A husband goes underground to bring his wife back, is told not to look at her, looks at her, and loses her permanently. The plot is familiar. What is not familiar is the aftermath: this couple do not part in sorrow. They stand on either side of a boulder shouting demographic threats at each other, and the arrangement they reach in that argument is the reason human beings die and the reason there are more of us every year.
The birth that killed her
Izanagi and Izanami had stood on the floating bridge of heaven, stirred the brine with a jewelled spear and made the islands from what dripped off it. They had produced the sea, the rivers, the winds, the mountains, the trees and the moors. Then Izanami gave birth to the deity of fire, and the fire burned her as it came out of her, and she sickened.
The Kojiki does not look away from what happens next, and the deities produced by a dying woman's body are the most startling catalogue in the book: from her vomit come the male and female deities of metal ore; from her excrement, the deities of clay; from her urine, the deity of irrigation water and a deity of growth. This is not disgust. It is the text insisting that the useful substances of the world come out of a body in extremis, and that mining, potting and watering the fields all have their origin in a goddess dying in childbirth.
Izanagi crawled around her, weeping, and a deity of weeping was born from his tears. He buried her on Mount Hiba, on the border between Izumo and Hōki. Then he drew his ten-hand sword and beheaded his newborn son, the fire, and from the blood on the blade and the rocks and from the parts of the child's body came a further set of deities, including the thunder-and-sword god who will matter a great deal later in the chronicle.
None of this brought her back, so he went to get her.
The door in Yomi
Yomi is not hell and it is not a place of judgement. It is simply the land of the dead, underground, dark, and — this is its defining quality — polluting. Everything there is unclean in the technical sense, and contact with it makes the living unclean too.
Izanami came to the closed door and Izanagi spoke to her through it: the lands they were making were not finished, and she must come back. She answered that he had come too late; she had already eaten at the hearth of Yomi, and food eaten in that country binds you to it. But because he had troubled himself to come, she would go and put it to the deities of Yomi and try to be released. And then the condition: while she was gone, he must not look at her.
He waited in the dark for a long time and lost patience. He broke one of the end teeth off the many-toothed comb in the left bunch of his hair, lit it as a single small torch, and went inside.
What the torch showed him was his wife's body with maggots swarming and roaring in it, and eight thunder deities sitting on it: great thunder in her head, fire thunder in her breast, black thunder in her belly, split thunder at her genitals, young thunder in her left hand, earth thunder in her right, rumbling thunder in her left foot, reclining thunder in her right. Japan's mythology has no scene more physically specific than this, and its power comes from the fact that nothing supernatural is being described. It is decomposition, itemised.
He ran.
The chase
Izanami's reaction is not grief but fury at being seen, and the pursuit that follows is the most purely enjoyable action sequence in the Kojiki.
She sends the hags of Yomi after him. He tears off the black vine that binds his hair and throws it down, and it turns into a bunch of wild grapes; the hags stop to eat them, and he gains ground. When they catch up he breaks the comb out of his right hair bunch and throws that, and its teeth become bamboo shoots; they stop to pull them up and eat them, and he gains ground again.
So she sends the eight thunders with fifteen hundred warriors of Yomi. He runs with his sword out behind him, swinging backwards as he goes, and reaches the bottom of the Yomotsu-hirasaka, the flat slope that is the boundary between the two countries. Three peaches are growing there. He picks them and throws them, and the entire army of the dead turns and runs.
And then he stops and does something unexpectedly tender. He tells the peaches that just as they have helped him, they must help the people of the reed-plain country when they are in trouble and distress, and he gives them a divine name and title. It is an aetiology for the peach's power against the unclean, and it is offered as a debt honoured rather than as a discovery.
The divorce at the boulder
Last of all Izanami came herself. Izanagi took the boulder that a thousand men would need to shift and rolled it into the pass, and they stood one on each side of it and spoke the formula of separation.
She said: if you do this, I will strangle a thousand of the people of your country every day.
He said: if you do that, I will cause fifteen hundred birth-huts to be built every day.
So a thousand people die each day and fifteen hundred are born. This is why there is death, and it is also why there is population growth, and the Kojiki delivers both facts in one breath as the outcome of a marital quarrel. She became the great deity of Yomi; the boulder itself was given a name and a divine title, as the thing that blocks the road.
