Kojiki

In 712 a court official named Ō no Yasumaro presented Empress Genmei with three volumes. His preface explains how they came to exist. An earlier emperor had set a man called Hieda no Are to memorise the imperial genealogies and the old stories, and Yasumaro wrote down what Are had learned. Stories that had passed from mouth to mouth became a book, the Kojiki. 1,278 years later an album with that name on the cover came out in America. This time the stories were carried by strings and drums.

Where it sits in music history

How Kitaro got here is told in Kitaro, where to start. The guide puts this record fourth, because you need to have earned the orchestra.

Think back seven years to Silver Cloud and you can measure how far he had come. The back of that sleeve listed sixteen instruments, and the only name above them was his. One man in a mountain workroom in Nagano played the lot. In 1986 he signed a worldwide deal with Geffen, and on this record he handed a large part of the work to other people. It was recorded in two places: Kitaro's own studio in Japan, and Skywalker Sound, the facility George Lucas built in California. It was mixed at Skywalker too.

The strings behind the synthesizers belong to the Skywalker Symphony Orchestra, with Jeremy Cohen and Nathan Rubin credited as concertmasters. The reference work Musicians and Composers of the 20th Century (Salem Press, 2009) describes the arrangement as a thirty-four-piece string orchestra and eight taiko drums. The man who used to build every layer himself was now writing parts for more than thirty players.

Tracklist

Everything was written and arranged by Kitaro. The timings follow the original Geffen release as listed on Discogs; the English Wikipedia listing has the first two lengths swapped. The Japanese titles come from the discography on Kitaro's Japanese site, and the sixth one is worth a look. In romaji it is "Matsuri", a festival. In kanji it is 饗宴, a feast.

A myth in seven titles

Read the seven titles in order and the outline of the Kojiki's first book shows through. It opens on beginning (太始) and creation (創造). In the myth, heaven and earth separate, and a male and a female god, Izanagi and Izanami, firm up the drifting land and give birth to the islands. The third title, 恋慕, means longing. Izanagi goes down to the land of the dead to find his wife.

The fourth, "Orochi", is a great serpent. The Kojiki tells of Yamata no Orochi, a snake with eight heads and eight tails. Susanoo, the storm god, kills it to save a girl named Kushinadahime, and finds a sword inside its tail.

"Matsuri" and "Reimei" line up with another episode. Susanoo's rampages drive the sun goddess Amaterasu into a cave in heaven, and the world goes dark. The other gods throw a party at the cave mouth. The goddess Ame-no-Uzume dances, the gods roar with laughter, and Amaterasu, curious, looks out. The light comes back. After the feast comes dawn, 黎明. No source we found has Kitaro saying which episode each piece depicts. But a feast followed by a dawn is exactly the order of that story.

"Matsuri", as it goes

The sixth piece, 9 minutes long, is the centre of the record. The guide sends you here first and calls it the best thing Kitaro wrote after 1985. Festival drums, a melody and a synthesizer solo all fit inside it. What to listen for is the moment the drums and the strings trade places. When the drums come forward your pulse picks up; when the strings rise, your breathing slows. The synthesizer solo still sounds like something from around 1974. Thirty-four string players and eight taiko drums, and Kitaro kept the habits he learned from Berlin.

The rest of the record

"Hajimari", at 3:33, is the shortest piece. Its title means beginning, and it opens the door. "Sozo", creation, follows.

"Koi" and "Nageki" are longing and lament. "Orochi", at just over 7 minutes, sits between them, so the fight with the serpent is framed by those two moods. Play the three in a row and listen to how the strings and the synthesizers share the weight.

"Reimei" closes the album at 8:37. It is called dawn, and it comes after the feast. That is where the story ends.

How to listen

• In order, start to finish. The seven titles make one story, and shuffling them scatters the myth.
• Turn "Matsuri" up a little. The drums need to reach the floor before the festival makes sense.
• Play "Flying Cloud" from Silver Cloud first, then switch to this. You will hear at once what seven years did to a man who used to play alone.

What happened next

The album reached number 159 on the Billboard 200 and number one on Billboard's new age chart. The biography on Kitaro's Japanese site says it held that top spot for eight straight weeks, a first for a Japanese musician. The same year he moved to Colorado.

On the world tour that followed, this music was the core of the show. In 1991 the tour came out as the album Live in America and the video Kojiki: A Story in Concert. For the twenty-fifth anniversary in 2015, Domo Records issued a new remaster from the original tapes, with 55 minutes of film from the 1990 tour.

The one track to send a friend

Send "Matsuri". Warn them it runs 9 minutes, then add one line. Its romaji title means festival, but its kanji title means feast. In the Kojiki, a feast of the gods is what brought the hidden sun back, and the next track on the album is called dawn.

Where to get it

The 1990 Geffen CD is the record as it first appeared, and there was a European LP the same year. The easiest one to recommend is Domo's 2015 anniversary edition (also on Kitaro's official Bandcamp), remastered from the original tapes, with the 1990 tour footage thrown in. Turn the lights off and start from "Hajimari". By the time "Reimei" winds down, 46 minutes on, dawn reaches the room before it reaches the window.

Kojiki · AmazonNew CD and LP search results.Kojiki · DiscogsEvery pressing, new and used.