The guest-bond: hospitality, gift-exchange, and inherited obligation.
On the longest night of the year the Son of Heaven went out to the southern edge of his city, to a patch of ground swept bare, and welcomed the return of the light with a single red calf and vessels of clay and gourd.
A Three Kingdoms general, whom his own historian called proud and self-defeated, was raised over fourteen centuries into a god of war, loyalty, and finally money. Almost every prop the temples paint on him, the great blade, the red horse and the sworn oath, was added a thousand years after he died.
A boy is told his mother lies pinned under Mount Hua for the crime of marrying his father: how a folk-and-theatre tale of the Ming and Qing borrowed its splitting axe from a river-god fifteen centuries older.
The dead did not vanish. One soul rose bright into the air and one sank into the ground, and between them the living built a temple, seated a grandson in the ancestor's chair, and fed him until he spoke the blessing back.
Confucius almost never called anyone humane, not even the sage-kings. Yet he swore the virtue was one act of will away: I desire it, and it is here.
His name means "the cormorant-feather roof was not finished". Born at the edge of land and sea, Ugayafukiaezu stands between the gods of Japan's oldest chronicles and the human imperial line.
