The Kojiki unfolds its ancient tales in Old Japanese, but it didn’t rely on a uniquely Japanese alphabet at the outset. Instead, scribes reached for Chinese characters, adapting them in a system now called man’yōgana. Each character played double duty—sometimes conveying meaning, sometimes standing in purely for Japanese sounds. This clever workaround let early eighth-century writers capture Japanese phonetics without an indigenous script yet in place.

Imagine a puzzle where every piece wears two hats. A single man’yōgana character might echo a Japanese syllable one moment and carry its original Chinese meaning the next. Over time, that tangle of characters evolved into the kana syllabaries—hiragana and katakana—that modern readers take for granted. Yet in its birth, Kojiki stands as a linguistic hybrid: a Japanese story cradled in the bones of Chinese writing.

Scholars today—armed with digital tools and AI—are re-examining these text layers, teasing out nuances lost to centuries of copying. In 2025, when Tokyo’s universities hosted workshops on ancient scripts, the spotlight fell squarely on man’yōgana’s intricate marriage of form and function. It’s a reminder that cultural exchange often sparks innovation: borrowing just enough to make something entirely new.

Through that borrowed script, the Kojiki whispers its myths across time, letting modern voices still hear the footsteps of gods and the rise of the first emperors.