon'', p. 411./re ...

edition of the ''Kojiki'', so it is thought that he read the work shortly after this point. His early writings following this date, such as the 1758 '' Aware Ben'' (安波礼弁) and '' Ashiwake Obune'' (排蘆小船) were more focused on the ''

Nihon Shoki The or , sometimes translated as ''The Chronicles of Japan'', is the second-oldest book of classical Japanese history. It is more elaborate and detailed than the , the oldest, and has proven to be an important tool for historians and archaeol ...

''. In the 1761 '' Ame Tsuchi no Ben'' (阿毎菟知弁), he had moved toward placing more value on linguistic scholarship and attacked the ''Nihon Shoki''s Chinese for being a barrier to research into the ancient Japanese language.

Publication

The was completed in Kansei 10 (1798). It is in 44 books, first published in 44 volumes. The first five books were first printed in 1790, with books 6 through 11 following in 1792. Books 12 through 17 were printed in 1797. The rest of the work was not published until Bunsei 5 (1822), after Norinaga's death. The first editions were printed in Nagoya by Eirakuya Tōshirō (永楽屋東四郎) and others.

Textual tradition

According to the 1983 '' Nihon Koten Bungaku Daijiten''s article on the , written by (1919–1980), Norinaga's original manuscripts for books 17, 18, 19, and 21 through 44 (27 books, 22 volumes), and secondary manuscripts for all 44 books (except for book 3, which is represented by a tertiary manuscript), are in the holdings of the Museum of Motoori Norinaga (本居宣長記念館 ''Motoori Norinaga Kinenkan''). The secondary manuscript for book 3 is in the holdings of the Tenri Central Library.

References

Works cited

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Kojikiden 1790 in literature 1790 introductions Book series introduced in the 1790s 1790 non-fiction books 1792 non-fiction books 1797 non-fiction books 1798 non-fiction books 1822 non-fiction books Kojiki Edo-period works Shinto texts Kokugaku Literature first published in serial form