The Story of Hoderi and Hoori

At a Glance

• Central figures: Hoderi (“Fire Shine”), elder brother and god of the sea; Hoori (“Fire Fade”), younger brother associated with the land and hunting.
• Setting: The land and the undersea palace of Ryujin, the Dragon God of the Sea; drawn from early Japanese mythology recorded in the Kojiki tradition.
• The turn: Hoori loses his brother’s prized fishing hook in the ocean, then travels to Ryujin’s underwater palace to recover it - and receives two tide-controlling jewels in the process.
• The outcome: Hoori uses the jewels to force Hoderi’s submission, the brothers reconcile, and Hoori marries Ryujin’s daughter Otohime; their line produces Ugaya Fukiaezu, father of Emperor Jimmu.
• The legacy: The union of Hoori and Otohime established the divine ancestry of Japan’s imperial family, connecting the ruling line to both the sea god’s palace and the land.

Hoderi asked his younger brother Hoori if they would trade. Just for a time - Hoderi would try the hunting bow, Hoori the fishing hook. Hoderi agreed, though without enthusiasm. He had his doubts, and they were the right ones.

Neither brother succeeded in the other’s role. Hoderi could not bring down game with a bow he did not know. Hoori went to the sea and pulled up nothing. Worse than nothing - he came back without the hook. Hoderi’s fishing hook, his prized possession, the instrument of his mastery over water, lay somewhere on the seafloor or in the belly of something large and indifferent. Hoderi’s anger was immediate. He cursed his brother, and the warmth between them curdled.

The Hook at the Bottom of the Sea

Hoori searched the shore. He waded in and dived. He searched again. The hook was gone, and he knew it.

He could not simply make a replacement and call the matter settled. The hook was not the point. The point was what it meant to Hoderi - proof of his gifts, his dominion over the sea. To lose it was a kind of wound. Hoori understood this, though understanding it did not bring the hook back. He stood at the water’s edge for a long time, and then a stranger appeared - a magical figure, something not quite human - who offered to help. This figure fashioned a small boat and told Hoori to follow the current down, down, past the surface world, to where Ryujin kept his palace beneath the waves.

Ryugu-jo, the Palace Under the Sea

Ryujin’s palace was coral and deep color, full of sea creatures moving through dim green light. It was called Ryugu-jo, and it sat at the bottom of the ocean the way a great lord’s hall sits at the center of a province - unhurried, abundant, permanent.

Ryujin’s daughter Otohime met Hoori at the entrance. She was beautiful, and she was not alarmed by his arrival. She listened to his account of the lost hook, his brother’s anger, his shame. She brought him before her father. Ryujin also listened, and seemed to understand the weight of the thing - not just the lost object, but what it would take to set it right.

The Sea God summoned every creature under his authority. They came and were questioned. One fish, in the end, admitted that something had caught in its throat. It opened its mouth. The hook was there.

Ryujin returned it to Hoori.

The Tide Jewels

But Ryujin did not stop at the hook. He knew that Hoderi’s curse had not been lifted, that the anger above the water was still waiting. So he gave Hoori two jewels - the Kanju and the Manju. The Kanju could summon the tide in, pull the sea over the land. The Manju could draw it back again. Whoever held both could raise the waters or lower them at will.

Hoori stayed in the palace. He and Otohime lived there together, and time passed differently under the sea - slowly, pleasantly, three years moving like an afternoon. Eventually Hoori remembered what he had come for and what still needed doing. He said goodbye to Otohime, though goodbye is perhaps not quite the word for it, since she followed him partway and they did not fully separate. She was carrying his child. He left the palace with the jewels and the hook, and Otohime waited.

The Waters Rising

Hoori returned to his brother and offered the hook back. Hoderi took it. The anger, however, did not dissolve on contact with the returned object. Some anger has its own momentum. Hoderi was not appeased.

Hoori used the Kanju.

The sea came in. Water rose over the shore, past the line where the beach ended, higher. Hoderi retreated as the water climbed. He called out to his brother. The rage had left him; there was only the water, still rising.

Hoori used the Manju.

The tide pulled back. The land reappeared. Hoderi stood wet and breathing and aware, for the first time, of the full distance between what he had wanted and what it had cost. He acknowledged his brother’s power. He let go of the grievance. They made peace.

Ugaya Fukiaezu and the Imperial Line

Otohime came to shore to give birth, and asked Hoori not to look at her during the labor. He looked. She had taken the form of a sea creature - a great tatsu, or perhaps something else, some shape belonging to the deep. She finished, and left the child with Hoori, and returned to the sea. She had known he would look.

The child was named Ugaya Fukiaezu. He grew, and had children of his own, and one of them was Jimmu - the first emperor of Japan, the founding figure of the imperial line. This is where that line comes from: from a younger brother who lost a fishing hook, traveled to a god’s palace beneath the ocean, received the power of the tides, and married the daughter of the sea.

Hoderi and Hoori each returned to what they had always been - the sea and the land - but not as they had been before. Something had passed between them that could not be taken back. The waters had covered the ground and receded. The fish had given back what it swallowed. And the child born on the shore in a hut with a thatched roof of cormorant feathers - only half-finished before the sea took his mother again - grew up to become the ancestor of emperors.