Okuninushi and the White Rabbit of Inaba
At a Glance
- Central figures: Okuninushi, the youngest brother among many and a deity of agriculture and medicine; the White Rabbit of Inaba, a divine being in disguise; Princess Yakami-hime of Inaba.
- Setting: The road to the land of Inaba, in mythological Japan; drawn from Shinto tradition.
- The turn: While his brothers mock the flayed rabbit and give it harmful advice, Okuninushi stops, listens to its story, and tells it to bathe in fresh water and cover its wounds with cattail pollen.
- The outcome: The rabbit heals and reveals itself as a divine being, prophesying that Okuninushi - not his brothers - will marry Princess Yakami-hime and rise to greatness.
- The legacy: Okuninushi’s marriage to Yakami-hime and his eventual prominence among the kami trace back to this encounter, established here as the moment his path diverged from his brothers’.
The brothers had been walking for a long time before they reached the cape where the rabbit lay. There were many of them - Okuninushi was the youngest, the least regarded - and they came carrying the baggage while their elder brothers walked ahead discussing the princess of Inaba, Yakami-hime, and which among them would win her.
Okuninushi trailed behind. He was used to that arrangement.
The Brothers Pass the Rabbit
The white rabbit was lying at the side of the road, its fur entirely gone. Something had stripped it clean. The skin beneath was raw and cracked, weeping where the wind touched it.
The elder brothers saw it. They laughed. Then, apparently deciding this was an occasion for sport, they offered advice: go to the sea, they told the rabbit, bathe in the salt water, lie on the shore and let the wind dry you. That will restore you.
The rabbit believed them. It was desperate enough to believe anyone. It dragged itself to the shore, lowered itself into the waves, and the salt entered every wound at once. It pulled itself back onto the sand. The wind moved over it. The pain was considerably worse than before.
The brothers had already moved on down the road.
Okuninushi and the Rabbit
Okuninushi found the creature there, shaking against the ground. He set down the baggage he was carrying - he was always the one carrying it - and crouched beside it.
He asked what had happened.
The rabbit told him. It had been stranded on an island, wanting to reach the mainland, and had solved the problem by calling out to a group of wani - the great sea creatures, crocodiles or sharks, the old texts do not fully agree - and proposing a count. How many wani were there? More than rabbits on land? Let them line themselves up from island to shore and the rabbit would count them by crossing their backs. The wani, curious or vain, arranged themselves across the water. The rabbit crossed, counting aloud. But at the last step, just before the mainland sand, it made a mistake: it told the final wani it had only been using them as a bridge.
The last wani took hold of it and stripped away its fur before letting it go.
Then his brothers had come along and told it to bathe in seawater. The rabbit did not need to explain what happened after that.
Cattail Pollen
Okuninushi told it to go to the mouth of the river where fresh water ran into the sea. Wash there, he said. Then find the cattails growing along the bank - gather the pollen from the heads, the soft dry dust of them, and lie down in it and cover yourself.
The rabbit went. It bathed in the river. It found the cattails and pressed itself into the pollen until the dust clung to every surface of its bare skin.
The burning eased. By degrees, the skin quieted. The fur began to return, white as it had been before.
The Rabbit’s Prophecy
When the rabbit was whole again it came back to where Okuninushi waited. It told him what it was - not an ordinary creature of the field, but something else, something that could see forward along the road of events.
It told him: your brothers will not have her. You will be the one Yakami-hime chooses. Not because you are the oldest or the strongest or the most ambitious. Because of what you did here, on this road, with a rabbit that could not repay you.
Then it was gone.
The Princess of Inaba
When the brothers arrived in Inaba and presented themselves to the princess, Yakami-hime looked at them all. She passed over the eldest and the next and the next, all the brothers who had walked ahead and mocked the creature on the road.
She chose Okuninushi.
He had come in last, still carrying what the others had made him carry. He was not who the brothers had expected would win anything. But the princess gave him her answer, and the rabbit’s prophecy closed itself around the shape of what had already happened - a moment on a dusty road, a wounded animal, a young deity who set down his burden long enough to ask a question and listen to the answer.