La metamorfosi di Iratsuko e Iratsume nella leggenda della pineta a Unai

The legend of the Young lovers of the pine grove [Unai no Matsubara] in the Hitachi no Kuni Fudoki is about a young maiden and a lad longing each other, who finally met at local utagaki. They spent the night together hiding in a pine grove near the utagaki place. The joy of their intimate meeting made them forget about the dawn. When daylight aroused, ashamed that someone might have seen them, the lovers turned into pine trees. This local legend contains at the same time a dramatic love and a metamorphic tale. The metamorphoses pattern of this legend is not very common in the Japanese source tradition. Moreover, the textual meaning of the legend shows some obscurities about the identity of the two lovers. This paper is an attempt to offer some hypothesis about the relation between the metamorphoses and the identity of the two young lovers.