THE STORY & ITS AFTERLIVES
Commanded by the primordial gods to give form to the drifting land, Izanagi stood with his sister Izanami on the Floating Bridge of Heaven and churned the sea with the jeweled spear Ame-no-Nuboko; brine dripping from its tip piled up into the island Onogoro. Descending there, the pair wed by circling a heavenly pillar. Their first child, the boneless leech-child Hiruko, born after the woman spoke first in the rite, was set adrift in a reed boat; once the ritual was corrected they bore the eight great islands of Japan and a host of deities of mountains, rivers, and winds.
Izanami died giving birth to the fire god Kagutsuchi, whom Izanagi cut down in grief. He then followed his wife to Yomi, the land of the dead. Told to wait without looking, he lit a tooth of his comb and saw her body seething with maggots, eight thunder gods coiled upon it. He fled, pelting his pursuers with peaches, and sealed the pass of Yomotsu Hirasaka with a thousand-man boulder, pronouncing their divorce across it. Bathing away the pollution of death in a river in Hyuga, he brought forth Amaterasu from his left eye, Tsukuyomi from his right, and Susanoo from his nose, a purification honored as the origin of Shinto ablution rites.
The Kojiki settles him at Taga, and both Taga Taisha in Omi and Izanagi Jingu on Awaji Island claim him as their enshrined god.
