Izanami
(East Asian mythology)
The primeval mother of Shinto. She was the sister spouse of Izanagi, who unsuccessfully descended to the nether world after her.
At the beginning, according to ancient Japanese records, there was only an ocean of chaos. Out of the mire in the form of a reed grew Kunitokotatchi, ‘eternal land ruler’, and two subordinate deities, who seem to have symbolized the female and male principles, not unlike the interacting Yin-Yang forces of Chinese cosmology. Izanami, ‘the female who invites’, and Izanagi, ‘the male who invites’, were the descendants of these subordinate powers. Together they created the terrestrial world as well as its divine rulers, Amaterasu the sun goddess, Tsuki-yomi the moon god, and Susanowo the storm god.
Strangely, the female principle was later transformed into the genius of decay, after she had died on giving birth to fire and gone to a subterranean place where darkness prevailed. To yomotsu-kuni, ‘the land of gloom’, journeyed Izanagi in the hope of bringing back Izanami, since the work of creation was ‘not yet finished’. Meeting him at the entrance, Izanami requested that he wait there while she arranged for her release with the deities of death, and she warned him not to look at her closely. When she had been gone for a long time, he broke off one of the end teeth of the comb that was stuck in his hair, and, lighting it as a torch, he entered yomotsu-kuni and looked. What he saw was shattering: maggots swarmed everywhere, and Izanami was rotting.
Overwhelmed at the vision of dissolution, Izanami fled, pursued by a hag. To escape this hideous creature he threw down his head-dress, which turned into a bunch of grapes, and, as his pursuer paused to devour them, he sped on his way. Then he broke a comb and threw it down to the ground, where it turned into succulent bamboo sprouts, and while she stopped to gobble them up, he rushed on. Knowing of these deceptions, Izanami sent after her brother spouse eight thunder gods with an army of ghastly warriors. But Izanagi reached the frontier pass between the abode of the living and the abode of the dead, and when the force rushed against him, he hurled three peaches and routed his pursuers.
Finally, Izanami came in person to find that Izanagi had shut the pass with a huge rock, beyond the strength of 1,000 men to shift. So the divine couple exchanged leave-takings. She threatened to ‘kill a thousand people in his kingdom every day’, while he retorted that he ‘would cause every day one thousand and five hundred women to give birth’.
While the myth ends on the question of population, the balance between births and deaths so critical for the survival of an ancient society, the real import of the story would appear to be the grave itself. Izanagi's action shut out the grisly prospect of death, his mighty rock allowing his subjects a brief, untroubled span of life.
