obo-ti, susu-ti, madi-ti, uru-ti

It's time to finish the story of Po-deri and Po-wori (which I wrote about here and here). Having lost his brother's fish hook, Po-wori was moping by on the water's edge. There he came upon Sipo-Tuti-Nö-Kami, the Brine-Spirit Deity, who gave him a boat and told him to travel to the palace of Wata-Tu-Mi-Nö-Kami, the Sea-Spirit Deity. On arriving there, he said, Po-wori would see a large katura tree. He should climb it and await instructions.

This Po-wori did, and, as he sat in the tree, the hand-maid of the sea god's daughter came out of the palace to draw water from the well. She offered him a basin of water to quench his thirst and he, taking one of the jewels that he had upon his person, put it in his mouth and then spat it out again into the basin where it stuck to the side so that it couldn't be moved. The hand-maid told the princess what had happened and she told her father, who recognised Po-wori and invited him to be his daughter's husband.

Po-wori lived in the Sea-Spirit Deity's palace for three years but eventually his thoughts turned again to the loss of his brother's fish hook. So his father-in-law called together all the sea creatures and asked them if they had any idea what had happened to it. They confirmed that the sea bream had been complaining of having something stuck in her throat and so they called her to the palace and, sure enough, when she opened her mouth there was Po-deri's hook.

The Sea-Spirit Deity told Po-wori that, when he gave the fish-hook back to Po-deri, he should say to him: 'This hook is a gloomy hook, an uneasy hook, a poor hook, a dull hook' (obo-ti, sasu-ti, madi-ti, uru-ti) and he should hand it over with his hand behind his back. These words and this action would constitute a curse and part of a larger pattern of conduct designed to ruin Po-deri entirely:

[I]f your elder brother makes a high rice paddy, make a low paddy. If your elder brother makes a low paddy, make a high paddy. Thus, since I control the water, within three years your elder brother will be poverty-stricken. If he becomes bitter and angry and attacks you, take the tide-raising jewel and cause him to drown. If he pleads with you in anguish, take the tide-ebbing jewel and cause him to live. Doing this cause him anguish and suffering.

After offering this advice, the Sea-Spirit Deity sent Po-wori back to the shore with a crocodile to look after him on the journey.  Po-wori did as he had been instructed and things turned out as the Sea-Spirit Deity had said, the elder brother losing all his wealth and coming close to drowning until the younger granted him his life with the power of the tide-ebbing jewel. Faced with the inevitability of ruin, Po-deri eventually submitted to  Po-wori's will and declared that, from then on, he would be his brother's guard by day and his servant by night.

According to the commentators (Matsumura and, following him, Philippi), the story reflects the ascendancy of the Yamato dynasty over other groups in southern Japan. (Po-wori is represented in the Kojiki as the grandfather of the first Emperor, Jimmu.) What is particularly interesting is the final line of the story: 'Down to the present day his various posturings when drowning are ceaselessly served up.' This point is made at greater length in another early Shinto collection, the Nihon Shoki:

At this the elder brother put on a waist-cloth, rubbed red clay on his palms and on his face, and said to his younger brother: 'I have defiled my body thus, I will be your mime for ever.' Then he raised up his feet and stamped them in imitation of his drowning painfully. At first, when the tide covered his feet, he did the foot-divination; when it reached his thighs, he ran around; when it reached his waist, he rubbed his waist; when it reached his under-arms, he put his hands on his breast; and when it reached his neck, he raised up his hands and waved them about. From that time until now, this has never ceased.

In The Japanese Theatre from Shamanistic Ritual to Contemporary Pluralism, Benito Ortolani reiterates the point about the ascendancy of the Yamato dynasty and associates Po-deri's dance with that of the Hayato clan from Kyūshū, who '[o]n the occasion of festivals and banquets' would smear themselves with scarlet earth and 'perform comic pantomimes of their defeat'. 'This dance,' he adds, 'the original Hayato-mai, was probably meant as a renewal of the promise of obedience to the conquerors.'

Thus, the story of Po-wori and Po-deri is presented in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki as a part of the mythology of the ruling Yamato clan. But, at the same time, it seems reductive to see the convoluted tale of the brothers' dispute as merely some kind of  historical aetiology. The elder brother's intransigence and the younger's revenge seem to dramatise some dark insight into the nature of social order and the politics of expertise. And how strange that the curse laid upon the fisherman is to spend the years dancing the scene of his own drowning. Po-deri should simply have accepted the replacement hooks. But then how could he? His fate was fixed when Po-wori first suggested that they trade 'luck' and try their hands at each other's allotted roles.














Hatō zu (Waves). Woodcut print after Konen Uehara, dating from between 1900 and 1920. Image by …trialsanderrors (Konen Uehara: Waves, ca. 1910) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.