Approaching the Kojiki is to enter a world where language, script, and myth are all in a state of emergence, and this creates formidable challenges for anyone seeking to translate or understand it. The text is composed in archaic Japanese, using vocabulary and grammar that diverge sharply from later forms of the language, and many of these forms are only sparsely attested elsewhere. Its writing system is a hybrid: Chinese characters are deployed both as semantic signs and as phonetic tools, with the same character sometimes shifting function from one passage to the next. This mixture of logographic and phonetic usage, coupled with multiple possible readings for many characters, makes even the basic segmentation and parsing of sentences a matter of scholarly debate.

The Kojiki also stands at the confluence of written and oral traditions, preserving myths that had circulated in ritual and performative contexts. As a result, the narrative often employs formulaic, elliptical, or allusive expressions whose original setting has been lost, leaving many episodes opaque. Embedded songs and poems intensify this difficulty: they draw on archaic diction, compressed imagery, and various forms of wordplay that resist straightforward rendering into modern languages. Any translator must constantly choose between literal accuracy and the attempt to evoke the aesthetic and spiritual resonance that such poetic sections would have carried for their earliest audiences.

Beyond the linguistic and literary hurdles lies a dense web of cultural and religious concepts that do not map neatly onto later Shinto or other religious frameworks. Notions of divinity, purity, ritual, and cosmic order are expressed through symbolic language and metaphors specific to an ancient Japanese worldview, often intertwined with shamanic and folk elements. Understanding these layers requires attentiveness to Shinto cosmology and to the ways myth, ritual, and social order mutually reinforce one another in the text. Without such sensitivity, there is a constant risk of retrojecting later doctrinal meanings onto earlier, more fluid conceptions.

The Kojiki is also a document of power, shaped by the historical and political conditions of its compilation. Mythic cosmogony and imperial genealogy are woven together so that divine narratives serve to legitimize the ruling house, and this intertwining makes it difficult to distinguish older mythic strata from later editorial shaping. The text draws on multiple oral traditions, and in the process of unifying them, it introduces tensions, contradictions, and possible interpolations that complicate interpretation. Combined with a limited and imperfect manuscript tradition—marked by variant readings, scribal errors, and disputed passages—these factors mean that every translation is inevitably an act of selection and interpretation, an attempt to navigate between literal fidelity and a deeper, contextual understanding of what the text seeks to disclose.