Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters) · 177 of 191

[Sect. CLXX.—Emperor Ken-Zō (Part IV.—His Age and Place of Burial).]

So the Heavenly Sovereign died, and His Augustness Ohoke ruled the succession of Heaven’s sun. 1 The Heavenly Sovereign’s august years were thirty-eight years. His august mausoleum is on the mound of Ihatsuki at Katawoka. 2

Context

Ken-zō’s death at thirty-eight closes the exile-restoration arc that began chapters earlier when the boy-princes fled their father’s murderers. His elder brother Ohoke, who ceded the empire to him at the opening of his reign, now succeeds him as Emperor Nin-ken. The structural symmetry — younger brother reigns first because elder brother yielded out of gratitude; elder brother then succeeds younger upon his early death — produces the cleanest piece of imperial cession-and-reciprocation in the Kojiki. From here forward the text accelerates: Nin-ken gets two paragraphs, Mu-retsu (the cruel emperor) gets one, and the closing reigns through Suiko are compressed into rapid annal. The literary leisure of the Yū-riyaku and Ken-zō chapters gives way to documentary terseness, the same arc visible in any chronicle as it approaches its compositional present.

Footnotes 421:1 p. 422 See Sect. XXXII, Note 27.

422:2 For Katawoka see Sect. LX, Note 29. Iha-tsuki probably means “rockplatter,” and seems to have been the name of a little plateau.