Matsura Sayohime
The core legend was that she climbed atop a hill and so piteously waved her scarf (hire) at her husband's departing warship that the location afterwards was remembered as Hire-furi-no-mine or "Scarf-Waving Peak", now known as Mount Kagami [ja] in the confines of the present-day city of Karatsu, Saga.
Later otogizōshi (fairy tale) versions of Sayohime, which were also readapted as sekkyō-bushi [ja], i.e., Buddhist "sermon ballad" pieces under the title Matsura chōja, contained an alteration of this plot where the heroine, in an act of filial piety, selling herself to be sacrificed to a serpent deity.
[11] However, the specific mountaintop that had been dubbed Hirefurinomine (領巾麾嶺, "Scarf-Waving Peak"), as attested in the Man'yōshū,[5][8] has been identified as the summit of Mount Kagami [ja], on the eastern edge of the city of Karatsu, Saga.
[5][12][d] In the alternate version of the old legend preserved in the Hizen fudoki [ja] (8th century), the Lady Otohi (or Otohihime)of Shinuhara or Shinohara (篠原)[e] village appears as the name of the famed farewell-bidding wife of Ōtomo no Satehiko.
[5][16][17] This version proceeds to tell the aftermath since the day the woman parts with Satehiko (waving her scarf at the Peak): she received visits from a look-alike of her husband for five nights in a row.
Miwa Story"), Ikutamayori-hime [ja] (Lady Ikutamayori) employs the same trick to discover the true form of the snake god Ōmononushi.
[25] This petrification lore of Sayohime appears to be of later development, with its earliest attestation identified as renga poet Bontōan [ja]'s Sodeshita shū (c. Ōei era, late 14th to early 15th century).
[31][2][32] The claim regarding her petrification on this island is given in a late account of the origin of this undershrine, preserved in the 19th century document called the Matsura komonjo (松浦古文書) (written during the Bunka era).
[37][16] The suicidal drowning had been claimed in literature predating the noh play, such as the aforementioned 12th century Waka dōmōshō and Priest Yua [ja]'s Shirin saiyōshō (詞林采葉抄, "Commentary of Leaves from a Forest of Words", 1366).
The two full, or "expanded versions" (広本, kōhon) are the unillustrated "Akagi-bunko" library text entitled Sayohime no sōshi dating to the Keichō era (late 16th or early 17th century) and the illustrated book (Nara ehon) Sayohome in the possession of Kyoto University.
[46][55][56] The illustrations and text from the Frankfurt emaki manuscript has been analyzed and translated into German by Katja Triplett, with self-sacrifice and human sacrifice being the central themes.
[57] The heroine in an act of self-sacrifice "sells oneself" (身売り, miuri) into slavery, into the hands of a human trafficker in order to achieve a deed of filial piety.
