Nihon Shoki stands at the root of Japan’s written memory, shaping both how history is told and how the sacred order of the world is imagined. Composed in classical Chinese and modeled on continental dynastic histories, it established the annalistic, reign-by-reign framework that later official chronicles adopted, placing the imperial line at the center of the historical stage. By weaving together myth, genealogy, and political record, it offered a powerful narrative in which the emperor’s authority flows from a divine ancestry, especially through the line of Amaterasu. This fusion of cosmology and chronology became a touchstone for later scholars and statesmen who sought to articulate Japan’s identity and the sacral character of its polity.

At the level of myth and Shinto cosmology, Nihon Shoki provided one of the primary written articulations of the Age of the Gods, from the creation of heaven and earth to the descent of the heavenly grandchild. Its accounts of kami, their genealogies, and their relationship to the imperial house helped standardize a shared mythic repertoire that later Shinto thinkers and ritualists could draw upon. The text’s multiple versions of key myths furnished later generations with a rich store of symbols and narratives, such as the withdrawal of Amaterasu into the rock cave or the exploits of heroic figures like Yamato Takeru. Through these stories, the vision of Japan as a realm specially linked to the divine gradually took root in cultural consciousness.

In the sphere of literature, Nihon Shoki functioned as a deep reservoir of themes, images, and narrative patterns. Courtly works and later historical tales moved within the world it had framed, presupposing an imperial-centered cosmos and reworking its episodes and personages in new guises. Poetry and prose alike drew on its mythic scenes and place-name lore, while later narrative genres, from anecdotal collections to war tales, echoed its way of binding sacred origins to human affairs. To allude to its passages or figures became a mark of learning, and its style in classical Chinese helped define what “serious” writing and official discourse should look like.

Over time, Nihon Shoki also became an object of intense reflection and debate. Scholars compared it with other early texts, probing its variant accounts and chronology, and in doing so they refined their sense of the boundary between myth and history. Thinkers associated with nativist learning turned to it both as a treasure-house of ancient lore and as a foil against which to discern what they regarded as more “purely” Japanese elements. In this way, the chronicle did not merely provide content for later historiography and literature; it shaped the very questions that Japanese intellectuals asked about origins, legitimacy, and the relationship between the human realm and the world of the kami.