Nihongi
The Nihon Shoki, also known in English as the Nihongi ('Chronicles of Japan'), is a historical and mythological chronicle completed in 720 CE by imperial order, compiled by a team of scholars under the direction of Prince Toneri, son of Emperor Tenmu, and, together with the older Kojiki (712), one of the two foundational sources for Japanese mythology and early political history. Unlike the Kojiki, written in a complex mixture of Chinese characters used phonetically and semantically that still echoed the cadences of spoken Japanese, the Nihon Shoki was composed in pure classical Chinese, the prestigious diplomatic and scholarly language of the period throughout East Asia, revealing its principal function: to present the Japanese imperial court and its divine lineage to China and other neighbouring kingdoms with all the formal prestige demanded by contemporary international diplomacy. Structured in thirty books, it narrates the mythology of creation and the gods from their origins —including the creator couple Izanagi and Izanami and the sun goddess Amaterasu— down to the reign of Empress Jitō at the end of the seventh century, including many of the same traditions found in the Kojiki, but often in alternative and contradictory versions that the text presents side by side ('according to one book...') without attempting to reconcile them, making it an invaluable testimony to the diversity of oral traditions coexisting in ancient Japan. Unlike its older companion, the Nihon Shoki enjoyed greater academic and official prestige for centuries owing to its more refined Chinese, and, as the first of the six official imperial annals, gave its name to an entire historiographical genre; together with the Kojiki, it remains an indispensable primary source for the study of Shinto, Japanese mythology and the ideological construction of imperial legitimacy.