A hare with no skin lies crying on a beach. Eighty princes walk past and give it confident, plausible, catastrophically wrong medical advice. The eighty-first, who is carrying their luggage, stops and asks it what happened, listens to a story in which the hare admits it brought the whole thing on itself, and then tells it what will actually work.
That is the entire episode, it takes up about a page of the Kojiki, and it is the reason a shrine in Tottori Prefecture is packed with people hoping to get married.
Eighty brothers going courting
The eighty deities were the brothers of Ōnamuji — the god later known as Ōkuninushi — and they had all decided to go to the land of Inaba to propose to Princess Yakami, who was famously beautiful and had never met any of them.
They took the youngest along as a bearer. He walked behind them with the bag.
At Cape Keta they came across a hare lying stripped bare, with all its fur gone and its skin exposed to the air.
The eighty deities looked at it and told it what to do: bathe in the sea, then go up somewhere high and lie in the wind until you dry.
It did exactly that. The salt water dried on the raw flesh and the wind cracked the skin as it tightened, and the hare was in far more pain than it had been before, and lay there weeping.
What the hare had done
Ōnamuji, coming along last, asked why it was crying.
The hare's account is the good part, because it does not present itself as a victim of anything except its own cleverness. It had been on the island of Oki and wanted to reach the mainland and had no means of crossing. So it went to the sea-creatures — the wani — and proposed a census. Let us count which of us has more kin, it said. Line yourselves up in a row all the way from this island to Cape Keta, and I will run across your backs counting as I go, and then we will know.
They lined up. The hare ran the length of them, counting. And as it reached the last one and was about to jump onto dry land, it could not resist finishing the joke, and told them they had been tricked, and that it had only ever wanted a bridge.
The last one in the line caught it and pulled its skin off.
Then, it added, the eighty deities came by and told me to bathe in salt water and lie in the wind, and I did, and now I am worse.
The cure
Ōnamuji told it to go at once to the river mouth, wash the salt off in the fresh water, then gather the pollen from the cattails growing there, spread it on the ground, and roll in it.
The hare did, and its fur came back, and it was whole.
The prescription is not arbitrary. Cattail pollen was a real item in the East Asian pharmacopoeia, used dry on wounds to stop bleeding — which means the story is contrasting two kinds of advice: the confident, cruel, useless kind offered by people who did not stop to ask what happened, and the correct kind offered by someone who did. The moral of this tale is usually given as kindness rewarded. It is at least as much about competence.
The prophecy
Then the hare — who is not an ordinary animal, and whom the Kojiki names as a deity — made a prediction.
The eighty deities will not obtain Yakami-hime. You will get her, though you are carrying the bag.
And when the brothers arrived and made their proposals, the princess told them she would not be marrying any of them; she would marry the one who had come last.
What it cost him
The story is normally told as ending there, and it does not.
The eighty deities decided to kill their brother. On a mountain in Hōki they told him to wait at the foot of the slope and catch a red boar they were about to drive down. Then they heated a boulder until it glowed and rolled it down at him, and he caught it, and it burned him to death.
His mother went weeping to the deity of creation, who sent two shellfish goddesses. One scraped, and one carried the milky fluid and smeared it on, and he got up alive and whole and better-looking than before. The brothers killed him a second time, by luring him into a split tree and letting it close on him, and again he was recovered — and then he was sent away, to the underworld, into the keeping of Susanoo, where he underwent the ordeals that eventually made him ruler of Izumo.
The hare episode is the opening move of a much longer sequence about a youngest son who is repeatedly killed and repeatedly comes back and ends up with a country.
Where it is written down
The tale is in the first book of the Kojiki, the Record of Ancient Matters, presented to the court in 712 — the oldest surviving Japanese book. It sits inside the Kojiki's substantial and, by the standards of an imperial chronicle, disproportionate coverage of the Izumo cycle.
