Yamata no Orochi

The founding monster of Japanese myth.

Eight heads. Eight tails. A body spanning eight valleys and eight hills.

Moss and cypress trees growing on its back, because it has been there long enough for a forest to establish itself.

And its belly is always bloody.

The bargain

It had been devouring one daughter of Izumo per year, and there was one girl left: Kushinadahime.

Susanoo — the storm god, freshly banished from heaven for wrecking his sister's court — arrives and finds her parents weeping.

He prices the rescue at marriage, which they accept, because they have nothing left to bargain with.

Then he transforms the girl into a comb and puts her in his hair, which is either the safest place available or the strangest engagement gift in mythology.

And he sets out eight gates, with eight vats of sake behind them.

The brew has a name

*Yashiori no sake — 八塩折之酒 — "brewed seven or eight times over.*"

Not ordinary sake. Sake re-brewed on itself, repeatedly, until it is something much stronger than anything anyone drinks.

The tradition's founding cocktail — and modern breweries still borrow the name.

The serpent puts all eight heads into all eight vats, and drinks, and sleeps.

And Susanoo hacks it apart until the River Hi ran red.

The sword in the tail

Cutting the middle tail, his blade snapped.

On something harder.

Kusanagi no Tsurugi — the Grass-Cutting Sword — which became one of the three Imperial Regalia of Japan.

Sit with that.

Japan's sovereignty regalia includes an object looted from a monster's corpse.

Not forged for an emperor. Not handed down from heaven. Cut out of the tail of a serpent by an exiled storm god who was only there because he'd been thrown out of the sky.

That's the deepest monster-to-state connection anywhere in this collection — and it's also where the named-sword tradition begins. Every celebrated Japanese blade with a name and a monster attached — the Demon-Child Cutter, the Spider-Cutter — descends from this moment.

And the method became the template

The sake gambit runs all the way down the canon.

The demon king of Mount Ōe, given poisoned sake by men disguised as priests, and beheaded asleep.

Japan's monsters lose when they drink, and the pattern starts here, in the oldest text.

Four theories, one serpent

The scholarly readings are worth having, because they contradict each other productively.

It's a river. The Hii — with its eight branches, its annual flooding, and the "devoured daughters" as flood-loss. Susanoo's victory is river engineering, remembered as a duel.

It's metallurgy. Izumo's iron-sand industry, with the red river as smelting run-off and the serpent as the ore-body. With a pointed observation attached: the Izumo Fudoki never mentions the myth — which suggests the story may be court fabrication, binding Izumo's iron to imperial ancestry after the fact.

It's a lava flow. Terada Torahiko's thesis — the eight-branched thing coming down a mountainside, glowing, with a bloody belly.

It's the jade trade. Umehara's reading, connecting it to Koshi.

Four theories. One serpent.

The myth as a Rorschach of whatever the reader's century feared or traded.

And it's still performed

Iwami kagura — the sacred dance tradition of western Shimane — stages the Orochi, and it is spectacular.

Multiple performers inside enormous articulated serpent costumes, coiling around each other and around the stage, rearing up over the audience, in venues that are usually far too small for it.

It runs for a long time. Children love it. It is genuinely one of the great surviving pieces of Japanese performance, and it happens in village halls.

Twelve hundred years after somebody wrote it down, in the province where it's set, they still put the serpent on.