Myth has charms that history lacks. History is stern, myth fanciful. History challenges the imagination, myth plays with it.

Island myths come readily to an island country. Japan has many. In the eighth-century chronicle ¡°Kojiki¡± we read, ¡°Hereupon all the heavenly deities commanded (the god Izanagi and the goddess Izanami) to make, consolidate and give birth to this drifting land. Granting to them a heavenly jeweled spear, they thus deigned to charge them. So the two deities, standing upon the Floating Bridge of Heaven, pushed down the jeweled spear and stirred with it.¡± When they ¡°drew the spear up, the brine that dripped down from the end of the spear was piled up and became an island. This is the Island of Onogoro¡± ¨C proto-Japan.

And proto-Japan Japan remained, for millennium upon millennium, if by ¡°proto¡± we mean the state preceding civilization. The Jomon Period (c.10,000 B.C. to c.200 B.C.) was, if ¡°savage,¡± admirable in its way: peaceful as few ¡°savage¡± cultures are, sufficiently content with its condition to give the impression it didn¡¯t so much fail to rise to civilization as reject it as superfluous. Who needs it? Who needs writing, cities, agriculture, government and all the messy complications they bring? Hunting and gathering fed them, fertility and the worship of fertility spirits perpetuated them, an artistic bent produced clay figurines of such dazzling raw beauty that their remains astonish their posterity to this day, and on Jomon rolled, life toward its end very little different from it had been at its beginning 10,000 years earlier.

Why couldn¡¯t it stay that way? What happened?

There are two ways of looking at it: history¡¯s way, and myth¡¯s. Myth¡¯s tale is, again, of an island.

History tells this story: China in the early third century was roiled by civil war. Refugees poured into Japan. They civilized it ¡ª or corrupted it, depending on your point of view. They introduced wet rice agriculture, metal-working, government, rich classes and poor classes, weapons, war and so on. This is the post-Jomon Yayoi Period (c.200 BC ¨C c.250 AD). One wonders if euphoria at having come so far was universal. Might some at least have felt twinges of regret for paradise lost?

Myth¡¯s island tale is of a band of hardy Chinese sailors setting out in search of the ¡°isle of the immortals¡± celebrated in Taoist lore. Where was it? Somewhere in the Eastern Sea. Its palaces were of gold, its trees bore jewels among fruits that healed disease and conferred immortality. One only had to get there.

Alas! The voyage miscarried. The ship landed (says one version) in Japan instead. Here they settled and seeded centuries of quasi-Chinese civilization, an astonishing...