inhabitants.
“Thus,” wrote the compilers of the Kojiki, “though the world’s beginnings are far-off and distant, early sages speak of an age where spirits were born and people first established.”
In the beginning, they say, there was formless chaos, from which the two opposing principles, Heaven and Earth, separated. Some unexplained interaction of these primordial forces created the first gods. There is a reed-like line between them, implied by the rotation of the Pole Star about its axis, and from this line came shadowy early super-beings. From them, somehow, comes a brother-sister pairing of the gods Izanagi (the Beckoner) and Izanami (the Beckoness). Standing on the bridge between Heaven and Earth, they churn the waters of the sea with the tip of their jewelled spear. The first islands form from the sacred waters that drop from the tip, and the couple descends to live there.
Very quickly, they realize that their bodies are different, and seek to cancel out these differences by sleeping together. They arrange a marriage ceremony in which they approach each other in a circle around the pillar of heaven (central roof-posts being a feature of Yayoi-period architecture) and greet each other.
Their first two children are deformed and disowned. They burn bones to attract the advice of their divine ancestors, and are told that Izanami has botched the ceremony by speaking first—something a woman should never do. They restage the ritual, this time with Izanagi speaking first, and the happy couple’s union produces a set of islands, seemingly a prehistoric rundown of Kyūshū and its environs, the Inland Sea and the lower part of Honshū. In addition to their brood of geographical features, they also spawn a number of gods (kami). The last is the personification of fire, which kills Izanami in childbirth.
Death in the time of the gods is not necessarily a permanent condition, however. Even Chinese chroniclers in the Dark Ages noticed the odd Japanese custom of leaving a body in state for ten days on the off chance that it might spring back to life. Resolving to retrieve his wife from Yomi, the land of the dead, Izanagi travels there, only for her to tell him that he is too late. (The name Yomi, meaning “Yellow Springs,” suggests perhaps a volcanic region of sulfurous pools, but is also a cognate with a similar Chinese name for the underworld, and so may be a mainland import.) The dead may only be retrieved from Yomi if they have never eaten its food, but Izanami has already dined. Refusing to take her word for it, Izanagi lights a magical torch, which reveals his wife’s body already crawling with maggots, and her flesh peeling off to create the eight deities of thunder.
Izanagi flees, pursued first by hags sent by his wife, then by warriors of the undead, then by the eight gods of thunder, and finally by Izanami herself. He flings away his clothes and possessions, creating many new landmarks in what are now forgotten or disappeared places. At the gateway to the underworld, he rolls a boulder in front of the entrance, shutting his wife within and leading to an unholy spousal row.
She threatens that if he blocks her path, she will curse a thousand mortals to die every day. He counters that he will arrange fifteen hundred births a day to hold her off, thereby establishing the cycle of human life and the growth of human society.
And so Izanagi is a bachelor once more, still shedding gods like dandruff, particularly when he bathes to wash away the taint of the underworld. He washes his eyes in a stream, for example, creating the sun goddess Amaterasu (Heaven Shines) and the moon god Tsu-kiyomi (Moon Counting). And he blows his nose, creating a whole host of new troubles by making the storm god, Susano’o (Rushing Raging Man).
A possible confusion over the nature of such gods survives today as a pun in Japanese, where kami means both “god” (written with a word imported from China) and “above.” But in the Ainu language—which is spoken today only among the people of Hokkaidō, but was once possibly spoken substantially further to the south—the very similar word kamuy also means “above,” and is used to describe tribal totems. It seems that the confused tale of Japan’s time of gods may indeed represent a hodgepodge of origin myths from assimilated local tribes, whose odd geographic features, totems, and guardian deities have been coopted into a sprawling, ever-growing narrative. Some of the names may even refer to places in what is now Korea, thereby making them impossible to find on a map of Japan.
In any case, the tale goes on: the sun and moon fall out when the latter murders a minor goddess of food, separating day and night thereafter. Izanagi himself fades from the story after he is last seen arguing with Susano’o, the Rushing Raging Man, over his responsibilities. Susano’o, like Izanagi’s other children, has been given a realm to rule over, but instead sits weeping because he wishes to meet his mother. Banished by Izanagi, Susano’o stops off to see his sister on his way out, leading to a contest with the sun goddess over who can create the most divinities. Although this appears at first to be good-natured and cordial, before long Susano’o is acting like the very worst of divine siblings—letting horses run wild on his sister’s rice paddies, shitting under the throne in her palace just before the sacred time of harvesting first fruits, and in a final indignity, ripping a hole in the roof of her weaving hall and throwing in the flayed corpse of a pony.
As one well might, the sun goddess Amaterasu flees into seclusion, shutting herself away in a cave and plunging the world into darkness. The various thousands of deities assemble in panic and try to lure her out of the cave, hanging a sacred mirror on a nearby tree along with a comma-shaped jewel, and performing several rituals that mean nothing to today’s readers but may evoke some half-remembered ceremony of olden times. Considering that this mirror and jewel (or their more modern facsimiles) are two of Japan’s three sacred treasures, it is likely that the tale of the disappearing sun goddess reflects a disaster in ancient Japan—an eruption, an eclipse, or perhaps even 536 CE, the year without a summer—which obliged the various contending tribes of indigenous and newcomer peoples to collaborate. Notably, the several contradictory accounts contained in the Nihongi do not merely name the gods and their various methods, but annotate them with the family names of their descendants at the Japanese court in the 700s, when the tale was written down.
Eventually, Amaterasu is lured out by the raucous shouts that greet a lascivious dance performed by the Terrible Female of Heaven. Wondering what could possibly be so interesting in the world, since she is no longer in it, Amaterasu pokes her head out of the cave and is swiftly dragged into the open. The gods tie a sacred cord to her that will prevent her from going back into the cave, and the sun is no longer able to disappear.
Susano’o is censured and banished for his acts—hardly much of a punishment, as he was already leaving when he stopped in to see Amaterasu in the first place. Not to be outdone, he kills a fertility goddess as he sets off, scattering the ground with grains, which suggests at least part of the story had its origin in the cycle of the seasons. He then descends to earth, where he runs into an old couple who offer him the last surviving one of their eight daughters if he will slay the eight-headed, eight-tailed dragon that has killed all the others. Susano’o sets a trap by leaving out strong rice wine that has been brewed eight times, which gets the dragon so drunk that the god is able to defeat it. While ripping open its corpse, he finds a sword embedded in its tail—the Sword of the Gathering of Clouds of Heaven—which he presents to his sister Amaterasu by some way of apology.
And so the stories go on, in the Kojiki and the Nihongi, with multiple generations of begettings and begats as the descendants of these early gods feud and forage, make love and make babies. It does not take much healthy cynicism to see in the stories a recurring and universal motif of tribes jostling for resources and supremacy, and legitimizing their victories in retrospect by claiming to enjoy the favor of the gods.
Amaterasu’s grandson Ninigi, whose full name translates as “Truly Winning Have I Won with Rushing Might Ruling Grand Rice Ears of Heaven,” is sent down to rule the entire land, bearing sacred treasures to prove he is divine—the Sword of the Gathering of Heaven, the mirror that once captured the light of Amaterasu herself, and a comma-shaped jewel—the significance of which
