My Years as a Lake God in Japan

While traveling around Japan’s Lake Biwa, Lin Fan, an ordinary young Chinese man, accidentally found a piece of jade radiating a gentle luster. He thought it was just an ordinary souvenir, never imagining that it was the lost divine core of Lake Biwa’s water god. By a stroke of fate, Lin Fan fused with the divine core and became the new water god of the largest freshwater lake in Japan’s Kansai region.

Faced with an entirely unfamiliar divine vocation, Lin Fan decided to do things in the way he knew best: following the model of the Chinese imperial court, he established a “Water God Palace” at the bottom of the lake. He recruited the lake’s spirits as his subjects and aquatic creatures as his troops, then modeled after the ancient emperors by setting up three palaces and six courtyards, making a lively and colorful life as a water god out of his otherwise leisurely existence.

In the end, as the Water God Palace flourished and stabilized and his descendants grew in number, Lin Fan enfeoffed his children across Japan’s freshwater regions, building a network of water deities centered on Lake Biwa. And the story of Lin Fan and his family continues to ripple beneath the tranquil surface of the lake...