Yamata no Orochi

The Kojiki, compiled in 712 CE, and the Nihon Shoki, compiled in 720 CE, both place the encounter in Izumo province, on the west coast of Japan, after Susanoo has been cast out of the High Plain of Heaven for his violent conduct toward his sister Amaterasu. Descending to earth beside the Hi River, he meets an old couple weeping over their last surviving daughter, Kushinada hime, and learns that a monstrous serpent has devoured her seven sisters one year at a time and is due to return for her.

Susanoo offers to fight it if he may marry the girl, then hides her by transforming her into a comb he wears in his hair, a detail scholars have read as evidence of very old ritual logic linking combs, hair and protective magic. His plan is not brute combat but intoxication: eight vats of sake, brewed eightfold strong, set behind an eightfold fence with eight gateways, one vat to a gate. The eight-headed serpent obligingly puts a head in each vat, drinks itself insensible, and Susanoo dispatches it with his sword while it sleeps. The number eight recurs so insistently across the tale, in heads, tails, hills, valleys, fences, gates and vats, that many readers take it as a formal marker of overwhelming scale rather than a literal count, the mythic equivalent of saying the serpent was simply enormous.

The story does not end with the serpent dead. Cutting into its fourth tail, Susanoo's own blade nicks on something harder than flesh, and he draws out a second sword from the wound, which he sends up to Amaterasu as a gift and reconciliation offering. She in turn passes it down to her descendants, and it becomes the Kusanagi no Tsurugi, the Grass Cutting Sword, one of the Three Sacred Treasures of the Japanese imperial regalia alongside a mirror and a curved jewel, symbols of legitimate succession still invoked, though never publicly displayed, at an emperor's enthronement. The Kojiki and Nihon Shoki differ on small points, including the sword's original name and exactly how the vats were arranged, differences textual scholars use to reconstruct which regional or courtly traditions each compiler drew on.

Modern interpreters have read the myth several ways at once: as a folk memory of flood control works taming the Hi River's destructive floods, given the serpent's described belly of "always inflamed and bloodied" red clay-like ground; as a political allegory for the Yamato court's absorption of Izumo, an older and rival regional power, into its mythic and dynastic order; and simply as a hero-and-monster tale structurally close to the dragon-slaying stories found across Eurasia, sharing the pattern of stratagem overcoming brute size that recurs from Near Eastern to Norse myth.