The Nihon Shoki, compiled eight years later with a different agenda, does not have it. That is worth noticing. The two chronicles are the twin foundations of Japanese mythology and they often disagree about what belongs in the record at all; Izumo material is precisely where they diverge most.
The whole cycle is Izumo's, not the court's, and it concerns a line of deities who eventually hand their country over to the heavenly descendants rather than a line who descend from heaven to receive it.
The word for the creatures in the sea
Popular English retellings usually call them crocodiles, and it is worth explaining why, because it is not a translation error so much as an inherited puzzle.
The word in the text is wani, written with a character that means crocodile in Chinese. Japan has no crocodiles. In the dialects of the San'in coast, where this story is set, wani means shark, and that is what most specialists take it to be here. Others read it as a sea-monster of no fixed species, of a piece with the dragon-kin who appear elsewhere in the chronicles.
There is no way to settle it from the text. Sharks are the safest rendering and the least colourful, which is presumably why illustrators keep drawing crocodiles.
The shrine, and the matchmaking
Hakuto Shrine stands near the beach at Cape Keta in Tottori Prefecture, on the stretch of coast the story names, and it enshrines the hare.
Its modern reputation is specific: it is a shrine for en-musubi, the tying of bonds — that is, for finding a partner. The logic is straightforward and rather charming. The hare made the match. It predicted the marriage, and the marriage happened, so the hare is Japan's oldest recorded matchmaker and the place where it was healed is where you go about your own prospects.
The beach has a pond identified as the fresh water the hare washed in, and small stone hares everywhere. Ōkuninushi's own great shrine at Izumo, further along the same coast, is the other major matchmaking site in Japan, for related reasons.
How the story is known now
For most Japanese people the first encounter is not the Kojiki. It is a children's song from the early twentieth century, taught in elementary schools, in which the deity who helps the hare is called by the name of a jolly god of good fortune with a sack over his shoulder.
That name is the result of a genuine confusion worth untangling. Daikokuten is a Buddhist deity of Indian origin, absorbed into Japan through scripture, and one of the Seven Lucky Gods. His name written in Chinese characters can also be read as the characters in Ōkuninushi's — great country. On that pun, plus the shared image of a figure carrying a large bag, the two were identified with each other in the medieval period, and Japanese popular culture has treated them as one ever since.
So the picture-book version has a Buddhist god of prosperity from the Indian tradition curing a hare in an eighth-century Shinto chronicle, and nobody minds. That is not sloppiness; it is exactly how Japanese religion worked for a thousand years.
Questions this episode raises
Is the hare punished for the trick? It loses its skin for the boast, not for the plan. The narrative is careful about the sequence: the bridge worked, the crossing succeeded, and the injury comes from saying the quiet part out loud on the last step. That is a Japanese moral about restraint more than about deceit.
Why eighty brothers? The number in Japanese usage means "very many" rather than a count, in the same way as the eight million deities. It functions to make the youngest brother's isolation total.
Does Yakami-hime become his wife? She does, and it does not last. In the later chapters Ōkuninushi's principal wife is Suseri-bime, Susanoo's daughter, and Yakami-hime returns to Inaba out of fear of her, leaving her child wedged in the fork of a tree. Izumo material is rarely sentimental.
Is the hare a god? The Kojiki gives it a divine title after the healing, so yes, in the way that many things in the chronicle are: not a great deity, but a named power with a place and a shrine.
Why does the Kojiki give Izumo so much room? This is one of the standing questions in the study of Japanese mythology. A chronicle compiled to justify the imperial line devotes a great deal of space to a rival tradition centred on a different province, whose deities eventually cede rather than conquer. Explanations range from a genuine political settlement being commemorated, to the incorporation of a powerful regional cult that could not be ignored. None is agreed.
Continue with Ōkuninushi, Susanoo, Daikokuten and Yomi; the other great Japanese story of a journey to the sea at Urashima Tarō and the dragon palace; and the Japanese hub.