Kojiki
The oldest surviving historical and mythological chronicle of Japan, completed in 712 CE at the commission of Empress Genmei, and compiled by the court scholar Ō no Yasumaro from the oral memorisation of Hieda no Are, a figure of ambiguous gender in the sources who is said to have possessed a prodigious memory capable of reciting entire genealogies and legends. Written in a complex mixture of Chinese characters used phonetically and semantically —an early transcription system (proto-man'yōgana) that still poses philological challenges to modern scholars— the work is divided into three books: the first relates the mythology of the creation of Japan and the gods (kami), from the primordial deities and the creator couple Izanagi and Izanami to the descent to earth of Ninigi, grandson of the sun goddess Amaterasu; the second and third narrate, in a continuum that deliberately blurs the boundary between myth and history, the reigns of the earliest legendary emperors, beginning with Jinmu, the first emperor, and reaching down to Empress Suiko in the seventh century. The Kojiki played a fundamental political role in legitimising the Japanese imperial dynasty as a direct descendant of the Shinto gods, establishing an unbroken sacred genealogy that still symbolically underpins the imperial house today, and, together with the Nihon Shoki (720), constitutes the most important primary source for Japanese mythology, religion and early political history. It lost prominence for centuries in favour of the more prestigious classical-Chinese Nihon Shoki, but was rediscovered and championed as a foundational national text by the Nativist scholars of the Edo period, especially Motoori Norinaga, whose monumental commentary, the Kojiki-den, restored it to the centre of Japanese cultural and religious identity.