What he did next, and why it matters more than the chase
Izanagi's line on emerging is that he has been to a filthy and horrible land and must cleanse himself, and he goes to a river mouth at Tachibana in Himuka and performs misogi, purification by water. Everything he takes off becomes a deity: his staff, his belt, his bag, his robe, his trousers, his headgear, his arm-bands. Washing at different depths of the water produces the deities of pollution, the deities who correct pollution, and the sea and harbour gods.
Then he washed his left eye, and Amaterasu was born; his right eye, and Tsukuyomi was born; his nose, and Susanoo was born. He called them the three noble children, gave the sun to one and the night to another and the sea-plain to the third, and — in the Kojiki — retired to a shrine at Taga in Ōmi.
This sequence is why the Yomi episode is arguably the single most consequential passage in Japanese religion. The central operational concepts of Shinto practice are here in narrative form: kegare, the pollution that attaches to death and is not a moral fault but a condition; and misogi and harae, the washing and purification that remove it. Every ablution basin at a shrine gate descends from a man scrubbing the underworld off himself in a river mouth. So does the whole Japanese ritual sensitivity around death, corpses and mourning periods, and so does the fact that funerals in Japan are overwhelmingly conducted by Buddhist rather than Shinto clergy.
The chronicles disagree about whether this happened at all
This is the source conflict worth knowing. The Kojiki of 712 puts the Yomi journey in the main line of the narrative and makes it the hinge of the whole cosmogony: the three great deities are born from Izanagi's purification after it.
The Nihon Shoki of 720 does not. Its principal narrative has Izanagi and Izanami produce the sun deity together, deliberately, as a couple, because they wish to make a ruler for the world — no death, no descent, no washing. The Yomi story appears in the Shoki only among the alternative accounts introduced by the formula "in one writing it is said", and the variants there differ among themselves: in one, Izanagi sees his wife bloated and swollen and lies down in shame rather than fleeing; in another the emphasis falls on the words of separation rather than the chase.
So the official court chronicle of 720, compiled eight years after the Kojiki by an overlapping establishment, relegated the descent into the underworld to a footnote. Anyone retelling this as the Japanese myth of death is retelling the Kojiki, and should say so.
Places, and one piece of archaeology
The Yomotsu-hirasaka is claimed at Iya in Higashiizumo, Shimane, where a small site with a large stone is maintained as the pass; Izanami's grave on Mount Hiba is claimed at more than one location across the Shimane–Hiroshima border. These identifications are traditional and cannot be tested.
The peaches, unexpectedly, can be. Excavation at the Makimuku site in Nara in 2010 produced roughly two thousand peach stones from a ritual deposit, radiocarbon dated to the second or third century CE — evidence that peaches were being used in ritual in Japan many centuries before either chronicle was written, and consistent with the peach's long-standing apotropaic role in Chinese practice, from which the association almost certainly came. It does not prove the story is old. It does show that the story's chosen fruit was already the right one.
Questions this myth raises
Is this the same story as Orpheus and Eurydice?
The resemblance is real and unforced: a descent, a condition, a forbidden look, a loss. Comparable tales are found across a very wide area, and folklorists have long treated them as a type. What cannot currently be established is whether the Japanese version descends from a continental tradition that also fed the Greek one, or whether the plot is simply an obvious way for a story about grief to go. Anyone asserting a line of transmission is going beyond the evidence. It is worth noticing where the two diverge: the Greek singer loses his wife and mourns, while Izanagi loses his and immediately has an argument with her about the birth rate.
Why is being seen the unforgivable part?
Because the offence is against her, not against a rule. The prohibition is hers, the anger is hers, and what she objects to is having been shamed — a word the texts use directly. Read that way, the episode is less about a fatal male impatience than about the exposure of a body that had asked not to be exposed, and the pursuit is a woman's retaliation rather than a mechanical curse.
Is Kagutsuchi's death a punishment?
The fire deity has no page of his own here, but the question comes up constantly. The chronicle does not frame the beheading as justice; it frames it as generative. A whole further set of deities, including mountain gods and the thunder-sword god who later subdues the land, come out of the body and the blood. Killing in this cosmology is very often a means of production, which is the same logic that makes mining ore come from vomit.
What became of Izanagi?
The Kojiki retires him to Taga in Ōmi, modern Shiga, where Taga Taisha is a major shrine and claims exactly that. The Nihon Shoki instead has him withdraw to a shrine on Awaji island. Both places maintain the claim, both have done so for a very long time, and there is no basis on which to adjudicate between them.