Customer Reviews

Kojiki

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W.G. Aston's Nihon Shoki is well known to be a great translation of that book. Unfortunately, Aston did not translate the Kojiki, the Nihon Shoki's much more difficult evil twin. Instead, a bumbling political commentator called Basil Hall Chamberlain did, combining the nationalist stylings of Motoori Norinaga's interpretation with his own uniquely twisted amateur Durkheimian psychology. The result is a witches' brew where the reader often hears the trumpets of nationalism or the African drumming of "primitive religion", but never the warm, simple Old Japanese melody of the original. Chamberlain's translation, publicly available on many websites, should be avoided at all costs.

This is the good English translation. There are no others, and judging by conditions in the world of liberal arts, there may never be any others. In this book alone you will hear the music of 1500-year-old poetry. Due to a nasty feud over the Philippi estate it only ever got one printing, and may never be reprinted. The price of this book will only go up over the decades. Get your copy while you still can.