The White Hare of Inaba

A hare is stranded on an island and wants to get to the mainland.

So it works out a scam. It goes to the wani — the sea-creatures of the old chronicles, variously understood as crocodiles or sharks or something with no modern equivalent — and proposes a census.

Let's settle which of us has the bigger clan. Line up your people across the water and I'll hop along and count.

The wani, flattered, line up. And the hare goes down the row on their backs, counting, and reaches the far shore.

And then — because it cannot help itself — it turns round and gloats. Tells them what it just did.

The last wani in the line, still within reach, catches it and flays it.

The first advice is worse than the injury

So there's a skinned hare on the beach in agony, and a procession comes along the road.

It's the eighty brothers — a crowd of gods on their way to court the Princess Yakami — and they stop to look at it.

And they give it advice. Bathe in salt water, then stand in the wind and let yourself dry.

Anyone who has had salt water in a graze knows what that does to a body with no skin. The hare does it, and the pain is beyond anything, and the drying wind cracks it open worse.

They knew. That's the point. It was a prank, delivered in the form of help, by gods who found the idea funny.

And then the one at the back

At the rear of that procession, carrying everyone's baggage because he's the youngest and nobody thinks much of him, is Ōnamuchi — the god who will eventually become Ōkuninushi, one of the great deities of Japan.

He stops. And he gives the hare a treatment that actually works.

Wash in fresh water from the river mouth. Then roll in the pollen of the cattail reeds.

The hare does it, and the fur comes back, and it is whole.

Then it stands up and reveals that it isn't merely a hare, and it makes a prophecy:

The princess will not choose any of your brothers. She will choose you.

She does.

The whole moral circuit in one page

I've come to think this is the most efficient story in Japanese myth, because it runs four separate lessons without pausing for any of them.

Trickery works. The scam is a good scam. The hare gets across the water. The story does not disapprove.

Gloating costs. He isn't punished for the deception. He's punished for needing to be admired for it, one back too early.

Cruelty disguises itself as advice. The eighty brothers don't attack anyone. They offer help, in a helpful tone, and the injury does the rest — which is a far more sophisticated portrait of malice than most myth manages.

Kindness is the only thing that cures. And notably, the kindness comes from the person carrying the bags.

The standard scholarly reading takes the eighty cruel elders against the kind youngest as civilization against barbarism. That's fine, but it undersells it. The hare is a trickster who got what was coming and an oracle who was owed something — punished and restored in the same afternoon, by different people, for different reasons.

It's in the Kojiki, from 712, which makes it one of the oldest things here. And the hare has an address: Hakuto Shrine in Tottori keeps it, with hare statues, on the coast the story describes.