Empress Suiko — the closing figure — is the Kojiki’s terminus by design. She died in 628, only eighty-four years before the Kojiki was completed in 712, and she was the first reigning empress in clearly recorded form, sister of Emperor Yōmei and aunt of Prince Shōtoku. Her reign is the moment when Buddhism, written law, and Chinese-style governance arrive together in the archipelago, and the chronicle’s choice to end with her is a quiet acknowledgment that what comes next is no longer myth-history but documented history. The reader who continues into the Nihon Shoki, and from there into the Shoku Nihongi, is following the same imperial line through three increasingly archive-based texts. The mythological mode the Kojiki opens partA with — Izanagi stirring the brine — closes here with a single paragraph about a palace, a length of reign, and a mausoleum rebuilt above a mound. This is the literary structure of the whole work: cosmic mythology, expansive heroic chronicle, terse late annal. Read together the three modes are doing the work of telling a young state how it came to be itself.