The Tale of Ryujin

At a Glance

• Central figures: Ryujin (also called Watatsumi), the Dragon God of the Sea; Hoori, a prince and grandson of the sun goddess Amaterasu; and Otohime, Ryujin’s daughter.
• Setting: The ocean depths and the underwater palace Ryugu-jo, in the age of the kami; the story connects to the Shinto genealogy of Japan’s imperial family.
• The turn: Hoori travels to Ryugu-jo to recover his brother’s lost fishing hook, and Ryujin grants him the tide jewels - the Kanju and Manju - which control the rise and fall of the seas.
• The outcome: Hoori uses the jewels to settle a dispute with his brother, marries Otohime, and fathers a son, Ugayafukiaezu, whose line becomes the imperial family of Japan; Otohime returns permanently to the sea after Hoori breaks her one prohibition.
• The legacy: The imperial family’s divine descent from Ryujin through Otohime and Ugayafukiaezu, and the continued veneration of Ryujin at coastal shrines by sailors and fishermen seeking safe passage.

The Dragon God sits at the bottom of the sea, and his palace is built from coral, its floors inlaid with pearls, its halls filled with creatures that have never seen sunlight. This is Ryugu-jo, and from here Ryujin rules everything the ocean covers. He appears sometimes as a great dragon or serpent and sometimes as a man, and the difference matters less than you might think - the sea itself shifts between calm and catastrophe without changing its nature, and so does he.

Two jewels rest in his keeping. The Kanju calls the tide in; the Manju sends it back. With both in hand, whoever holds them holds the ocean.

The Lost Hook

Hoori was a prince, grandson of Amaterasu, the sun goddess, and on the day that matters he borrowed his brother’s fishing hook. He lost it. The hook went down into the deep water and did not come back up. His brother was furious, and Hoori - who had tried making replacement hooks from his own sword, dozens of them, none of them right - had nowhere left to turn.

An old man at the shore told him to build a small boat from reeds and let the current take him. The current knew the way. Hoori did what the old man said, and the current carried him down, deeper than any fisherman had dived, until the walls of Ryugu-jo appeared through the water ahead of him - pale coral, glowing faintly, utterly still.

He stopped at the well outside the gate, under a katsura tree, and waited.

Ryugu-jo

Otohime found him there. She was Ryujin’s daughter, and she brought the young prince inside to her father’s hall. Ryujin received him without alarm - a grandson of the sun goddess was a guest worth having - and when Hoori explained why he had come, the Dragon God called his sea creatures together and sent them to search.

It took time. The fish spread out through the dark water, combing the floor of the sea, and eventually a large red sea bream was found with something lodged in its throat. The hook.

Ryujin returned it to Hoori. And then he offered something more.

The palace had a way of keeping guests. Days in Ryugu-jo pass differently from days on land, and while Hoori stayed, he and Otohime came to know each other well. Ryujin watched this and was not displeased. Otohime was his daughter, but the line of Amaterasu was no poor match, and the Dragon God understood that ties between the sea and the land were worth more than any number of coral walls. He gave his blessing. The two were married.

The Tide Jewels

Before Hoori left the palace - and that departure was still some years away - Ryujin pressed the two jewels into his hands. The Kanju. The Manju. One to call the tide, one to release it.

He had not forgotten Hoori’s brother.

Back on land, the brother had spent the years of Hoori’s absence growing bitter, and when Hoori returned he found no welcome. His brother challenged him. Hoori held the Kanju up and the tide answered, rising fast and cold around his brother’s legs, up to his chest, up to his chin. The brother surrendered, swore submission, agreed to serve Hoori’s line from that day forward.

Hoori lowered the Manju, and the water went back.

The jewels went back to Ryujin. That had been the arrangement, and Hoori kept it. The sea received them again, and the Dragon God kept them at the bottom of Ryugu-jo where they had always been.

Otohime’s Return

Hoori and Otohime came ashore together. She had left her father’s palace and the pearl-floored halls and the still green light of the deep ocean for a life on land beside her husband. For a time it held. She was carrying their child, and everything seemed as it should be.

She asked one thing of him. When the time of the birth came, he must not look.

There are prohibitions in these stories and they are always broken. Hoori knew the rule and could not keep it. When Otohime withdrew to the birth-house he followed, and through the gap in the door he saw her - not the woman he had married but the great dragon beneath her form, the creature she had always been, the daughter of the sea. She was enormous. She was not frightening, exactly. She was simply not of this world.

She had felt his gaze.

She handed him their son, Ugayafukiaezu. She did not speak for a long time. Then she walked back toward the water and did not stop at the shore, and the sea closed over her, and Hoori stood on the beach holding his child in the ordinary daylight.

The God Beneath the Water

Ryujin did not vanish with Otohime’s return. He remains in Ryugu-jo, and the sea is still his. Fishermen going out before dawn have always known his name. Sailors before a difficult crossing have always known his shrines - small stone structures near the water, often with offerings of salt or sake. What the sea gives, it can take back; what Ryujin withholds, no effort will recover. The prayers are practical. They are the prayers of people who understand what they are dealing with.

Ugayafukiaezu, the child Hoori raised alone, grew up and fathered children of his own, and from his line, the chronicles say, came the first emperors of Japan. The imperial family carries Ryujin’s blood through Otohime. The Dragon God is not merely a figure from the age of myth - he is an ancestor of the living throne, a fact embedded in the genealogies, a connection between the deep water and the land that the sea has never quite released.

His palace is still there, somewhere below the surface. The tide comes in and goes back out.