Twice ToldWakasa kokuden-ki, the Yao Bikuni cave at Kuin-ji (Sakurai Kyokuzen)
- Language
- Japanese
- Reading
- transcribed from the page image
- Translation
- ours
- Retrieved
- 18 October 2026
The Wakasa kokuden-ki is an early gazetteer of Wakasa. Togashi Akira dates it to the Kanbun years (1661 to 1673); the NDL print is of 1871. It is written in mixed Chinese and Japanese with katakana endings. Only lines that could be read with confidence are given. Where the page has more text between two excerpts, it is marked with … and was not transcribed. The first excerpt is the opening of the entry, the second is its close, and the third is the page’s quotation from the Honcho jinja ko.
八百比丘尼ノ窟ハ後瀬山南麓空印寺ノ裡ニアリ。傳云、往昔小濱ノ人數輩、棹舟泛江流ニ、忽風波起而飄颻トシテ空江ニ漂フ、任其止處、一嶋ニ着ク。岸ニ上テ見之、金樓門アリ、人家也ト知テ扉ヲ叩ク。内ヨリ衣冠ノ宮人出テ来リ所ヲ問フ。渠等具ニ語之、求食ト。…
…其女取食之而及八百歳ニ。故ニ時人名八百比丘尼。衆皆以為其嶋ハ蓬莱、肉ハ人魚ナラン。或云日本ニ七仙女アリ、此尼其一也。死所不詳。
神社考云、余先考嘗語云、傳聞若狹國有号白比丘尼者 … 女子壽四百歳。所謂白比丘尼是也。
Translation
The Yao Bikuni’s cave is inside Kuin-ji, at the southern foot of Mt Nochise. The tradition says: long ago several people of Obama were out rowing on the water when a storm suddenly blew up, and they drifted out over the open water. Where the boat came to rest, they landed on an island. They climbed the bank and saw a gate with golden towers. Seeing that people lived there, they knocked on the door. A courtier in court dress came out and asked where they were from. They told him everything and asked for food. …
… that girl ate it, and lived to eight hundred. So people of the time called her the Yao Bikuni. Everyone thought the island must have been Horai, and the meat a mermaid’s. Some say that in Japan there are seven immortal women, and this nun is one of them. Her place of death is unknown.
The Honcho jinja ko says: “My late father once told me: it is passed on that in Wakasa there was a woman called the White Nun … the girl lived to four hundred years. She is the so-called White Nun.”
Notes
The omitted stretch between the first two excerpts holds the feast, a dish that looked like human flesh that the visitors would not eat, and a person who took some home; it was not transcribed, so the “girl” at the start of the second excerpt is the one the missing lines introduce. The reading of the characters describing the palace was too uncertain to give. Togashi Akira quotes a longer, slightly different wording of the same entry (Koshokyo 43, p. 112, no. 5). The page’s last lines quote the Honcho jinja ko with 四百歳, where Razan’s own print (documents/honcho-jinja-ko-shiro-bikuni.md) has 四百餘歳; the compiler copied it abridged or from another text. The date of the compiler’s own work is not on the pages we read.