Vocabulaire et mécanismes de la soumission dans les mythes du Kojiki. Le problème du koto-muke

Abstract

One possible way to summarize the guiding thread of the Kojiki’s myths could be to describe them as the narration of a “heavenly” lineage establishing an “earthly” realm. In the process of taking possession of that earth, the heavenly representatives, first deities, and then human emperors, had to face opposition from some wild deities and disobedient people. Victory went to the heavenly side, and the text depicts the overthrowing of the savage entities by means of a specific archaic term called koto-muke, which can be roughly translated as “submission,” and that is occasionally followed by the verb yahasu (“pacify”). Even though long historical research about this mysterious koto-muke precedes our work, we believe in the importance of thinking about this word anew in order to grasp the specific features of the notion of submission in the Kojiki. Indeed, as the narration leans heavily on this compound to epitomize the whole process of subjugation of the savages, one reasonably suspects the presence of some deeper layers of meaning below its surface. This is mainly due to the presence of the morpheme koto, which infuses its polysemous qualities into the compound koto-muke. Therefore, this work aims to redefine the archaic word koto-muke not only by means of a thorough narrative analysis but also by a meticulous philological approach to both the invariable word koto and the verb muke.