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The secret myths and folktakes behind OkamiThe Wolf Among Us before it was cool
The Wolf Among Us before it was cool
Let’s start with a nice big obvious one: the tale that defines the entire opening act of the game, the story ofAmaterasu, Susano and Orochi. The game feeds off several different versions of this myth, but also gives it a few neat twists of its own.
A lot of this will probably be familiar if you’ve played Okami, but it’s the way the story’s been interpreted and remixed that I find most fascinating. Susano is still descended from (Iza)Nagi, for example, but both are comparatively helpless in the face of Orochi’s might. So are Ammy and Shiranui, the white wolf that once helped Nagi back in the day, and it’s only when each pair combine their respective strengths that they’re able to take the big dragon down. It also finally explains Ammy’s sake battle technique, too!
The reason for Ammy sealing herself up in a cave is different in the game as well. Here, it’s the death of Shiranui that causes the light to disappear from the world, and it’s from Shiranui’s statue that Ammy makes her triumphant return. I mean, she’s also been turned into a wolf for the purposes of this story, so anything goes, really, but it does explain the origin of Ammy’s iconic weapons - her beloved mirror and, eventually, her Magatama beads.
Ammy’s diminutive palIssunis also a riff on the tale"Issun-boshi" (or One Inch Boy). This tells the tale of a chap no bigger than a man’s fingertip who tries to make his fortune as a miniature samurai, wielding a needle as his sword. Despite his tiny size, he manages to rescue a princess from a demon carrying a magic mallet. Issun is gobbled up whole in the process, but a prick of his needle in the monster’s stomach causes it to spit him back up, drop his mallet and scarper. As a reward for his bravery, the princess uses the mallet to restore Issun-boshi to his normal size and they both live happily ever after.
Issun still has a keen eye for the ladies in Okami, and the size-changing mallet makes an appearance when Ammy must gain access to the locked down palace in Sei-an City. Similarly, Ammy’s pint-sized tour of the emperor’s gullet mimics Issun-boshi’s descent into the monster, and Issun, we eventually learn, was once a samurai before he set his sights on becoming a painter.
It’s not just the central characters that can find their roots in Japanese folklore, though. One of my favourite discoveries in compiling this series was the tale behind the strangeCutter couple in Taka Pass. You know the ones - that evil house in the valley that’s weirdly sinister for no reason? Yep, they’re based on the tale"Shita-kiri Suzume" (or Tongue Cut Sparrow), which tells of a poor old woodcutter and his greedy wife who take in an injured sparrow one day in the woods. The husband wants to care for the bird, but the wife wants to eat it, and when her husband goes out one day she ends up cutting off the tongue of the sparrow after it eats all of their food.
The sparrow flies home and the old man goes looking for it, eventually stumbling on the sparrow’s inn where he’s greeted warmly and is allowed to rest. He’s given some treasure to take home in a box, and when his wife gets wind of this she tries her luck as well. But because she was a badd’un, her box is full of snakes and deadly monsters, and the shock of finding all these horrible things causes her to trip and fall down the mountain, presumably to her death.
In the game, Mr Cutter gets a bit of a rough bargain here, transformed from a kindly old man into another evil bastard like his wife. But they do capture Chun, the daughter of the head of the neighbouring Sparrow Clan, with the intention of eating her later on, their family name of Cutter references the sparrow’s cut tongue in the folk tale. Similarly, the Sparrow Clan do indeed have an inn in Sasa Sanctuary, one of the key locations in the second act of the game, and if you sniff about in the some of the rooms you do actually find a man having a lie down who introduces himself as a hunter who once saved an injured sparrow, harking back to the original kindly old man in the story.
I could go on. There’s the story of"Tamano no Mae"that forms the basis of the game’s middle arc where Ammy does battle with the dark lord Ninetails and Issun’s favourite “busty babe” Rao, and there are also the surrounding tales of Otohime, queen of the Dragonians in the game and daughter of the sea god Ryujin (dragon god) in the myth, and “Taro Urashima”, the fisherman who rescues a turtle from children who were torturing it on a beach, that feed into this section of the game as well. I’d probably be here all day if I talked about all these as well (there’s a reason why I split the original series into multiple articles), but you canfind them all hereif you want to find out more about them.
Again, this is barely scratching the surface ofall the other myths and talesyou can find in Okami’s final act, including the origin of the Poncle, Issun’s miniature brethren, Tuskle, the Oina shaman, and Chikap-kamuy, the owl god who is almost certainly the basis for our pals Lechku and Nechku.
Kaguya’s story is properly fascinating. As well as being one of the earliest examples of science fiction in Japan, some versions of her tale actually have her being sent to Earth in order to save her from a celestial war among the gods, which is exactly what happens over the course of Okami as Ammy works to defeat the evil Yami from destroying the cosmos. Viewed in that light, you could almost say that Kaguya’s tale is the real legend behind Okami’s spectacular story, with everything taking place in the boundaries of one, big, mythological showdown. Not bad for a tiny shoot of bamboo, eh?
