Wani

Salt water dries fast on skin that has no fur left on it. The hare lay on the sand at Cape Keta with every inch of its hide gone, and the wind coming off the water finished what the brine had started, splitting the raw body open while it wept. It had crossed the strait from the island of Oki on the backs of sea-monsters, counting them aloud as it ran, and it had been too pleased with the trick to keep quiet about it. The last one in the row had heard. That one turned and took the hare’s clothing off in a single motion.

This is the first appearance of the wani in Japanese writing, and it is a peculiar debut, because the monster is not the subject of the story. It is the road.

The Kojiki, compiled in the early eighth century, and the Nihon Shoki that followed it a few years later are the two oldest surviving accounts of the Japanese gods, and both use the word wani for a large creature of the sea. The scribes wrote it sometimes with phonetic characters and sometimes with the Chinese graph for crocodile, a borrowing that would cause centuries of argument. What the texts actually give the reader is thin and strange. A wani is measured in fathoms. It has a fin. It moves along the ground on its belly. Nobody ever says what colour it is.

In the hare’s story the wani are numerous enough to lie nose to tail from an offshore island to the Inaba coast, which puts the beach at what is now the Hakuto shore in Tottori. The hare proposes a census, a competition to see whose tribe is larger, and the creatures agree and arrange themselves obligingly across the water. Then the hare treads along the line, counting as it goes, and makes the mistake of announcing the deception one step too early. Eighty passing gods advise the flayed animal to bathe in the sea and dry off in the wind, which is either stupidity or cruelty. The last god in the procession, the one carrying everyone else’s bags, tells it instead to wash in fresh water at the river mouth and roll in the pollen of the sedges growing there. The fur comes back. The hare turns out to be a deity, and repays the kindness with a prophecy about a marriage.

The wani appear again in the story that matters most, because the imperial genealogy runs straight through it. A young god called Hoori loses his brother’s fishhook and goes down under the sea to find it, arriving at a palace built like fish scales with a cassia tree over the well beside the gate. He marries the sea-deity’s daughter and stays three years. When he finally sighs for home, his father-in-law summons every wani in the ocean and asks which of them will make the journey fastest. Each bids according to its body length. One a single fathom long promises to have him ashore within the day, and does, with the god seated on its head and instructions not to frighten him halfway across. Hoori unfastens the small sword at his belt and ties it round the creature’s neck before sending it back. The Kojiki notes, almost in passing, that this wani is now worshipped as the Deity Blade-Possessor.

Then his wife follows him onto land, pregnant, and builds a hut on the shore to give birth in. She tells him that a foreigner in labour resumes the shape of her own country, and asks him not to look. He looks. What he sees is a wani eight fathoms long crawling and writhing about on its belly, and he runs. She knows he has seen. She leaves the newborn on the sand, goes back down, and closes the sea path behind her so that the two worlds can never be walked between again. The child she abandoned fathered the man the chronicles call Japan’s first emperor.

The Nihon Shoki keeps the same creature but stretches the word further. It records the sea-god Kotoshiro-nushi taking the form of a kuma-wani eight fathoms long in order to father a daughter who became an empress. The prefix means bear, and in Japanese naming that is a size marker rather than a species claim, the same way a hornet is a bear-bee. The chronicle also uses Wani and Kuma-wani as ordinary personal names, which does nothing to make the record clearer.

What the wani looked like has been argued about for well over a century, and the argument is more interesting than any settlement of it would be. Basil Hall Chamberlain, translating in the 1880s, went with crocodile, on the grounds that the Chinese descriptions his Japanese commentators cited plainly meant a crocodile and that the creature was clearly amphibious and serpentine rather than a fish. Ernest Satow had already put “sea shark”. William Aston refused the crocodile outright, pointing out that the Japanese who made these stories could not have known the animal, and that this thing lives in salt water rather than rivers; he later decided the wani was simply the Chinese dragon, and produced a print showing the sea-god and his daughter with dragons’ heads rising over their human ones. Marinus Willem de Visser disagreed with everyone, arguing that the wani was a native Japanese serpent-shaped sea-god that later generations dressed in imported Indian and Chinese clothing, and noting that the whole fishhook myth has close cousins in the Kei Islands and the Minahassa. A twentieth-century linguistic proposal traces the word to a reconstructed root meaning shark or crocodile, split in Japanese between wani and the ordinary word for fish.

There is a simpler fact underneath all of it. Along the San’in coast where the hare story is set, wanizame is just the local word for shark.

Its powers follow from what it is for. A wani crosses. It moves between the floor of the ocean and the tideline faster than anything else in the myths, carries a passenger without complaint, and answers a summons from the sea-deity instantly and in numbers. It can be an individual, a fleet, or a shape a divine being steps back into. That last is the sharpest of its abilities: the wani is not only a monster that gods keep, it is what certain gods are when nobody is watching.

The limits are just as clear. A wani obeys. It comes when called, lines up when asked, bids for the honour of a job and waits to be chosen, and can be talked into a bad bargain by a hare with a plausible manner. Its strength is bounded by its length, negotiated openly in fathoms. And the one thing it cannot survive is being seen: the moment a mortal eye lands on the true shape in the birth hut, the marriage ends, the child is abandoned, and the road between the sea and the land is shut for good.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a wani in Japanese mythology?

A wani is a large sea-creature that appears in Japan’s two oldest chronicles, the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, where it serves the sea-deity and carries passengers between the ocean floor and dry land. The texts describe it only by its length in fathoms, a fin, and a body that crawls on its belly. The word is written with the Chinese character for crocodile, but the creature’s actual identity has never been settled.

Is the wani a crocodile, a shark, or a dragon?

All three readings have been defended by serious translators, and none has won. Basil Hall Chamberlain translated wani as crocodile, Ernest Satow as sea shark, and William Aston concluded it was really the Chinese dragon; Marinus Willem de Visser argued it was a native Japanese serpent-shaped sea-god that only later took on Chinese and Indian dragon features. Along the San’in coast where the earliest wani story is set, wanizame is simply the local word for shark.

What happened to the hare that tricked the wani?

The hare of Inaba persuaded the wani to line up across the sea so it could count them, then ran across their backs and boasted about the deception one step before reaching land. The last wani in the row seized it and stripped off its entire hide. It was healed by a god who told it to wash in fresh river water and roll in sedge pollen, after which its fur grew back.

Why did Toyotama-hime turn into a wani?

She told her husband Hoori that a woman giving birth away from home resumes the shape of her native country, and asked him not to watch. Her native shape was a wani eight fathoms long. When he looked anyway she left the newborn child on the shore, returned to the sea, and sealed the path between the two worlds permanently.

Was a wani ever worshipped?

Yes. In the Kojiki, the one-fathom wani that carried Hoori home in a single day was given the god’s own small sword, tied around its neck, and the chronicle records that it was thereafter known as the Deity Blade-Possessor.

Related Entries

Mizuchi, Samebito, Isonade, Ikuchi, Umibōzu, Ningyo, Bake-kujira, Funayūrei, Yamata no Orochi, Susanoo, Amaterasu, Kappa, Naga, Makara, Sobek