HIMIKO

The queen of Wa, as the third-century record gives her — and as seventeen centuries of readers have rebuilt her since.

Himiko is famous. What survives from her own time is a short passage in the court histories of China: a woman whom countries that had been at war set up together as their ruler; who served what the historians called the way of the spirits; who was seldom seen; who sent envoys across the sea and was granted a seal and a title; who reported a war; and who died and was buried under a great mound. None of the men who wrote those sentences claims to have seen her. Her own people left no writing that survives, and the oldest Japanese chronicle, compiled nearly five centuries later, quotes the Chinese record in its notes and does not use her name.

So this book is in two parts. The Queen in the Records gives her as the records give her, in their order and at their length, with the background a newcomer needs: the coast the Chinese called Wa, the commanderies through which every word about her passed, the road her envoys travelled, the war she reported, the mound. Where the histories differ they stand side by side. Where they are silent, the silence is left standing.

The Queen After the Records follows what was built on that passage once it stopped: the empress she was matched to, the long quarrel over where her seat lay, a princess and a tomb, the sun and an eclipse and the word shaman, and the towns, museums and beliefs that own her now. None of it is direct evidence about her. All of it is what became of her.

After each chapter there is a short note, Behind the Tale, which says which records the chapter rests on, where they disagree, and what is later scholarship or later legend. Go in expecting less than her fame promises and more than her record holds.