The Tragic Campaigner of the Chronicles
Yamato Takeru, born Prince Ousu, was a son of Emperor Keiko. Immensely strong and alarmingly fierce, he was told as a boy to 'admonish' an elder brother who skipped the royal meals, and killed him outright. The unnerved emperor kept sending him on distant campaigns. Against the Kumaso of Kyushu, still a youth, he borrowed his aunt Yamatohime's robes, slipped into the chieftains' banquet disguised as a girl, and stabbed both brothers; the dying Kumaso Takeru, in admiration, bestowed on him the name Yamato Takeru, 'the brave of Yamato.'
Soon he was dispatched east. At Ise his aunt gave him the sword Kusanagi and a fire-striker bag, with which he cut and back-burned his way out of a grass fire set for him on a Sagami moor. Crossing the Hashirimizu strait in a storm, his consort Ototachibana-hime spread rush mats on the waves and gave herself to the sea god; the waters calmed, and seven days later her comb washed ashore. On his way home he sighed from a mountain pass, 'Azuma wa ya,' 'oh, my wife,' the legendary origin of Azuma as the name of the eastern provinces.
In Owari he left Kusanagi with Miyazu-hime and went bare-handed against the god of Mount Ibuki, who met him as a great white boar; he spoke slightingly and was battered by monstrous hail. Sickening, he died at Nobono in Ise, singing his homesick praise of Yamato, then turned into a great white bird and flew away, with 'white bird tombs' raised where it alighted. The lonely, tragic prince of the Kojiki and the dutiful paragon of the Nihon Shoki make a famous contrast between the two books.
