The Age of the Gods.
71
The August Grandchild inquired of this fair maid, saying:—"Whose daughter art thou?" She answered and said:—"Thy handmaiden[1] is the child of a Heavenly Deity by his marriage with Oho-yama-tsu-mi Kami."
The August Grandchild accordingly favoured[2] her, whereupon in one night she became pregnant. But the August Grandchild was slow to believe this, and said:—"Heavenly Deity though I am, how could I cause any one to become pregnant in the space of one night? That which thou hast in thy bosom is assuredly not my child." Therefore Ka-ashi-tsu-hime was wroth. She prepared a doorless[3] muro[4] (called utsumuro), and
- ↑ The use of the character meaning concubine as a pronoun of the first person fem. is a Chinese idiom. The interlinear Kana version has yakko, i.e. slave. Oho-yama-tsu-mi means the Great-mountain-body. Possibly it should be taken here as a common noun, a mountain Deity.
- ↑ i.e. married her.
- ↑ It appears from the "Kojiki" that after going in she plastered up the entrance.
- ↑ The character 室 which in Chinese means a house, a chamber, is, in the older Japanese literature, generally, if not invariably, used to represent the Japanese word muro. Another character used for this purpose is 窩, a cellar. The muro is distinguished from the ihe, or ordinary dwelling. What was the muro? This term is nowadays applied to a gardener's forcing-house, which in Japan consists of a pit four or five feet deep and roofed over. Hi-muro means an ice-house. If the ice-houses in Japan (see drawing in "San-sai-dzu-ye," IV., 19), so denominated, resemble those which I have seen at Yang-hwa-chin in Corea, they were pits sunk several feet below the surface of the ground and covered with a heavy thatched roof. At the foot of Mount Ohoyama there was to be seen, some years ago, a large rectangular pit, three or four feet in depth, with a thatched roof sloping to the ground, and no walls, which was occupied as a dwelling by the pilgrims to that mountain. There are also pits in Corea covered with thatch or strong oil-paper, which are used by the poorest classes as shelters. These are called um, or um-mak. Pit-dwellers are also mentioned in the old Chinese literature. The references to the muro in the "Kojiki" and "Nihongi" show that the muro of those days had a similar character. We read of Tsuchi-gumo (earth-hiders, see Index) living in muro, of a muro being dug, and of steps (down) to a muro. That they were sometimes of considerable size is shown by the legend of Jimmu Tennō's reign, which speaks of 160 persons being in a muro at the same time. The pit was (at least in some cases) not simply roofed over, but contained a house with a wooden frame lashed together with cords of a creeping vine (dolichos), the walls having sedges or reeds for laths, and plastered with a mixture of grass and clay. The roof was
