Mikado's Court, one of these notices belonging to the very next year after its completion. It threw wholly into the shade its predecessor the Kojiki and superseded the recitations of the Katari Be and other similar customs. Another testimony to its value is the series of commentaries which began to be written upon it immediately after its appearance. Some of these notes, known as Shiki or "private notes" have been preserved to us in a work called Shaku-nihongi, written about the end of the 13th century. They are described as of the periods Yōrō, (714-724), Kōnin (810-824), and Yengi (901-923).
This high estimation for the Nihongi has lasted until our own day. Its pre-eminence as a source of knowledge of Japanese antiquity was never contested until quite recent times. Even Motoöri[1] acknowledges its value, although his religious and patriotic prejudices lead him to give a preference to the Kojiki which is less profoundly tainted by an admixture of Chinese ideas.
The Kojiki and the Nihongi.—Both the Kojiki and the Nihongi present to the eye a series of Chinese characters. A closer examination, however, reveals a marked difference in the way in which they are used by the respective authors. In the Kojiki, which was taken down from the mouth of a Japanese by a man with some tincture of Chinese learning, the Chinese construction is every now and then interrupted or rather helped out by Japanese words written phonetically, the result being a very curious style wholly devoid of literary qualities. It is in fact possible to restore throughout the original Japanese words used by Hiyeda no Are with a fair degree of probability, and this has actually been done by Motoöri in his great edition of the work known as the Kojikiden, This feature gives the Kojiki a far greater philological interest than the Nihongi. The
- ↑ Motoöri has left a poem to the following effect:—
In all their fulness
How should we know
The days of old,
Did the august Yamato writing (the Nihongi)
Not exist in the world?Hirata says ("Kodō Taii," I. 36), "If we put aside the ornaments of style of Chinese fashion, there is none among all the writings in the world so noble and important as this classic."
